San Miguel County Democratic Party July 5th Picnic Remarks

Thank you, and happy belated Fourth of July. Thank you to the San Miguel Democratic Party for all your work to organize this.

There is something fitting about gathering the day after Independence Day, because what we celebrate is not just freedom in the abstract. It is self‑governance. People coming together to make tough decisions and shape the future they want to live in. That is what this race is about.

I have lived in San Miguel County for more than twenty‑five years. I owned two Main Street retail businesses, worked in rural healthcare for almost a decade, and served on and led the school board and the hospital board. In 2018 I helped lead the county‑wide behavioral health funding measure that voters passed.

Christine and I raised our five children here and watched all of them walk across the stage as graduates of Telluride High School. And like so many young people and families across this county, they are finding it harder than it should be to come home and build a life here.

I am not running because I think this county has failed. I am running because the trajectory is heading somewhere many of us do not want to go, and because I believe we can change it.

We are a place of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary wealth. But we have fewer children in our schools. Longtime residents are being priced out of homes they have lived in for decades. Younger people cannot get a foothold at all. A Main Street business owner told me recently, the buzz is gone. That is not an abstraction. It is a warning.

We are not losing our community all at once. We are losing it one household at a time. The window is still open to preserve our community, but it is closing. And I would rather pour my energy into keeping it open than spend the next decade explaining why we let it shut.

The question is not whether the county grows. It is whether growth serves the community. Whether it pays its way, covering the roads, transportation, water, and regional housing demand it creates. Whether it respects our limits and helps the people who make this place function actually stay. A community that prices out its teachers, its healthcare workers, its tradespeople, its restaurant and hospitality workers does not stay the same. It becomes something else.

Workforce housing has to be the priority. Not a number on a spreadsheet, but rents and prices that match what local workers actually earn, in places connected to jobs and infrastructure. A longtime community member put it this way: we had dessert first. The amenities came before the housing that sustains the people who make them possible. We approved growth faster than we housed the workers that growth depends on. We cannot undo the order we did things in. But we can change the order from here on out.

Housing is the clearest symptom of a larger imbalance. At bottom, this is about whether this remains a place where people can build the lives they dream of, afford to live them here, and still have a real voice in the decisions that shape our future.

How decisions get made matters as much as what gets decided, and right now trust in government is as low as I have ever seen it. People can accept decisions they disagree with. What they can’t accept is feeling the decision was already made before they ever walked into the room.

Rebuilding it means people are in the room before decisions harden, the reasoning is visible, and the goals this county has set for itself are applied consistently to every vote. Not bent for the project with the loudest backers, not set aside when the pressure is on, and not just to serve those who can attend a mid‑day meeting in the middle of the workweek.

I want San Miguel County to remain a community to come home to. For my children, for the families struggling to stay, for the people building a life here right now. That future is not inevitable. But it is possible, and it is worth fighting for. This is not about getting the old days back. It is about who gets a future here.

This is the start of the general election campaign, and I am asking for your energy, your time, and your help between now and November. Let us go do this together. Thank you.