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- [00:08]
John Reuter
Got my bus pass, been a ride first class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the peeps.
- [00:19]
Norm Van E. Peersman
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. And that's what's happened in Hartman, Colorado. The immediate story is quite dramatic and makes for a fascinating read. Political infighting and 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 E. Peersman with Strong Towns and joining me today is Joshua Hopkins, who 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 UpZone, Joshua.
- [01:53]
Joshua Hopkins
Yeah, I'm really, really glad to be here. All of this stuff is so relevant and hits home and something I struggle with to bring in front of the public and even the council to think about. So this is just a really important conversation and it's good for people to see, I think, you know, somebody who is familiar with the Strong Towns movement and trying to make these things solvent. You know, I really just jumped in there and said, I got to help, I got to try. You know, I got to try.
- [02:20]
Norm Van E. Peersman
And I just love that you are from Chugwater, which is one of my favorite small town names. And it's just fantastic. And 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 Strongtowns Board for many years, but also worked as vice president for State and Local Strategies at the League of Conservation Voters and and earlier in his career 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 upzone again this week, John.
- [03:10]
John Reuter
I think I was this is my second week in a row, so I'm returning Champion, I believe is what I get to be called now. But it's great to be with you, Norm.
- [03:17]
Norm Van E. Peersman
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 we get into the conversation. I come to this conversation 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 system. And then adding something as expensive as a rural water system meant taking on another permanent obligation. And across my home province, many small communities are confronting versions of the 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 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 the Denver Post. Sam Tavaknick about the town of Hartman this is a southeastern Colorado town, fewer than 60 residents at the 2020 census, but 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 having 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 surface and so the article talks about gears of conflict and resignations and even a physical confrontation at a governing meeting, but that history helps to explain, like how they reach its final stage. But we want to ask whether that the crisis itself is because of this mismatch between how much comes in versus what is required in order to provide services there. And 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 love sort of that as an opening into this article for you and your reflections on it.
- [05:58]
Joshua Hopkins
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. We struggle with all of the same stuff. I think really any town probably smaller than a thousand does. And Wyoming is interesting because there are. Fiscal solvency is really important to Wyoming, and it's aware of its position of mineral extraction and such being very heavy to the economy. Although interestingly, our county is one of the few benefits really from that directly. But fiscal solvency is important because in the state statutes there is something called an enterprise fund that specifically relates to water, sewer, utilities, and if you have, I think, electric and essentially the requirements for these types of funds that could have a board of public utilities in our town obviously does not. It's just the council, they must pay for themselves. They must cover the cost of their own expenses incurred. Now, in reality, that ends up being a little bit fudged here and there. There's some overlap with some other taxes that you can raise and say, well, you know, that water tank was too much. It was never going to, you know, 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. And I kind of end up wringing my hands because that's an absolutely essential service, that one. You know, we really need to be putting all of our money in. 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. In our town of 175. And when you drive around a town about our size, they're going to almost always be dirt 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. And so now, in my term being about 25, 30 years later, I'm dealing with the maintenance on these streets, which are indeed crumbling. And we've got alligator cracking. Engineers said these things have been done for years. And 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, just was 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 it really hits home, a lot of this discussion of strong towns, this idea of fiscal solvency, with me, because I'm looking at a budget that does that. And streets are one thing, you can let them go, but water, you can't. And you'll end up in a situation like what's happened in Colorado here to say this is not a livable situation anymore. And so now we have to look at, okay, we've got massive costs. We actually have a water tank that needs 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 engineering costs. And so we have to look at raising utility rates. And it's like, at what point does the utility rate pass the threshold of affordability for a town that's lower income? And so that's a struggle we. 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. And I really. 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 mean, I'm not going to pretend it's Mayberry. It certainly isn't.
- [10:13]
John Reuter
Yeah.
- [10:13]
Norm Van E. Peersman
John, you're nodding along because you've seen this as well. Do you want to share, just from your perspective, things that the Hartman story has sort of emerged for you?
