 Hey everybody, welcome to Celebrate Longmont, the new channel for everything Longmont. Welcome to the show Celebrate Longmont, well where we celebrate all things Longmont. And my guest today, I should say my name first, Matthew. I'm the host and my guest is Ron Gallegos, who's a former council councilman and we kind of developed a conversational relationship over the past few years. A joint interest in Longmont, one of the things I love about Ron is he is a visionary. Thank you. Yeah, so he called me the other day and he's like, hey, I'm interested in serving the community perhaps again. So today we're just going to chat about maybe your vision for Longmont and also your vision. My vision, yeah. Equally for me anyway is an opportunity to go out and sign up, solicit people and find out what they're thinking, what the pulse is right now. Because you know, I hate to be that old proverbial parade analogy where the parade is moving but I wasn't paying attention and now the parade is left on him at the end. Like Santa Claus? Sort of like Santa Claus. Well the parade is not over till Santa Claus goes by. There you go. Anyway, so Ron, is it true that you're perhaps considering running for council? There is a vacancy and I am putting a committee together right now and I will be launching my attempt to get elected to council again. Okay, wonderful. This is a short term vacancy. What happened is the mayor got elected, she moved up and her spot has two years left on that. She had a four-year term and the mayor has a two-year term. So that's vacant now and now we have to have a special election and so we have to have some candidates. And that is in April, you're telling me. That is April 5th. April 5th. Okay, so mark your calendars April 5th. It will be a mail-in mail-out ballot like you traditionally have gotten. So you'll be getting something in the mail. Okay. And then you should be getting some information from time to time for my campaign or for me in the mail because right now there's probably no other way to communicate with folks. Okay, I noticed that you have, you have a Facebook page, you sell a website. We're putting up a new website. We're modifying our old website. Okay. Bringing it, making it up to date. And what is it, what is the website? It will be Ronforcouncil.com. Okay, Ronforcouncil.com. And right now we have that little thing that says it's under construction. It's a little man with a hard hat. Yeah. So maybe, maybe by this time next week it'll be up and running. Okay, so tell us a little bit about yourself, Ron. I am one of those rare creatures. I am a native of Colorado. Okay. But actually mine was one of the first Spanish families in the state. So we're one of the first families in the state about 1830. Wow. Yeah, okay. So by training, I want to see you. I'm married to an attorney here in town. And in finance, do a lot of lending, had done a lot of residential lending. Now I do a lot of commercial lending, things of that nature. So, you know, work with hard money lenders and wood bank programs and SBA and da, da, da, da. Now that I put you to sleep. But if you want to start a business, give me a call. I can help you through creating a business plan, getting an idea of where you want to go. Because I like when people get into business and they say, I want to borrow a million bucks. And I say, well, do you have your business plan? Huh? What's a business plan? Yeah, really. Do you have projections? Huh? Yeah. So it's good to figure out what you're going to do. So, you know, when you're there, when you've arrived. When you've arrived. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of arriving, so say, so if you get elected council to city council, well, I mean, what's the main reason that you're running for council? And what would you like to see happen in Long Island? In 1995, I was on council for one term. And when I got elected, I said there was, I had a list of about 11 things I wanted to accomplish. Okay. So I think it's important if you're a council member to have a plan to be fair with people, this is what I'm about. And in those days, we didn't have a rec center. In fact, we had had three previous elections where the concept of a rec center failed. Wow. So that didn't happen. The museum in those days was probably a space of less than 400 square feet. Wow. So really, the museum in those days consisted of a lot of quants and huts where we stored a lot of stuff, but you never saw it because there was no display space. We really didn't have a building. And then the senior center was getting a little long in the tooth. It was getting a little old and needed to be remodeled. Was it in the same place? Same place. But we were able then when we did the initiative to build a rec center, to build a new museum, and to remodel the senior center. And it was important because they had a real limited kitchen and Meals on Wheels is headquartered out of there. There's a public private partnership. So yeah, it made it really hard because they were having pre little stoves and maybe some firewood in the corner. I don't know. But it was it was really tough. So now it got much better. But