Hartman, Colorado, reached a point where it could no longer function as a town. Its water system was unsafe, every member of the town board had resigned, and no one remained with the authority to hold an election or sign the agreements needed to fix the water. Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Joshua Hopkins, mayor of Chugwater, Wyoming, and Strong Towns executive director John Reuter to look past the political infighting and ask what happened before the final collapse. The question facing places like Hartman and Chugwater is increasingly basic: How much town can a very small community actually afford to maintain?
A town can have streets, homes, a water tower, even generations of history, and still actually get to a point where it can no longer function as a town. That's what's happened in Hartman, Colorado. The immediate story is quite dramatic and makes for a fascinating read: political infighting, resignations by everybody on the town board, an unsafe water system that no amount of chlorine can fix, and no one left with the authority to even hold an election or sign the agreements needed to fix the water system. But the less dramatic but more important question is: long before that final resignation occurred, did this community of Hartman have enough people, taxable wealth, capacity, and financial margin to sustain the infrastructure it had inherited from past generations, because you can build it, but the bills will come.
So welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns. We take a story in the news and we look beyond the headline to examine those systems and trade-offs and financial realities that are shaping our cities and towns. I'm Norm Van Eeden Petersman with Strong Towns, and joining me today is Joshua Hopkins, who is the mayor of Chugwater, Wyoming. Joshua previously joined us on Bottom Up Shorts to talk about creating a permanent rodeo arena that could serve as a gathering place, support local businesses, and strengthen community life in Chugwater.
Today, we're drawing on another part of his experience, seeing at close range what it costs for a very small rural community to remain solvent, to maintain essential services, and to make careful choices about the infrastructure that it takes on. Welcome to Upzoned, Josh.
Yeah, I'm really glad to be here. All of this stuff is so relevant and hits home, and it is something I struggle to bring in front of the public and even the council. So this is just a really important conversation, and it's good for people to see. As somebody who is familiar with the Strong Towns movement and trying to make these things solvent, I really just jumped in there and said, "I got to help.
I got to try."
I just love that you are from Chugwater, which is one of my favorite small-town names, and it's just fantastic. It ties to our second guest, who is John Reuter. John said that I had selected Josh in part because I just wanted to be able to repeat the name Chugwater several times over, and that may be true. But John Reuter is our newly appointed executive director at Strong Towns.
Before joining the staff, he served on the Strong Towns board for many years, but also worked as vice president for state and local strategies at the League of Conservation Voters. Earlier in his career, he served on the city council in Sandpoint, Idaho, out west as well. Eventually becoming the council president, John has an organizer's perspective, but also having sat at the table where a community must make really consequential choices with limited resources. It's good to have you back on Upzoned again this week, John.
This is my second week in a row, so I'm returning champion. I believe that is what I get to be called now. But it's great to be with you, Norm.
Yeah, we're soon past your best before date, so this is great.
We've got to get good use out of it.
I love it, and I'll share too. Just as we get into the conversation, I come to it with rural roots of my own. I grew up on a dairy farm in the county of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. My family relied on county roads, policing, fire protection, planning and building approvals, and that thin layer of professional administration that makes rural life possible.
My dad understood that what we paid in county taxes probably didn't even cover the full cost of maintaining all those systems, and then adding something as expensive as a rural water system meant taking on another permanent obligation. Across my home province, many small communities are confronting versions of this same math.
Alberta actually has a formal municipal viability review process for communities that face serious financial or infrastructure or governance challenges, and more than two dozen municipalities in Alberta have gone through that process, and roughly half have voted to dissolve and become hamlets under the jurisdiction of the surrounding county or municipal district, and that's to me what makes this Hartman story sensational in some ways because of the fighting and the bickering and things like this, but not wholly unfamiliar. The article that we're talking about is by Ramon Antonio Vargas. It was published by The Guardian on August 1 under the headline "Colorado Declares Town Abandoned Amid Water and Leadership Crisis." He's building on reporting by Sam Tabachnik at The Denver Post about the town of Hartman.