- [10:20]
John Reuter
Well, I want to pick up on what Mayor Hopkins said There at the end there of the. Of the rowdiness of small towns. Sandpoint was a big town compared to these ones. We had six 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 standpoint, we circle the wagons and then we shoot inward, right? And so just that there's that liveliness to. Was also because everybody really cared, right? And these smaller places, the connection that people have to them just runs so deep. And really, I think that these rural places. I spent a summer in New Meadows, which is a town of about 200 people in rural Idaho, and always loved being there, because when you would go to the grocery store and buy something, like a week later, the grocery store would start responding, and they would stock more of whatever you'd bought, right? To this instant connection. And I think that just speaks to the way these towns are so connected and. And the relationship to the government is so intimate and in ways that's really powerful, right? 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. I don't think the headline says infighting exasperated a water crisis. I think a water crisis exasperated infighting. Right. And that the reality was you have a town that has infrastructure that it can barely afford, if it can afford it at all. One bad decision somewhere to pave a street, as Mer Hopkins was talking about, or to decide to do a project one time, or to delay or to keep taxes a little bit lower, because, boy, people are in a tough spot, right? Can make it so that suddenly the numbers don't match up anymore, even if when you originally did it, there was a way to figure it through. And 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, the math's not 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 in the fact that they don't have clean water right now and having to boil their water to be able to drink it, but also, I think it's torn the 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, that's not just on them, that's on an entire system. It's broken.
- [13:15]
Norm Van E. Peersman
When I look at it from, you know, Google Maps, zoom in from a distance, you wonder in my mind, one, how did it come to be that they have their own distinct municipal water service? And yet I actually probably knows a little bit of the ways in which that can start to happen. Because we saw it with our farm out in Alberta is 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 sort of acreage development. Because people don't want to have to worry about their water quality. And so instead we get to tap into the city system at some distance and oh, by the way, you're only going to have to pay half the cost. And my dad immediately was like, well, who was paying the other half? And why would that, why would anybody else pay the other half of that cost? Because that's people in, you know, in my country that would be people from Quebec and Ontario covering the cost of me in Alberta getting this water. And so it is that that real challenge that a place like this would otherwise be even less developed on a well system if there was wells available or you would have had to move away because there simply wasn't that water available. And these are, are, you know, they are to a certain extent life and death situations being on a water boil water advisory. But then the flip side is you can definitely create to gather a functioning municipal water system. 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, 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 can be. Probably would have been surfaced at some point within these types of town discussions. And then people would say, yeah, but we. We deserve a water system, or we deserve, you know, a normal system. And it's like, actually what's needed in a lot of these places is what we can manage what. What we can afford the bills for. Josh, jump in.
- [15:28]
Joshua Hopkins
Yeah, absolutely. So I think what I've experienced is the problem is twofold. Our water system and chug water 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 a mayor that we had who. It wasn't exactly consecutive. We had a mayor for about 50 years. He was on 1935 to 1985 did that, and then in the 70s did the sewer system. And I read through all of the town's minutes from 1919 up and kind of followed the story, and they were indeed very, very conservative. How are we going to pay for this? They use the general assessments, all of those types of methods of raising revenue. And so the revenue side is one side of this coin. But the other side that I found is 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 all be. You need to upgrade everything. And, you know, right now there's a lead and copper survey. It 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. If it's there, it's hard. I have to have staff. I don't have to try to get ahold of that money. So we've noticed that costs, you know, engineering costs. The water development office requires a series of. 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, 50% of the cost, exactly what we're just talking about ends up being borne by the town. 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 water 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. And if you don't have one, the state will fine you $10,000 a day. So. And then I say, okay, well, if I can't get a hold of one, do you have a list for me? Do you have. There's 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 whatever happens. 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 that cost twice what a maintenance person before cost. And we lost that maintenance person because the mayor and them couldn't get along. And so they left. And, you know, a lot of the local stuff happened there, but it left us in the situation of now we have to spend even more money. And then the other side of this whole thing is, and it might be a dovetail into another discussion is what is it that brings revenue and its people and population and tax revenue, property tax, all of that type of stuff. And 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 car, single family zoning 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 sort of standard of living outside a major metro. And yet your expenses are creeping up with an ever decreasing and aging population. So it's really a pinch from both sides that we experience heavily.