you know, the community continues to grow. So one of the things I have is probably again, four or five things that I'm interested in. But really, this notion of sustainability, it's really kind of popular right now. It's a buzzword. It's a buzzword. Most of the emphasis is on environmental. But there is another component. And the other component is kind of a financial component. What is the economic health of the business community, which is the economic health of our community. Because if we don't have jobs, we don't have sources of income, we don't have commerce, the city kind of grinds to a halt and stops. We've been fortunate in the past that we've had a lot of high tech. But I think from my perspective, we're so close to Rocky Mountain National Park that it's an opportunity for a long mod to become a tourist destination. And maybe we do that from a lot of planning where we get tourists to come in. And the nice thing about tourism is they come in on a Wednesday or Thursday and then they stay through Sunday. We run them up to the park. They go up to see the bus. We come down at night and they go to our restaurants and stay in our hotels and we pick their pockets. I mean, they make contributions to our community. But then they get on the airplane. Legally picking their pockets. Legally picking their pockets. Then they get back on. Enticing them to use their money here. Well, we want to give them a good environment. Yeah. Which means I think there's lots of opportunity for us to develop the community. You know, one of the things I've been kind of pushing is we have a lot of focus on downtown, but I think there's a lot more we could be doing. You know, if you're in Spain and you have tapas, the idea of going in Spain and eating tapas is you go from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant. So if we had a pedestrian mall say from 3rd Avenue to 6th or maybe the 9th and close it off. That's like that's a big idea Ron has here. Big idea. We could then recruit art galleries, restaurants, entertainment so that it became an end destination. Bearing in mind, we've got three great sites for parking today that are surface parking. In other words, they're parking lots. The other part of my vision is we need to really address affordable housing. So we could have a public-private partnership where we built long buildings, high buildings, you know, multi-story buildings where people could buy a condo. There could also be a retail component and maybe the first couple of floors and we could do the parking either on top, on the bottom, or internally. So we've got three spaces that would again add to the nuance of downtown but create kind of a synergy. So if you don't work together, they're all working together, which means that you can then begin to address transportation. And those of you that are familiar with Lublin, there's a couple of streets that go north and south. Well, there's no reason that we couldn't maybe talk to CDOT and relocate our designation as a state highway, put it on airport road, and then change the two streets, you know, Kaufman and Kimbark so that they're north-south streets. They then channel the internal traffic, the traffic that really wants to be in downtown Longmont. And those folks that want to go to Bertha, or to Wyoming, or Montana, wherever the heck they're going, points north, could go all the way up airport, which is almost 95% finished. It ends at 17th now. Let's put a link around the lake and let's hook it up to 66 so that we have another viable option in terms of a bypass. And you've had this idea for some time? I've been talking about this for a while. My understanding from talking with folks at CDOT is if we can make a viable transportation improvement, there's nothing sacred about the designation of where the highway is today. Highways sort of like our rivers, they occasionally move. That's interesting. Highways are like rivers. Man, I caught you. Yeah, well, now that we've just gone through a flood, we've seen, you know, what happens to the river. They can change. Yeah, rivers can change, and certain events can change the river, the course of the river. Yeah. Sometimes you bring in the Corps of Engineers and they help you change. Yeah, so one of the things I think about cities is there's a gravitational pull. You think of a planet or a sun. The bigger it grows, the more gravitational pull it has. And I think we need to see more of that in our downtown, our city. We need to have more of a cultural pull. If you were to compare Longmont to a city like Boulder, for instance, there's not a lot of foot traffic on any given night in downtown. There's way more in Longmont than there was in the past. I mean, 2009 was pretty sad after the Great Recession. I can remember I had some friends from Chicago and we were going to Boulder and this was about 730 and the lights were blinking, you know, on Kauffman. They turned the lights red and this fellow said, what's going on? Why are all the lights blinking and why are they red? And I said, well, we've put the town to bed. We put the town to bed, yeah. And he didn't understand the concept of the traffic lights