This is a southeastern Colorado town, with fewer than 60 residents at the 2020 census. It was declared abandoned after all of its local public officials resigned. The town had been under a boil-water order. Its water infrastructure required substantial work, and the absence of either a board or even a clerk meant that they couldn't, as I said, hold an election.
They weren't allowed to conduct municipal business or even enter into the agreements needed to restore safe water service. So the article talks about years of conflict and resignations, and even a physical confrontation at a governing meeting, but that history helps to explain how they reached this final stage. But we want to ask whether the crisis itself comes from this mismatch between how much comes in versus what is required in order to provide services there. So, Joshua, do you want to tell us a little bit about your community and then touch on what your community really understands about the difference between being able to build an improvement, being able to own and operate and maintain and eventually replace it, and being on the hook for these types of services.
I'd love that as an opening into this article for you and your reflections on it.
So Chugwater is probably very similarly placed. We sit on the High Plains, 45 miles north of Cheyenne. We are off Interstate 25, which is a blessing and a curse. However, we struggle with all of the same stuff.
I think any town smaller than 1,000 probably does. Wyoming is interesting because fiscal solvency is really important to the state, which is aware of how heavily its economy depends on mineral extraction. Interestingly, our county is one of the few that benefits directly from that. But fiscal solvency is important because in the state statutes there is something called an enterprise fund that specifically relates to water and sewer utilities, and I think electric utilities as well.
These types of funds could have a board of public utilities. In our town, obviously, they do not; it's just the council. They must pay for themselves. They must cover their own expenses.
In reality, that ends up being fudged here and there. There's some overlap with some other taxes that you can raise and say, "Well, that water tank was too much. We never could have charged people what it would have cost to pay for the water tank," and so we find ourselves in those situations a lot. I end up wringing my hands because that's an absolutely essential service.
That is one we really need to be putting our money into. But Chugwater decided in the '90s and the 2000s that it was going to get a lot of federal grants. You see this, I'm sure, a ton of times, and the clerk and mayor and council at the time all thought, "Hey, let's throw a lot of money into some big projects that really make us look financially sound, and build some massive concrete streets here in our town of 175." When you drive around a town about our size, they're going to almost always be dirt or gravel streets because, at the very least, people typically understand, "Hey, maybe we got the money up front, but we can't afford it long-term." So now, in my term, being about 25 or 30 years later, I'm dealing with the maintenance on these streets, which are indeed crumbling. We've got alligator cracking.
Engineers said these things have been done for years, so we actually had a street maintenance plan ordered five years ago that the mayor at the time must have ordered, but never looked at. It was just an unopened report, and I was shocked to see the street maintenance plan essentially said, in order to afford the maintenance and replacement costs of all the streets in your town, which is something like three miles of streets, you need essentially 100% of your annual budget set aside, and we are setting aside zero. So this Strong Towns discussion about fiscal solvency really hits home with me because I'm looking at a budget that does that.
Streets are one thing you can let go, but water you can't, and you'll end up in a situation like what's happened in Colorado here where it is no longer a livable situation, and so now we have to look at it and say, okay, we've got massive costs. We actually have a water tank that needs to be replaced to the tune of about $2 million. We do have a water development office at the state that is going to help if we can get some of that funding. We're still talking about a million dollars in engineering costs, and so we have to look at raising utility rates.
The question is, at what point does the utility rate pass the threshold of affordability for a town that's lower income? So that's a struggle we face all the time. Streets are one thing. I certainly raise a lot of complaints about that and say we really need to think about this more.
But you can't really argue over the water and sewer. I worry that Chugwater could potentially get into this situation where it's so beyond an individual fixing it, that it ends up fighting and pointing and name-calling, because that stuff does happen in our town. I'm not going to pretend it's Mayberry. It certainly isn't.
Yeah, John, you're nodding along because you've seen this as well. Do you want to share just from your perspective what the Hartman story has brought up for you?