- [19:25]
Norm Van E. Peersman
That's really insightful. And it dovetails with the closing quote from Shawna Casey is a resident there, in the article, says Hartman is not a failed town. Hartman is a town that was failed by the systems designed to protect it and makes me consider the way in which sometimes that burden of high standards can actually become the thing that strips away the capacity to just get by and get by a little bit longer until other factors might emerge that allow for the things that you're talking about, a consensus around letting more properties be developed in the community. If you take aerial view of the community, it's lightly developed. And so there are definitely, you know, acres of potential developable land. And the recognition is that in Many areas across the United States and Canada, not a lot of development is going to come. And so if, you know, it's sort of like waiting for the mailman at the end of your county road, if you simply don't allow that mailman to even come, like 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. Oh, but it's probably not worth it for me then it, the moment has passed and that opportunity has sort of went by the wayside. And it is interesting to me that the language of ghost town didn't emerge here, sort of. And maybe it's because a ghost town is a place that's wholesale abandoned. But when we think about the end game of strong town's sort of 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 the 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, you know, just by nature to get dark like that. But John, what about like when you kind of grapple with like the longer term impacts here, even as we think of, you know, for example, that 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, the switch and use the chlorine testing vials because they were the only ones authorized to do that.
- [21:47]
John Reuter
Well, I think that's exactly right. It picks up on what the mayor was saying that I thought was so important. I want to quibble with a little bit where you said the line of that they got themselves into, right. And they can't get themselves out of. And I think as Mayor Hopkins pointed out, it's not always that these places get themselves into the problem. Right. Part of the problem is, okay, we have these increasing standards. Another problem I'm hearing him talk about in his place is we got a bunch of money, right? And they poured a bunch of. They came up with dump trucks full of money and said, here it is. And we said, okay, great, we'll pave a street now. Oh, wait, that street to repair costs more than our entire budget or it costs 100% of our budget so we could have nothing else repairing that street anymore. Right. Before I go back to that, I'm like highlight that 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 even comes down to this idea around how we grow. There is so much, I would say, propaganda to try to make people think that gentle density increases that let, as you talked about, let your mother in law come and move to the community that you live in, let your kids stay in that community, let a business open across the street so you can go up a great place to share a cup of coffee with some neighbors and have a conversation. You know, there's so much core of these things of how we've set up our communities to fail. And, and also the entire conversation so often revolves around our largest cities, our biggest places, the centers of media in this country, but also the centers of like capital and power right in this country that just don't take places like this community in Colorado seriously and almost view that as we're seeing 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 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. Look, 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. And 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 the reason why they couldn't come to an agreement now, we don't know, right? And I'm sure some of it was petty feuds and personalities and all the stuff that, that infects every community anywhere. But another part of it was, as I said before, there was no clear solution, right? If you're in a place where it's going to cost all of your city's revenue to repair your street, it's really hard to find a 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 kind of an impossibility. Right. And 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, a problem that was not entirely of their own making, and give up. And I think that's a rational conclusion. And I do think that long term in these places you suggest the path is towards a ghost town. And I think that 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 financially stable. And like part of that's going to be having a state and federal government 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 to figure out how do you gently start to welcome more people, how do you stabilize, how do you make the math add up so that you can continue forward and not end up like this community that is likely, this likely ends with them slowly disappearing into the abyss. Right. And we don't want that to happen to, to our rural places. And so we have to start having those conversations about how do we gently fix them up, how do we incrementally grow and create places that are going to be strong and last.
- [26:05]
Norm Van E. Peersman
And Mayor Hopkins, it's not through alchemy, but through some pretty time tested practices that Chugwater has seen 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 share a little bit about like small town renaissance and, and the, 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, you know, tossed and turfed.