change because there really isn't, there wasn't in those days in 2008, 2009 much activity downtown. I think it's getting better, but I think we have an opportunity to create what I call a postcard moment. Right now people go to the park and maybe on the north end they stop and buy gas or maybe they run into Walmart and buy junk food to eat in the car all the way up to Estes. But they don't really come into Longmont so they miss the opportunity to wine and dine here, to seize at sites so that we have. There's certain things. I've talked to people, I mean, over the past two, three, four years, I think. And one of the things is kind of stuck is this whole gateway signage project. I mean, we have very few gateway signs. If you could go straight from 66 all the way to Estes and never know you passed Longmont, because like we literally don't have any signs that say Longmont, right? So that's something like, I think, I know there's things underway and that's good, but it needs to get done. No, it really does, which means. Because we're missing out on, I mean, Longmont should be the gateway to the Rockies. Like that's how, if I were to be in charge of, you know, visit Longmont or something, I would say, hey, we need to bill ourselves as we're the gateway to the Rockies. Well, and we're so close also, not only to the park, but we're so close to CU, CSU, and Greeley. And most of those, Boulder does not have one more inch of space left for conventions or activities of that nature. Right. Fort Collins is in a similar fashion and so is Greeley. So I think there's an opportunity for us to create tourism, but also maybe build a convention center, partner with a hotel to build a big multi-story, poor seasons or rits or something, and do it along the river corridor so that we can do some thoughtful planning. I'm not for paving all paradise, but there may be a couple of miles that we can, that could be economically viable. And it could be thoughtful. Yeah, I think we don't want to change, we obviously, we don't want to change the character of our city and we're not going to. No. But if we need some resources in our city to be competitive with other communities, I feel. I think, and from my perspective, these are like quality of life instances. These are things that we can do to bring us and make us go to the next level. It's nice that we're an all-American city, but we are so close to lions and we are so close to all that shale, all that rock. It would be interesting if we had an initiative where we began to develop an architectural nuance, a style downtown, sort of like CU has this Renaissance style in buildings. We could have a sort of Santa Fe. Santa Fe is cute because it has an architectural nuance and a style. And whether or not you realize that it's it's artificial. The city fathers in the early 20s were really suffering. New Mexico has always been poor, but they figure, well, you know, we have all these people, all these sites and people want to come out here. We should create, you know, our kind of our own brand. And they did it by mandating that commercial buildings all had to have a certain Southwestern Santa Fe style architectural footprint. And it works. So I think there's things we could do. Let's take advantage of us being so close to lions and some of the natural attributes there. And we could put a lot of the facades on their facing. So I think it's important also. Here's what, you know, sustainability means this, not only making sure that it's an attractive place for businesses to want to locate and do business here, but it should be an attractive place where people want to live. And I'm not sure the solution. I think the solution really should be to work and play in town as much as possible. So I'm not sure a trained Denver is the answer. I'm not sure a musk spaceship. Somebody in the last campaign was talking about partnering him with them, creating these little pods or something that would shoot along the interstate. Oh, wow. I remember Kyle Clark was saying, like, when the whole thing went down to RTD in Longmont, you know, and he said the moon's going to get a train before Longmont will get a train, which I think is a shame. Well, and, you know, we're paying lots and lots of millions of dollars to that project and we're not getting anything out of it. So I've been saying we should get aggressive with RTD. Tell them we want our money back. Give us our money back. Yeah, if nothing else, we create our own internal RTD and maybe buses are free and seniors can get across town. Yeah, enough of this, you know, people pushing Longmont around. I mean, you know, you've got to teach people how you want to be treated, you know, especially larger municipalities. Yeah, or other forms of government just because we're here in the northern part, you know, kind of forget us. Yeah, I'm really pro-Longmont. Like, that's the big thing. Like, this whole show, I want to be like, it's not about Republican-Democrat, it's about Longmont. You know, like, it's like, hey, let's celebrate Longmont. Where do we want to go as a city? Right. And I like to think big. And one of the kind of driving thoughts I