Well, I want to pick up on what Mayor Hopkins said at the end about the rowdiness of small-towns. Sandpoint was a big town compared to these ones. We had 6,000 to 8,000 people-a matter of hot debate of how many thousands it was, because those formulas matter on what money you get back from the state and so forth. But we used to say that in Sandpoint, we circle the wagons and then we shoot inward.
There is that liveliness to it. It was also because everybody really cared. In these smaller places, the connection that people have to them just runs so deep. I think about these rural places.
I spent a summer in New Meadows, which is a town of about 200 people in rural Idaho, and we've always loved being there because when you would go to the grocery store and buy something, a week later, the grocery store would start responding, and they would stock more of whatever you bought. You had this instant connection, and I think that just speaks the way these towns are so connected, and the relationship to the government is so intimate, and in ways that's really powerful. There's really wonderful things about that because there is a greater connection to decisions being made, a greater need to show up, an ability to actually go out and be able to talk to everybody in the town and show up and have those conversations and have civic life be what it was meant to be-a real conversation of folks getting together.
But what we see here with Hartman is the dark side of that, and the story is painted as though the leaders all started fighting with each other, and then they couldn't figure everything out, and then everything fell apart, and that may be true, but I have to tell you, I think it's probably the opposite. The headline says infighting exacerbated a water crisis. I think a water crisis exacerbated infighting. The reality was, you have a town that can barely afford its infrastructure, if it can afford it at all.
One bad decision to pave a street, as Mayor Hopkins was talking about, or to decide to do a project, or to delay, or to keep taxes a little bit lower because people are in a tough spot, can make it so that suddenly the numbers don't match up anymore. Even if there was a way to make it work when you originally did it. In a lot of these cases, a federal grant has come in at some point, provided you with water, and then you can't figure out how to actually redo it again. So I really think it's easy to look at these places and say, well, boy, they just couldn't get their act together.
But this is most of our towns and communities across this country where the finances aren't working and the math isn't working. We have infrastructure that we can't actually afford to maintain off of our tax revenue, and the result you saw here is really tragic. Not just because they don't have clean water right now and have to boil it to drink it, but also because I think it has torn their relationships with each other apart because as hard as they tried, they couldn't figure out how to solve this problem, and that's not just on them; that's on the entire system. It's broken.
When I look at it from Google Maps, you zoom in from a distance, I wonder: How did it come to be that they have their own distinct municipal water service? Yet I actually probably know a little bit of the ways in which that can start to happen because we saw it with our farm out in Alberta. The county got a large grant to be able to provide fresh water, and so that fresh water system was basically pitched to all the farmers and all the property owners as, "Hey, this is going to be necessary for us if we're going to see any acreage development because people don't want to have to worry about their water quality.
Instead we get to tap into the city system at some distance and, by the way, you're only going to have to pay half the cost." My dad immediately asked, "Who is paying the other half, and why would anybody else pay the other half of that cost?" Because that is people. In my country, that would be people from Quebec and Ontario covering the cost of me in Alberta getting this water. So it is that real challenge that a place like this would otherwise be even less developed on a well system if wells were available, or you would have had to move away because there simply wasn't that water available. These are, to a certain extent, life-and-death situations, being on a boil-water advisory.
But the flip side is that you can create a functioning municipal water system together if you all said, all right, what is our standard? What is our expectation? I remember when Chuck wrote an article that became controversial, but it was about like dual-purpose water systems in Flint, Michigan, where he said we don't need to replace all the lead pipes if we are trying to maintain a fire-protection system. Maintain it for that and use that water for those purposes, but then run a secondary residential pure-water system that is explicitly intended for drinking water, and I think when we actually become practical like that, that probably would have surfaced at some point within these types of town discussions, and then people would say, "Yeah, but we deserve a water system, or we deserve a normal system.
It's like actually, what's needed in a lot of these places is what we can manage, what we can afford the bills for. Josh, jump in.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think what I've experienced is the problem is twofold. Our water system in Chugwater dates back to 1938, and the town was actually incorporated in 1919, so there was quite a bit of time where there wasn't a water system. There were just wells, and We had a mayor for about 50 years, though it wasn't exactly consecutive.
