Durango has had the same city manager for 10 years and are on their fourth manager since the 1950's. He indicated that manager stability is a major reason the community has done so well. The council elects the mayor annually by charter and it rotates annually amongst the council. The rotation of the mayor lends authority to the manager. The mayor is not CEO-the council appoints the manager, attorney, and municipal judge. They have had a staff attorney for the past 4 years and prior to that they had a contract attorney who was around for 30 years.
The council has a retreat every spring-use the meeting room at the library-for two days and bring in a facilitator to identify a set of goals they want staff working on. The outcome of the retreat is it creates the basis for department heads to determine priorities. They also do a budge retreat in the fall and both are public meetings.
They have had 10 years of congenial councils. When he came in as the new mayor in 2013 he had 1 on 1's with each council person.
The toughest issue he is dealing with is homelessness and the city manager concurs. The sherriff has tacitly allowed camping in certain areas around Durango-has said he cannot enforce the law if people have no where to go. Fire danger is a huge concern. There is a proposal for permanent housing via tax credits but it is at least 3 years out. The big fear is that if we have a drought next spring/summer all the camping in the woods could lead to wild fires.
They put in a new land use code 4 years ago which helped them get ahead of the VRBO issue. They enforce it with a third party enforcement company who scours websites and compares to city licenses.
Asked if we are member of CAST(Colorado Association of Ski Towns) which puts out really good surveys.
Mentioned that Durango is about to launch a major civic engagement project and that Fort Collins was a really good source for them. They went through a 6-12 process asking the community to establish procedures which led to a Tabor override.