Roy Otto acknowledges often the myopia that comes along with a job that requires problem solving on an immediate level.
The Greeley city manager calls it “the tyranny of the urgent.”
But Otto is keen on looking to the future, too, even when problems — like the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, which plagued the city and planet for most of 2020 — dominate the consciousness of city council and staff.
“Problems always come up and we get them taken care of,” Otto said Thursday by phone. “But the shadow of that strength can be your eyesight is down at your feet and not at the horizon. We recognized that as maybe a little bit of a weakness — we’re so strong tactically that we don’t think strategically. Our push (last year) was to think about the horizon.”
With that in mind, Otto’s view of the near future — 2021 — largely involves goals and initiatives that will impact the distant future of Greeley and the region.
The year of water
“The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of 2021 is I think it will go down in history as the year of water,” Otto said.
Otto then listed a handful of monumental, historic projects right at hand for the city built on irrigation and its water programs.
Terry Ranch is top of mind — the project that proposes to purchase a massive underground aquifer near Pierce in which Greeley hopes to store water for generations to come, pulling from it in dry years and refilling it in moist ones.
But Chimney Hollow, a reservoir creation project near Carter Lake the city is undertaking that likely breaks ground this year, is also a big change for Greeley’s water portfolio.
“That’s a major project,” Otto said. “First reservoir built in the state in quite a long time.”
Then there’s the issue, Otto continued, of recovery from the massive forest fires that tore across the central part of the state, including the regions of all four of Greeley’s major water sources — an unprecedented impact to the city’s uncommonly diversified portfolio of the resource.
“I’ve been talking about trying to come together with other regional municipal water providers,” Otto said of this effort and others. “We’ve done an initial touch base and we anticipate 2021 and moving forward agreements to help that collaboration addressing municipal water provision in Northern Colorado.”
Finally in this realm of concern is the need to upgrade the city’s water reclamation facility.
“We spend so much time on drinking water, but the treating of water going through the community is huge, too,” Otto said. “Both ends of the process, it’s a huge focus of the city’s efforts.”
Greeley’s location at the confluence of the Platte and Poudre rivers is well known. Now there’s another water confluence on the near horizon, though.
“Here we are with a confluence of issues to move forward with the next wave,” Otto said. “A lot of people believe Terry Ranch will be seen as the next major part of Greeley’s water history.”
Elections
Municipal elections approach in 2021, as they do every odd year. The city council will change over in part, and that’s not the only big piece of Greeley’s future that will be addressed at the ballot box.
“We anticipate moving forward with asking to extend the Keep Greeley Moving tax,” Otto said, referring to the sunsetting tax that has funded a flurry of roads improvements in the last several years. “Citizens continued the Food Tax, we’ll most likely be asking the same thing for Keep Greeley moving.”
Transportation
In the same vein of Keep Greeley Moving, Otto said, is the upcoming Strategic Transportation Master Plan update.
“How do we link the bigger transportation initiatives for Greeley and the region as a whole?” Otto said of the tone he anticipates for that conversation. “Lots about that from an infrastructure standpoint.”
Otto noted I-25 improvements, and more locally the 35th and 47th avenues’ overpass projects among the biggest elements coming up in the transportation realm.
“Hopefully the state can provide funding as was initially planned; ours was coming through Imagine Greeley, but all those challenges with how taxes are performing in light of COVID is a concern,” Otto said. “How do you move forward with those projects? But you’ve got to have them planned well.”
Public spaces
Otto said that there’s new things coming for the city’s open spaces and natural areas.
“Staff in 2020 was doing a lot of work and outreach to the community as a whole on creating the Get Outdoors Greeley plan,” Otto said. “That’ll be submitted to council in the first quarter of this year. It’s a five-year strategic plan to move those initiatives forward. I’m very excited about that.”
Among the elements the plan intends to include: A new natural resources division within the Culture Parks and Recreation Department; new development of open space around 1st Avenue south of town; access for the city to areas around the Platte; and improvements and extensions for the Poudre River Trail.
Tourism
Otto said that there’s excitement among staff about collaboration with Visit Greeley to develop a Master Tourism Plan.
“Hopefully the pandemic is officially something of the past soon and we’re able to move forward into the post-COVID world with a more intentional plan of tourism in Greeley and the area,” Otto said. “Obviously council was not planning on this to be something coming out of a pandemic, nobody knew that, but it timed out that way.”
In the end, Otto said the year is shaping up to be one that sets the city up for a long time, and that’s intentional.
“We accomplished a lot in 2020 in spite of the pandemic,” he said. “I’m proud of the staff, but that was setting ourselves up for long-term issues, as well. These are almost all long-term issues. It’s nice to do that, and quite frankly, I think that helps you get through the tyranny of the urgent as well. That can wear you out and demoralize you. But thinking about the future and shaping a positive future, it lifts the spirits.”
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January 02, 2021 at 08:01PM
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Greeley city manager looks ahead to an exciting new year - Greeley Tribune
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