He served from 1935 to 1985, installed that, and then in the 1970s installed the sewer system, and I read through all of the town's minutes from 1919 up, and followed the story. They were indeed very conservative. They asked, "How are we going to pay for this?" They used general assessments, all of those types of methods of raising revenue. So, the revenue side is one side of this coin, but the other side, I found, came once we got into the 80s and 90s, and the EPA and the Department of Environmental Quality suddenly came in and said, "Oh my God, you're not meeting any of our standards of quality.
Everything is terrible, and you need to upgrade everything. Right now there's a lead and copper survey that costs thousands of dollars, and okay, so we're going to meet these standards that the state and federal government want us to meet. However, no funding comes from them, or if it is there, it is hard to access. I need staff I don't have to try to get hold of that money.
So we've noticed those costs, including engineering costs. The water development office requires a series of engineering studies to be done. There's a little bit of cost borne by the town at the end of it when something is built. Fifty percent of the cost ends up being borne by the town, exactly what we're talking about, and that goes up year after year.
So the cost side and what we must do versus what we can choose to do it becomes even more difficult because of those state and federal standards. In fact, the biggest issue we have in town is we must have a certified water and sewer operator to run our system by the state. That is a very difficult position to fill, and if you do, they're very expensive. If you don't have one, the state will fine you $10,000 a day.
Then I say, okay, well, if I can't get a hold of one, do you have a list for me? There is very little to no help or funding from the state. Essentially, it's meet our regulations, or we will pound the crap out of you until something gives. Now they have worked with us in the past to say we understand the laws require all of this.
We're going to try to help you here, but the town ended up getting stuck with a contractor who cost twice what the previous maintenance person cost, and that we lost that maintenance person because the mayor and the employee couldn't get along, and so they left. A lot of the local stuff happened there, but it left us in the situation of now we have to spend even more money. Then the other side of this whole thing is, and might be a dovetail into another discussion: is what is it that brings development, people, population, and tax revenue, property tax, all of that type of stuff. So, when you have super restrictive zoning laws, like Chugwater does, believe it or not, you have people who say, "I want our standard of living to be the 2,400-square-foot single-family home, and I don't want people who live in mobile homes to live here.
Well, then your revenue goes down, your distribution of sales tax goes down, and so you're trying to maintain a suburban standard of living outside a major metro, and yet your expenses are creeping up with an ever-decreasing and aging population. So it's it's really a pinch from both sides that we experience heavily.
That's really insightful, and it dovetails with the closing quote from Shawna Casey, as a resident there, in the article. It says, "Hartman is not a failed town. Hartman is a town that was failed by the systems designed to protect it." It makes me consider the way in which sometimes the burden of high standards can become the thing that strips away the capacity to get by a little bit longer until other factors might emerge that allow for the things you're talking about: a consensus around letting more properties be developed in the community. If you take an aerial view of the community, it's lightly developed, and so there are definitely acres of potentially developable land, and the reality is that in many areas across the United States and Canada, not a lot of development is going to come.
It's like waiting for the mailman at the end of your county road, if you simply don't allow that mailman to even come, you're going to wait a long time before they come back, and it's those first glimmers of someone saying, "Hey, I'm thinking about moving my mother-in-law here, but it's probably not worth it for me." Then the moment has passed, and that opportunity has gone by the wayside, and it is interesting to me that the language of "ghost town" didn't emerge here. Maybe it's because a ghost town is a place that's wholesale abandoned.
But when we think about the end game of Strong Towns logic about what our places have gotten themselves into and the long-term consequences of degraded public services, increasing costs that people are then unwilling to pay, the end game does look like either abandonment or devolution of a lot of our places in the struggle to ever provide for the resources that are needed to maintain a decent level of service and a good quality of life. I know I often go there because that's my nature, to get dark like that. But John, what about when you grapple with the longer-term impacts here?
Even as we think of, for example,, the rising tide of standards for municipal water services can sometimes eat into the very budget that may have been left over to cover the next repair of the water tower, and instead that went to a contractor that could come and flip the switch and use the chlorine testing vials because they were the only ones authorized to do that.