- [26:46]
Joshua Hopkins
Absolutely. Just before I get into that, I do want to touch on this idea of unfair because when I, like we said, there's a lot of these petty personal things and being I'm 35, being a younger mayor and just frustrating with sometimes I'm getting debated over 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 and try to let off steam. And I say, you know what, what's really difficult here is 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? I mean, 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, mowing the lawn is what's going to bring people into town. And they really firmly believe that, oh my gosh, if there's, you know, broken windows, if the lawn isn't mowed, people won't come in. And I'm looking at the town has declined 28% over 20 years and saying, okay, well, we kind of tried that. It's not working. Let's maybe have a different approach to things. But I think tasking people who live in these small towns and really are salt of the earth great people who mean well with these very complicated understandings of state statutes to even pass. I mean, we have, you look at our ordinances, 80% of them were passed improperly and could be legally challenged. And that's probably true for many small towns. And so it's like, well, what is really the law? And it's like whoever's in power kind of gets to pick. I mean, one small win I had is we had 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 with the second one, but they didn't. They just had these two sort of conflicting ordinances that had different requirements. And the town would waffle with each administration which one use this from that and that from that. It was very confusing. The rules were sort of arbitrary based on who picked them because who's going to check challenge that in a small town? A working class nobody. And so I was able to write a new ordinance, remove the two and write a new one that's a little clearer. And the fee schedule increased 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 you know, 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, it needs to be done. So I just, I wanted to point out sort of 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, but leading into sort of the business revival. Somebody who is, I guess, on the cusp of being younger and getting older. As a millennial, I see a lot of stuff myself. I'm a film photographer, have been for 20 some years. But that's resurged. Vinyl is resurged. I think there is a connection to, and especially a pushback against this AI. Everything is going to become technologically driven, especially in younger generations. And I don't think this is uncommon with generation after generation. They rediscover, you know, two generations ago and now VHS tapes are all the rage. And it's like, boy, that was a pain. You know, crazy stuff. But I think in some way small. I don't think it's a massive movement, but I think, and this is something I try to promote on my Instagram, to say 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 kind of gives some sense of purpose to being human and having senses. And 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 which we as a town just have to be ready to receive that every little idea, my kind of constant joke when I'm complaining about some of our commercial setbacks are 40ft, you know, off of a 60 foot right of way. And I'm like, a lemonade stand would be illegal here, but a lemonade stand would generate more revenue than the empty lot that currently sits there waiting for the 40 foot setback. And it's a joke, but it's true. I mean you get six pennies on every dollar. So that we've seen a lot of interest. I think now part of why I ran for mayor is to say if this town isn't ready for this wave, there may not be another one. If there isn't a wave to build on in the first place to say, let's get our downtown kind of got enough going on that then the next wave can say, hey, there is something there, let's latch and build further.
- [32:45]
Norm Van E. Peersman
Yeah, I think there's so much in that. And I'll just briefly touch on the article that really has stuck with me for a long time on this that Chuck wrote years ago is on 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 catchments of our municipality. And so that's the buildings and the improvements on, 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 that out of that is what we then fund all of our community investments or public investments in all of those tangible and intangible assets that each municipality has to return enough in service quality to make an impact and make it worth continuing to do so. 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. And it would be interesting to sort of do the quick math for a place like Hartman or a place like Chugwater and, and I think especially smaller communities and need to be nickel and diming on that question and asking, all right, hey, what is all of our property worth? All right, how much are we spending in order to like provide public services that meet that? And let's take out the federal grants, let's take out the transfers, let's just talk what do we have is in terms of what is each of ours and then what do we have together and, and does that work out? And I think a lot of us would realize we need to be a lot more careful about what we're doing. And with that, that actually means you can have much more honest conversations about either concrete streets or whether or not you can afford that extra, you know, 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, is trying to reintroduce some core metrics that can be really help. It's a little bit more complex to find than what we the core numbers we find in the finance decoder. And 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, sort of bind that up for us as you think. Think of some takeaways here.
- [35:20]
John Reuter
I think the big takeaway right from all of this is we got into the wonkiness of the details of what makes towns work and what makes them go broke is really the. Is really how important leadership is in these moments. Right. And for people in really places of any size, like a decision or two can really send you off course. And 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 of all sorts of different sizes. And so in this point in time, it's so important to take the actions to strengthen your place financially, to do the math like you talked about with the decoder, to actually think about adding gentle density, thinking about how do we 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'll also make our places socially and civically stronger. Right? And this whole story illustrates how it can all fall apart at once, how the financial and the social and the civic capital can all fall apart at the same time. But it's also true 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. And 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.
