Community Builders has been working for two months to build a better process for how to engage the community about the next Brown Ranch proposal.
The process to annex the Brown Ranch into the city of Steamboat Springs lacked an effective way to make decisions, a trait that led to tense negotiations and created an increasingly political environment, a consultant told Steamboat City Council on Tuesday.
Clark Anderson, the executive director of the Glenwood Springs nonprofit Community Builders, said while intentions on all sides were good, the tense nature of negotiations, flawed decision-making structure and urgency to get a deal done created an environment that ultimately divided the community.
“When real issues and questions came into the process, when people had challenges they wanted to identify or critiques of the project that they wanted to talk through, the space wasn’t there to do that,” Anderson said. “There wasn’t really a problem-solving space, a space to sort of work through these things. … You can kind of start to see how these things fell apart and became increasingly political.”
Anderson likened last year’s negotiations between the city and Yampa Valley Housing Authority to a chess match with a variety of constituencies vying against each other. This happened because there was no shared vision across the community for the project, he said.
“Different players playing against each other, and the more it got down the road of not being quite right, the more that was the case,” Anderson said. “It became more personal, and the battle was there instead of where it should be. We want to turn the chess board and have the entire community that cares about this stuff, playing the game against the issues.”
Anderson’s comments Tuesday was the first public presentation to city council about Community Builders’ work to find a pathway forward on the Brown Ranch, an effort that started near the end of August. While phase one of this effort — an assessment of the failed annexation attempt — isn’t done yet, Council members indicated they wanted Community Builders to work toward a second phase on Tuesday.
This second phase would seek to explore some of the key issues Community Builders has identified around the Brown Ranch and create a space for problem solving that Anderson said was absent from last year’s process. This process would also work to create a shared vision for the project through the community, something Anderson said was lacking in the last process.
Anderson said one of the key issues is “growth and change” in the valley in general, in addition to the scale of the project, cost for services and infrastructure, traffic, and housing types incorporated within the plan, among others.
To facilitate these types of problem-solving focused discussions, Anderson said there needs to be an increase in civic capacity.
“Civic capacity is basically a community’s ability to make decisions about the future,” Anderson said. “The reasons that we’re not creating solutions and getting progress done at the scale that we are falling behind is not because we don’t know the technical and financial ways forward, it is actually political. … It’s community politics and our ability to actually come together as a community.”
Anderson described the basic structure of how phase two could progress, including various teams. One of these would be a project management or oversight team that will help set the agenda for problem solving. Another group would be a stewardship team that would stay more high level and work to provide a layer of accountability to the process.
Another group Anderson described — the Community Deliberation Committee — needs to fuction as a “fish tank” to discuss issues, saying it needs to be a “visible lab where the community can do this work and learn and discuss and solve problems together.”
“That’s not something that you can do through general community wide outreach, it needs to build on itself,” Anderson said. “It needs to be visible to the community… It’s going to bring in different perspectives from different sides to work on this together in a very visible environment where people can see what is going on and provide feedback that way.”
While this second phase would not create a clear development plan for Brown Ranch, Anderson said it would hope to produce a series of recommendations that YVHA could implement in a new plan.
Anderson said his findings about the previous annexation process and the structure of the pathway toward a new plan is based on 15 focus groups and more than 20 one on one interviews with people who were generally heavily involved in the last process. The first group Anderson said they met with was the Citizens for a Better Plan group that led the effort to petition annexation.
Community Builders is working on a full written assessment of what happened with the last annexation attempt, which could be ready to share with council as soon as December, he indicated on Tuesday. The timeline for phase two is not entirely clear, though Anderson said it would likely last through the first half of next year at least.
“What people seem to want is clarity on how this can move forward,” Anderson said. “What does the final set of products need to look like? … That’s something we are trying to design.”