Well, I think that's exactly right, and it picks up on what the mayor was saying there. That was so important. I want to quibble a little bit with the line you used that they got themselves into and they can't get themselves out of. I think, as Mayor Hopkins pointed out, it's not always that these places get themselves into the problem.
Part of the problem is that we have these increasing standards. Another problem I'm hearing him talk about is that they got a bunch of money. Dump trucks full of money came in and said, "Here it is," and they said, "Okay, great, we'll pave a street now." Oh wait, that street to repair costs more than our entire budget, or 100% of our budget, so we could have nothing else repairing that street anymore. I just want to go back to that and highlight it again because that's such a crazy thing.
But it's not fair to put the full weight of those decisions on the local people in these small-towns that are just trying to follow the best practices and the opportunities that they see before them and trying to be successful, and there is so much. It even comes down to this idea of how we grow. There is so much, I would say, propaganda that pushes people away from gentle density increases that, as you talked about, let your mother-in-law move into the community, let your kids stay there, or let a business open across the street so you can go to a great place to share a cup of coffee with some neighbors and have a conversation.
There is so much at the core of how we've set up our communities to fail, and also the entire conversation so often revolves around our largest cities, our biggest places, the centers of media, capital, and power in this country that just don't take places like this community in Colorado seriously, and almost view a story like this article as a bit of a sideshow and some entertainment and a historical novelty, and look at what these people got themselves into, and I just really think that's deeply ungenerous and unfair, because as you called out in that last sentence of the article, really what we're seeing here is a system that's failed a community that was trying. It's not like one side got driven off in this whole fight. I think it's so telling that everybody resigned.
It wasn't like oh, half the people resigned because the feud was over. So, what I think you saw in this community was a lot of people who cared a heck of a lot, who were fighting to try to figure out how to save their place. They couldn't come to an agreement. I think maybe there was a reason they couldn't come to an agreement.
We don't know, and I'm sure some of it was petty feuds and personalities and all the stuff that infects every community anywhere. But another part of it was, as I said before, there was no clear solution. If you're in a place where it's going to cost all of your city's revenue to repair a street, it's really hard to find the solution. If you live in somewhere where the water costs are so astronomical that you can never figure out how to quite budget to get there.
It's an impossibility. So, at the end of the day, you saw everyone in this community just throw their hands up and say, "We can't solve this problem," and give up on a problem that was not entirely of their own making. I think that's a rational conclusion. I do think the long-term path in these places points toward a ghost town, and I think that's regrettable because so many of these places are filled with such incredible people and such amazing communities, even if they aren't giant.
So we have to figure out, as Mayor Hopkins was saying, how to help them become financially stable, and part of that's going to be having state and federal governments that think more about the particulars of rural places and don't come in and dictate with heavy hands without actually looking at the particulars and understanding those places, and the second part, which I think we really have to lean into, is those places need to start figuring out how to gently welcome more people. How do you stabilize and make the math add up so that you can continue forward and not end up like this community that likely ends with them slowly disappearing into the abyss. We don't want that to happen to our rural places. So we have to start having those conversations about how do we gently pick them up?
How do we incrementally grow and create places that are going to be strong and last.
Mayor Hopkins, it's not through alchemy, but through some pretty time-tested practices that Chugwater is seeing new businesses or businesses in old buildings that have been newly established, and starting, as I understand it, to turn the tide a little bit, and at least get a foothold closer to stability in terms of property revenues and things like that. I do want to hear a little bit about small-town renaissance and the challenge of it, but also I think the path that is present in a lot of these small communities that, as John, you so rightly said, really matter and have a deep resonance and deep significance in our places, and can't just be tossed aside.
Absolutely. Just before I get into that, I do want to touch on this idea of unfair because, as we said, there are a lot of these petty personal things. Being 35, a younger mayor, it's frustrating when I'm debating things that have no basis in fact. It's just somebody disagrees with me because they don't like me or what I said, and I'll talk to friends to try to let off steam.
