The effort to plan the spending of a half-million dollars that could shape Boulder’s future met a huge milestone in June, when a deadline was met to allocate the Boulder Development Fund — provided by the state following the closure of the Montana Developmental Center — to 15 carefully vetted economic development projects.
The two-year-long process involved many players. Notably, the 10 at the center of it all — the members of the Boulder Development Fund Board, or BDFB — were volunteers.
“There are always discussions about the lack of adequate numbers of volunteers for a variety of events and causes and here we have these dedicated individuals come forward for the good of the community,” Tom Harrington, co-manager of Jefferson Local Development Corporation (JLDC), said by email. “They have diligently met in the evening monthly over the past two years and put together the projects based on public input, meetings and many planning documents. They reviewed, discussed and recommended project proposals to the [Boulder] City Council that have gotten us where we are today.
Harrington, who has facilitated the BDFB’s most every step and scrupulously tracked its projects, was referring to the board when he said in a recent email that “Boulder has come a long way from the legislative decision to close MDC and the impact it would have on the community.”
“The board has done very well,” said board chair Drew Dawson, who along with board member Tim Norbeck recently sat for an interview. “It’s a group of really concerned people who have given an extraordinary amount of time and energy to really making this work.”
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The BDFB was authorized in June 2017 by joint resolutions from the City of Boulder and Jefferson County. The board’s purpose, the resolutions stated, was to “provide advice and consultation” to the city for expenditure of the fund and to help track those expenditures and apprise residents of them.
The following month the Boulder City Council appointed to the board Connie Grenz, Bryher Herak, Cory Kirsch, Sally Buckles, Erika Morris, Lynn Price, Griffin Bullock, Terry Minow, Norbeck and Dawson, who was named chair. (Dawson was not yet a councilman.) As called for in the resolutions, those chosen represented the Boulder Area Chamber of Commerce, the Boulder Transition Advisory Council and local public schools, among other parts of the community. All would volunteer their time.
JLDC would serve primarily as a facilitator, not only of meetings and among board members but also between the board and the Montana Department of Commerce.
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Jennifer Olson, administrator of the Department of Commerce’s Community Development Division, said in a recent phone interview that it “is fantastic” that the board was created and that its “broad spectrum of volunteers … was definitely an attribute to helping this community decide how to use this $500,000.”
Both the volunteers and the large fund made this a unique project for the Department of Commerce to work on, Olson said, for her team typically works with planning boards and smaller planning grants.
The Department of Commerce imposed on the BDFB a deadline of June 30, 2019 for allocating the $500,000. Harrington said the deadline focused the BDFB on maximizing opportunities to allocate funds and to “not leave any resources on the table.”
“This board is unique in that they had the ability to recommend financial resource expenditures that would actually see projects accomplished [thus] creating some personal satisfaction,” Harrington wrote.
That satisfaction extended to Land Solutions, a planning company the City of Boulder frequently contracts with and that was involved in several aspects of the fund expenditure project.
“This is a really amazing project for a planner because usually you do a plan but it’s going to take 20 years of very slow implementation,” planner Jessica Holdren said in a recent phone interview. “In this particular case we did the plan and then [were given] a year to allocate a bunch of money toward implementing it.”
Land Solutions served as what Dawson characterized as an intermediary between the board and the Department of Commerce — the result, Holdren said, of her company’s experience working with the agency as “economic development facilitators” between it and communities it works with.
Prior to July 2018, when it began serving in that facilitating role, Land Solutions worked on updating Boulder’s Growth Policy and developing the city’s Downtown Master Plan — projects that Holdren said served as Land Solutions’s “jumping off point” for its latter work.
“In those documents we made quite a few recommendations of ways to promote economic development in the community,” she said. “Once we were able to set some economic development priorities then we were able to help the board make some decisions.”
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One of the challenges the board faced, Dawson said, was agreeing on which projects from “a long list” to prioritize.
“What we didn’t want to happen was to have this $500,000 just go to a bunch of pet projects,” he said. “We struggled with how to sell this as an opportunity to have projects funded, but they should all be honed in on a common goal of growing the community and stimulating the economic development of the area.”
That’s where the established relationship between Land Solutions and the Department of Commerce came into play.
“The Department of Commerce … wanted us to try those things they know steer a community toward an organized development process,” Dawson said. It was sometimes a “balance between what they wanted us to do and what we wanted to do, and [there was] a negotiation process to make that work. I think it did.”
Dawson also noted “a lot of citizen involvement” that had informed Land Solutions’s work on Boulder’s Growth Policy and Downtown Master Plan — two documents that, along with the state’s guidance, “helped us formulate what the projects should be.”
He further credited board members’ willingness to compromise and the board’s diverse makeup — “within diversity there’s strength,” he said — as contributing factors to the final projects list.
“And it was [a] totally apolitical [process],” he added.
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Also helpful, Dawson said, was managing expectations at the start of the process by outlining the role of each group involved in allocating the fund: the Boulder Development Fund Board, the Boulder Transition Advisory Committee, the JLDC, Land Solutions, the City of Boulder and Jefferson County.
Other factors Dawson said contributed to the board fulfilling its mandate was the City of Boulder and Jefferson County showing confidence and support in resolving to create the citizen board in the first place, and the facilitation and project management provided by Harrington and Alison Richardson, his colleague at the JLDC.
In his email Harrington provided his own list of success factors. These included “good public input” from a variety of sources; the board’s “engaged” discussions about what would be in Boulder’s best interests and “a good plan of what needed to be accomplished”; a marketing subcommittee whose project research and coordination “helped keep the group on task”; Chair Dawson’s ability to “keep the group focused on the priorities and establish [project] timelines”; and Boulder’s mayor — first Gary Craft and then Rusty Giulio — attending most meetings and “providing good direction for the board.”
“This board performed at a higher level than most boards and committees we work with and is attributed to the personal involvement and sense of community the members have,” Harrington wrote. “There was very little turnover, which indicates the interest level was sustained and members felt they were engaged in an important project.”
“I was very impressed with the board and the volunteer level of this project because [they] really are the ones that helped steer this in the right direction and kept it going,” Holdren said. “I haven’t really seen anything to this scale in the smaller communities we’ve worked with.”
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Though the projects have been chosen and the funds allocated, and board meetings are now quarterly instead of monthly, the board’s work isn’t done. Dawson said they still have “a lot to do”: monitoring projects, nudging businesses to apply for matching grants and loans the fund has made available, and making sure the community stays informed.
Olson at the Department of Commerce is confident the BDFB will successfully see the projects through.
“This group went through a fairly robust review and identification and prioritization of their goals,” she said. “When [an authentic, engaged] community goes through that very locally driven, locally engaged process, it always results in really good, carried-out projects.
Noting a history in the United States of successful grassroots efforts, Norbeck said what the BDFB has shown is that “with commitment and goals and a direction, you get some things done.”
“I always tell kids … you need to be an active citizen,” he said. “It’s about you giving up your time, your expertise and your talents to make things better. You’re going to be in a position like that some day in life. Use it.”