- [36:49]
Norm Van E. Peersman
Yeah. Mayor Hopkins, a takeaway for you.
- [36:53]
Joshua Hopkins
Take away for me would be. When I saw this article, it sort of 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. And my thought is, you know, my goal isn't to be the mayor for 50 years. A good government should be able to be. I mean, this is something George Washington believed in, is 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, 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 if we can have some sort of resiliency plan to say anytime there's a new council, it's somebody who maybe just has the energy but doesn't lack or lacks the education specific to what it takes for a municipality having some sort of plan of action in place to say, okay, you know, water system is number one. And it might be as simple as that. And you'd be shocked. I mean, there will be people who complain about lawns and cracks in the street, but they don't have maybe the understanding of how the system works and what makes us all live there to say what is really essential to survival, number one, and then number two, what is it that allows us to grow? And so this really just hits home with me to say my takeaway should be, I really need to work on, with my council and with the public a plan to say, how do we make our town 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.
- [38:49]
Norm Van E. Peersman
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. And maybe the one that for me, I'll share is I read this a little bit ago, but it's very relevant, is a book by an author, a Canadian author called Donald Savoy. And it's called Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher? And 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 sort of other layers outside of the school system. But the net consequences that the music teacher, the specialty teachers, they were the ones that 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. And so whatever happened to the music teacher? What about for you, Mayor Hopkins?
- [40:02]
Joshua Hopkins
Yeah, so I. I've been reading this book very, very slowly and I. I can't remember the title, but it's a well known book. It's called Influence and it's. It's essentially about the psychology of influence, how people influence each other, you know, 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'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. And the unfortunate reality can be exciting. It can be a little bit of something else 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's kinds of 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 sort of play politics and have discussions, which is a world I've never thought I'd deal with. But this book, Influence, talks about sort of the psychology and it just has me thinking when I'm discussing with people at council, sometimes just bludgeoning someone with idea seems like, why don't you get this? Why don't you understand this? And there may be some basic psychology behind that. And 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. And 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. And so I think a lot about psychology of Influence. And 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, 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.
- [42:27]
Norm Van E. Peersman
Yeah, that's awesome. I quickly look for it because it sounds awesome on why people say yes. Really studying that. It's Robert Cialdini influenced the psychology of persuasion. Great suggestion. Yeah. John, what about for you?
- [42:40]
John Reuter
Okay. Well, this is a very in tune with the moment here and in tune with our guests. We've got him. To hear Mayor Hopkins on how to run a city. I thought very intelligently. 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. Who doesn't love a cowboy while they're growing up? I certainly did. And Mayor Hopkins is not just a very talented mayor and advocate for strong town's principles. He is also an incredible photographer and you can check out his stuff at Water Chugwaterite on Instagram and there are just amazing. I think you have a few books too about this stuff too here.
- [43:23]
Joshua Hopkins
I did make a couple books. Yeah.
- [43:26]
John Reuter
And there's just these incredible visuals of the west and it just makes me so reminiscent just for the places that I love out west and traveling that area. But also just like this iconography that like is what it is there. And I think for me this duality of being a mayor and a photographer capturing these quintessential images here too. Someone pushing for modernization while also celebrating the defining moments that are like timeless in some ways about what it means to be in these places. And if you scroll through his Instagram just spoiler here you'll see support for mixed use neighborhoods right next to images of cowboys out on the range. And to me like this is what we need though. This is what we need in our country. Right now is a celebration that both these things can go together, that we can both think about a future and figure out what do we to do together while still holding on to the values and the kinds of places and experiences that have made our places wonderful. And so that's my down zone is to go and check out this photography and to 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.
- [44:32]
Norm Van E. Peersman
That's outstanding. Thank you so much John and thank you Mayor Hopkins as well. That's it for this episode of Upzone. Thank you. 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 commons. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you next week and until then take care and take care of your places.
- [44:51]
John Reuter
Let me show you what I'm about to do.
- [44:54]
Norm Van E. Peersman
This episode was produced by Strong Towns a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, you deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.