I say, "What's really difficult here is that we are asking such complicated things of council people who must live in this municipality, and this isn't disparaging my fellow townspeople, but I'm saying, do you think any of these people are Harvard graduates with degrees in urban planning and experience on municipal finance? These are just people who care about their community; they want to do what they think is best, which some people think mowing the lawn-which is something we fought about-is what's going to bring people into town, and they firmly believe that. Oh my gosh, if there are broken windows, if the lawn isn't mowed, people won't come in. I'm looking at the fact that the town has declined 28% over 20 years and saying, okay, well, we tried that; it's not working.
Let's maybe have a different approach to things. But I think we are tasking people who live in these small-towns, who are salt-of-the-earth, great people who mean well, with very complicated understandings of state statutes. Look at our ordinances. 80% of them were passed improperly and could be legally challenged, and that's probably true for many small-towns. So then it's, well, what is really the law?
It's like whoever's in power gets to pick. One small win I had was dealing with two ordinances on the books. One from 1937 was really the original building ordinance, and then we had one from I think 1999, and they should have repealed the first one when they adopted the second, but they didn't. They just had these two conflicting ordinances that had different requirements, and the town would waffle with each administration over which pieces to use from each one.
It was very confusing. The rules were arbitrary based on who picked them, because who's going to challenge that in a small, working-class town? Nobody. So I was able to write a new ordinance and remove the two, and write a new one that's a little clearer.
The fee schedule increases with square footage, so it favors small square footage, flat fees for ADUs, and we had some good forward-thinking stuff that we did get through. But it probably was never done because who is going to take the time to look at it on a part-time salary, and who's going to have the education to say this is a problem and needs to be done? So I just I wanted to point out the unfairness isn't entirely just from increasing standards, but running a town is becoming increasingly complicated, and you get lawyers and engineers, and if you're just listening to their opinions, you might end up in some of these situations where people who meant well go down the wrong path. Leading into the business revival, as somebody who is, I guess, on the cusp between being younger and getting older as a millennial, I see a lot of stuff.
I'm a film photographer. I have been for 20-some years, and that has resurged. Vinyl has resurged. I think there is a connection to, and especially a pushback against, this idea that with AI everything is going to become technologically driven, especially among younger generations.
I don't think this is uncommon with generation after generation. They rediscover things from two generations ago, and now VHS tapes are all the rage, and it's boy, that was a pain, crazy stuff. But I think in some way, It's small. I don't think it's a massive movement, but this is something I try to promote on my Instagram: there is really something special to be had in these small-towns as a means of being more intentional, which I think is what a lot of that stuff is about is you have to handle the VHS, you have to handle the film, you have to handle the vinyl, and it gives some sense of purpose to being human and having senses.
So, living in these small-towns, and I guess the intentional banality of the everyday becomes appealing and becomes a selling point because there's something amazing about driving down this road. There's nothing to see for hours and hours and hours, and oh my gosh, you come into this little town, and there's a cute little vintage store, and there's a functioning soda fountain, and wow, ranchers buy their barbed wire over there. People love that as it disappears in other places, and so I think that maybe generational movement is creating the seed of interest, and we've seen some of that. We as a town just have to be ready to receive that.
With every little idea, my constant joke when I'm complaining about some of our commercial setbacks are 40 feet, off of a 60-foot right of way, and I'm a lemonade stand would be illegal here, but a lemonade stand would generate more revenue than the empty lot that currently sits there because of the 40-foot setback." It's a joke, but it's true. You get six pennies on every dollar sold, so we've seen a lot of interest. Part of why I ran for mayor was to say that if this town isn't ready for this wave, there may not be another one. Let's get enough going on downtown that the next wave can say, "Hey, there is something there.
Let's latch on and build further." Yeah,
I think there's so much in that, and I'll just briefly touch on an article Chuck wrote years ago that has stuck with me about the ratio of private investment to public investment in a place, and if we think of all of our private investment, that is, it's stored wealth that is actually in a taxable form on the properties within the catchment area of a municipality, and so that's the buildings and the improvements on the parcel of land that makes the land more valuable because something is actually being done with it, and it makes it more possible for us to then take a portion of the value of that parcel and tax it, and out of that we fund all of our community investments or public investments in all of those tangible and intangible assets that each municipality has to support with enough service quality to make the investment worthwhile, and that private to public investment ratio is something that is in our numbers.
