Many of the challenges facing Colorado’s mountain communities, such as housing shortages, rising cost of living, and cultural division, transcend jurisdictional lines. Such boundary-spanning issues ripple across city and county boundaries, over mountain passes, and across river basins, making it difficult for locals to thrive in the communities they love.
When community challenges span jurisdictional lines, local government planning efforts are strongest when they too bypass traditional boundaries. Conducting community planning with a regional lens better prepares local governments to proactively respond to challenges with an eye for cross-jurisdictional alignment and impact.
This is exactly what is underway in the Upper Arkansas Valley where Community Builders, a Colorado nonprofit, is partnering with the City of Leadville and Lake County to guide the governments through a joint comprehensive planning process. Throughout the next year, the three partners will collaborate to create a shared vision for the future of the region.
Leadville and Lake County are not the first local governments in Colorado to take a joint approach to comprehensive planning. Two similarly sized communities, Rio Grande County, the Estes Valley, and others (see table), have also done so.
For one, Leadville is the only incorporated municipality in Lake County. The county itself is geographically small and what many visitors think of as “Leadville” actually includes areas outside of the city limits. In fact, City Hall is just a stone’s throw away from the County Courthouse.
Secondly, government functions are already somewhat enmeshed. The City and County share a fire agency and animal shelter, the County helps distribute local tax dollars to the City, and the Leadville Police Department and Lake County Sheriff’s Office help each other with coverage assistance.
Though many local governments are good candidates for joint comprehensive planning, they often hesitate to collaborate due to competing interests or political tensions.
One common challenge is that municipalities and counties have different governing responsibilities (counties in Colorado, for example, offer social services while most municipalities do not). Local governments also often have different facility and infrastructure needs that may lead them to prioritize resources differently.
Funding and politics add another layer of complexity. Municipalities and counties sometimes apply for the same state and federal grants, cultivating a sense of competition instead of cooperation. And past conflicts, personal dynamics, or concerns about preserving local identity, authority, and control can make it hard for governments to trust each other enough to work together effectively.
The potential of partnership
If local governments are able to work through such barriers, joint comprehensive planning offers unique potential for municipalities and counties alike.
Collaborative planning helps municipalities and counties create a cohesive regional vision. Convening under the umbrella of a shared vision allows local governments to better identify goals and prioritize actions that will help communities become what they aspire to be.
Such planning work also results in closer alignment at jurisdictional boundaries, providing consistency in development standards and growth targets in areas just outside of municipal limits.
The Pueblo Regional Comprehensive Plan, a partnership of five local governments, exemplifies this collaborative approach. Partner governments identify key locations for growth in the plan, as well as a vision for how growth should be managed as one region. This coordinated strategy enables local governments to better anticipate and respond to future infrastructure and service demands.
A community engagement approach that can hone in on a regional vision helps build civic capacity, enhancing trust of government and community buy-in for future projects. Such regional alignment also holds potential to make municipalities and counties more competitive applicants for grants and other funding sources.
Joint comprehensive planning also allows for a more robust response to boundary-spanning issues such as affordable housing, transportation, and wildfire. Confronting such challenges as a region allows governments to develop policy alignment across topical areas and effectively pool resources.
For example, the Estes Forward Comprehensive Plan, a collaboration of the Town of Estes Park, Larimer County, and unincorporated communities in the Estes Valley, identifies how to build regional resilience to future natural disasters such as wildfire and floods. Actions prescribed in the plan include updating municipal and county building performance standards and creating a bilingual text message alert system to utilize during hazard events.
Lastly, collaborative planning builds trust. Tackling a sizable project like a comprehensive plan with another local government strengthens relationships between staff and creates shared decision-making structures that can be utilized for years to come.
In Leadville and Lake County, City and County planning departments are working closely together to create the community’s joint comprehensive plan. The biweekly meetings held for the project are helping the two departments build rapport, understand each other’s capacity constraints, and connect over shared challenges.
The benefits of joint comprehensive planning continue to clarify themselves as Leadville and Lake County move forward in the yearlong process. Every step forward is a step towards building a regional roadmap – a plan that will prepare the local governments to tackle the changes and growth pressures facing Leadville and Lake County as one.