We can track it down. In my city, it's three to one, which is just a huge warning sign. So we have $3 of private investment for every $1 of public investment, which is public obligation that we've committed to. It would be interesting to do the quick math for a place like Hartman or a place like Chugwater.
I think especially smaller communities need to be nickel and diming on that question and asking, "All right, what is all of our property worth?" How much are we spending to provide public services that meet that? Let's take out the federal grants. Let's take out the transfers. Let's just talk about what each of us has, what we have together, and whether that works out.
I think a lot of us would realize we need to be a lot more careful about what we're doing, and that means you can have much more honest conversations about either concrete streets or whether or not you can afford that extra reverse-osmosis system, or if you have to actually plead with the state to keep the water standard what it was, rather than moving up to the next level, whatever that looks like. I think a big part of it is trying to reintroduce some core metrics that can really help. It's a little bit more complex to find than the core numbers we find in the financing code. So that's why we didn't include it in there.
But it's another really good exercise in looking at where the investments are in our communities. We're going to move over to the down zone in just a moment here. But John, let's take all of your worldly wisdom and insights, rural living, all of that. Bind that up for us as you think of some takeaways here.
I think the big takeaway from all of this, after getting into the wonkiness of what makes towns work and what makes them go broke, is how important leadership is in these moments. For people in places of any size, a decision or two can really send you off course. Right now, a lot of our places are nearing a breaking point. The same thing that we hear in this story about this town in Colorado could be lots of us in cities all sorts of different sizes.
So at this point in time, it's so important to take the actions to strengthen your place financially. Do the math, as you talked about with the decoder, and think about adding gentle density. Think about how to get that lemonade stand started if that's what it needs to be. But whatever it is that starts to actually make our places financially stronger, it will also make our places socially and civically stronger.
This whole story illustrates how it can all fall apart at once, how the financial, social, and civic capital can all fall apart at the same time. But it's also true in the other direction, and so the stakes are just really high, and the decisions that local leaders make are really important, and we have to spend the time to get them right. I guess my last little note here is I'm just thankful for people like Mayor Hopkins who are doing that work where they live, who are trying to figure out how to bring people together to help make sure that their towns will persevere and have a chance to continue, and I think the stakes are exactly as high as they said they were. Yeah.
Mayor Hopkins, a takeaway for you?
My takeaway would be that when I saw this article, it upset me because I thought that could be us, and how easy it is to end up in that situation, especially with how many things I juggle. My goal isn't to be the mayor for 50 years. A good government should be able to be handed off.
This is something George Washington believed in: you should be able to hand it off to the next person and have a good system that somebody can run and add their personality and listen to their constituents, and I think what ends up happening in these little towns is some of those systems fall apart, the knowledge falls apart, the plans fall apart, and so what I would like to take away from this is a resiliency plan, so anytime there's a new council and someone has the energy but lacks the specific education it takes to run a municipality, there is a plan of action in place that says, "Okay, the water system is number one," and it might be as simple as that, and you'd be shocked.
There will be people who complain about lawns and cracks in the street, but they may not understand how the system works or what makes it possible for us all to live there. What is really essential to survival, and what allows us to grow? This really hits home with me: I really need to work with my council and the public on a plan to say, how do we make our towns survive, and when these situations happen, how can we make sure we've got the money for the absolute essentials so that we can keep going and keep solving problems and not actually hit the breaking point where you've got a hole in the bottom of the pot and now there's nothing left.
Yeah, 100% This is heavy but real. I really appreciate both of your insights. But let's move over into the down zone. That's where we take an article that we've come across or something that we've been reading, or watching, or listening, or thinking about, and just share it.
The one I'll share is a book I read a little while ago that feels very relevant by Canadian author Donald Savoie, called "Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?" It's a really interesting question about how is it that music teachers were one of the things that got cut from educational programming, even as funding was found for a lot more layers of management and a lot more layers of reviews and things like this.
All of the other layers outside of the school system, but the net consequence was that the music teachers and specialty teachers were the ones who got cut, and I think it really does touch on some of those challenges that have resulted in our communities in a quest for, at the state level or provincial level, to be more efficient or more accountable, actually resulting in resources being stripped away from that front line where they could be of most value and effect. So, whatever happened to the music teacher? What about for you, Mayor Hopkins?
Yeah, so I've been reading this book very slowly, and I can't remember the title, but it's a well-known book. It's called Influence, and it's essentially about the psychology of influence, how people influence each other through principles of liking and such like that, and it's been interesting because I think what I didn't anticipate, being a very technical person, is when you have a good idea you want to bring before council, you think you're just going to bring it up and say, "Hey, here's a great idea," and everyone's going to go, "Wow, that's a swell idea. Let's get that sucker passed." The reality can be a little bit different. Something I think about all the time is "The Room Where It Happens", which is from Hamilton.
If you haven't heard that song, listen to it. It is very much an experience I have where there are compromises and dealings and things that are above board, but maybe behind closed doors, to say the mayor's got to step in there and play politics and have discussions, which is a world I've never thought I'd deal with. But this book, Influence, talks about the psychology, and it just has me thinking when I'm discussing with people at council. Sometimes just bludgeoning someone with an idea turns into, "Why don't you get this?" Why don't you understand this?
There may be some basic psychology behind that. I'm working on gearing up to have a major zoning overhaul come through. The zoning board is behind it. We are going to rezone the entire town and make it much more viable for all kinds of common-sense development, and get rid of a lot of spot zoning and restrictive rules that have been piled on through the years.
It just has me thinking about this to say, there will be people who disagree with this. They will disagree because they don't understand. They don't like me. Whatever it is, and it's not really due to what's in the document.
So I think a lot about psychology of influence. So I apologize, I can't think of the author of this book. I promise, if you go on Amazon or wherever psychology of influence, you'll find this book. But very interesting to think about, and something I deal with all the time, and it's taught me to just be more receptive and thoughtful when presenting ideas or even listening to other people.
Yeah, that's awesome. I quickly looked for it because it sounds fascinating, especially on why people say yes. I'm really studying that. It's Robert Cialdini, "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." Great suggestion.
Yeah, John, what about for you?
Okay, well, this is very in tune with the moment and with our guest, we've gotten to hear Mayor Hopkins talk very intelligently about how to run a city, but something I have loved for years is the image of the American cowboy. I just think it's this powerful, iconic symbol of the country. Since I was a little boy, I've loved it. Who doesn't love a cowboy growing up?
I certainly did. Mayor Hopkins is not just a very talented mayor and advocate for Strong Towns principles. He is also an incredible photographer, and you can check out his stuff at Chugwaterite on Instagram. They are amazing.
I think you have a few books about this stuff too.
I did make a couple books.
Yeah. There are these incredible visuals of the West, and it makes me nostalgic for the places I love out West and for traveling through that area, but also this iconography that is so much a part of the place. For me, this duality of being a mayor and a photographer capturing these quintessential images means someone pushing for modernization while also celebrating the defining moments that are timeless in some ways about what it means to be in these places. If you scroll through his Instagram, spoiler here, you'll see support for mixed-use neighborhoods right next to images of cowboys out in the range.
To me, this is what we need in our country right now: the celebration that both these things can go together, that we can both think about a future and figure out what we can do together, while still holding on to the values and the kinds of places and experiences that have made our places wonderful. So, that's my down zone: go and check out this photography and really celebrate these iconic images that capture what it means to be an American, alongside the action that's going to take to keep these places here for generations to come.
That's outstanding. Thank you so much, John, and thank you, Mayor Hopkins, as well. That's it for this episode of Upzoned. You can find the articles and the related material in the show notes, and you can continue the conversation with us in the Strong Towns comments.
Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you next week. Until then, take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.