have is like, where do we want Longmont to be in 50 years, 100 years? And that's where we should start thinking, what do great cities do and what do great cities have? Right. And I think if we think that way, then it's not a matter of we're thinking too big or we're dreaming too big or it's like, what do great cities have? And we talked about, I know there's initiatives to get performing art centers going, convention centers, just things like that. Development along the river corridor. And that's exciting. There's, I know, two organizations, like the cities behind something, STEAM, but then we also have the Longmont Performing Arts Initiative working on a performing arts center. And I think those sort of things are on. I think it's like, let's just plan on doing it. Like, let's just plan on doing it. If it takes 10 years, 20 years, I would like to see it be shorter and quicker. Right now, from a finance perspective, money is as cheap as it has ever been. So we could go out and through the bonding authority of the city, bond a lot of this money and do a public-private partnership like with Four Seasons or somebody and build a beautiful center, convention center with gardens, maybe, you know, outdoor amphitheaters so that we could have Shakespeare in the park. That's huge. That's so important. Gardens will get a beautiful gardens in the summer. There's lots of things we could do and take again advantage of the fact that we're so close to the park. And it's people move here and love it because, you know, I always try and convince my friends from California that, you know, they need to buy a shovel and lots of parkas because it snows so much here and you have to have sleds and sled dogs. Because I really want them just to come during the summer and leave. But having said that, there's some tension. You know, lots of people would like Longmont to be the way it was in 1970. Well, folks, I think that trains left the station. It's not going to be that way. But as what you said, we can be thoughtful and I think that's where my experience in the past, having been on council, having been on the planning and zoning commission, having been on the board of directors of National League of Cities, having been on the board of directors for the Colorado Municipal League. I bring a lot of on the ground experience there. So you're not, you know, having to teach me a lot of tricks because this old dog has a lot of tricks. That's good. We've been there and done that, you know. So if you're in, I like that if you're an old dog and you've already learned the tricks. Right. If I could say that. You could actually learn the tricks before you get there. Spend less time training. I'm already party broken trained and whatnot, you know. And I, a kidding aside, I was involved in that council and they actually went to Toronto and saw what they were doing when they were talking about broadband and doing the cable. Wow. Yeah. And that was 95. And then for whatever reason, we sat on it for about 10 or 15 years and Comcast and got nasty and wanted to take it from us. And we put up a good fight. And now I think we got next lighted. You know, it's just wonderful. So you're partially responsible. Well, that council was, it was mine. I came back and said, guys, Hey, other communities are doing this. We should do this. You know, and we were like, Lama was one of the first or the first in the country to do it. To do it. Yeah. And it's a great resource right now. You know, we did the same thing. We had an opportunity to acquire Sandstone Ranch. And we did. We said, well, you know, we need additional parks. I think one of the measures I have is the health of the community is measured in terms of how much we have in terms of park and the ability for, for recreation and whatnot. We're probably from my perspective and just listening to people out there at capacity in terms of our rec center. In fact, to be honest, I think the day we opened it, it was antiquated. Unfortunately, in those days, Lafayette had just finished the burgers center. And Lafayette in those days was about 15,000 people. And we said, Oh, yeah, we need a rec center like Lafayette. Well, we were already 40,000 and we're past 40. So we probably need another rec center or two. And you know, my chosen spot right now, our favorite is garden acres. We don't have to acquire any real estate. There's a big presence there. We've got it there. Yeah, that's a good idea. That would be an opportunity. So yeah, I think what you're saying is like, we need to provide these resources in Longmont because if we don't, people are going to go somewhere else. Oh, yeah. And that's like, you know, my thinking young people will go find what they want to find. Why shouldn't they do it here in Longmont? Whether it's sports, arts, entertainment, you know, nightlife. Why don't we music venues? Like, and so I think Longmont needs to think that way, like we need to think that way. I think it's important. Well, you know, and like you say, there are other communities that are waking up and if we don't do it, they're going to do it. Yeah, if we don't build a performing arts center, Loveland will if we don't build a convention center, Loveland will, you know, Loveland's already got one. Okay. Yeah. So, but we need to be able to, if we don't have them, we can't compete. But ours could be a little bit different more in terms of having a hotel on site and having the amenities, having a performing arts center and maybe an art gallery or an art center at the same time. Lots of meeting rooms and create, you know, a hub. So a lot of activity can take place there, not only for tourism, but for the community as well. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. So those are the things that I think we should be thinking about and talking about. Because if we look, you know, the last maybe three or four councils, the big watermark mixing my metaphors here was the flood. But we haven't really done anything since the flood. That's not to say that the city hasn't gone on. We've made some improvements in wastewater, we've made some improvements, you know, with the dams and whatnot. And the bridges reinforcement and everything. But that's really, if you think about it, I think we talked about this a little bit before, but people can get into kind of a, just a management kind of like marking time sort of. So that's really is reactionary because we're having to spin resources on something that happened that was bad as opposed to going on the attack as a community say, where do we want to be in the next 50 years? And you know, you can push a lot of paper around your desk or you could go make things happen. And I think as a community, we should be leading the charge with through vision. My office is in the first bank tower there, first on 17th and main, and we're on the fourth floor. So we can look out there. My wife has a beautiful, like a 360 degree windows on all sides. Anyway, at three o'clock on 17th and main, it's like World War three, the traffic is just unbearable. And it's north and south, but it's also 17th and it's really getting bad. So it's, you talk about maintenance, well, yeah, we can add three or four little parking spots downtown. That isn't going to cut it. We really need to deal with parking and transportation issue. And like I say, where we can drive incentives so that people can live and work in town and celebrate downtown, celebrate the community here. We don't need to train. We don't need spaceships. I think we need to concentrate. I debate there, but we need spaceships. Yeah, yeah, sure. I'd like them to see them in my lifetime. So I think those are the things. So right now I'm kind of doing a listening campaign, talking to people, telling them what I think that I'm about, but really wanting to ask them, you know, do we have enough library books? Do we have enough opportunities in the arts for for young folks? Other things we're missing, you know, the school is now adding an aquatic center. That'll be one good thing. That's exciting. Yeah. I think, you know, we get into sports. I think Longmont should own one sport. Like I don't care if it's swimming or rugby or something, you know, or ice hockey, lacrosse, like the city, like Glendale actually, they build a rugby stadium. Right. They have, I think, semi-professional rugby leagues and they play a lot of soccer too. And I think that's where I think, you know, it's important for leaders like to get in public office to be like, hey, let's do something as a community. Yeah. Let's own something so we can, you know, move a vision forward and give children, young youth an opportunity to be involved in something bigger. Well, and I was on the site selection committee of the golf course years ago. So we were, we started when there were just empty ground and we lived three or four sites until we finally settled on that site and settled on the golf course developer that we got. But yeah, I mean, I think there's some opportunities and there's some additional opportunities that, you know, there was discussion of about a hockey rink and whatnot. And for whatever reason, it didn't come to fruition. But just because it didn't happen one time doesn't mean that we couldn't, you know, tee it up again and maybe look at it. But as long as we have the viability and the community is healthy, you know, there used to be an educator years ago, there was a study called Envision 2020. That's how old I am. And we were looking at what it would be like in 2020. Well, now we're 2022. Where has your pass gone? I'm going to have to pull out that old document and dust it off and see what we were planning. But some of those things have come to pass. Some of them we didn't even think about. And some of them were now stuck with transportation is a real big one. Affordable housing is a big one. Affordable housing is one of those things that, yes, we need to have all the open space. But remember, every inch of open space comes, it means that maybe there's less regular space. Not that I want to build department houses from here to New York. But we have to have, I think, a viable means of housing people in the community. And $16, $18, $2200 a month for a person working, making $12 an hour just isn't going to cut it. No. Most people are having to move to Kansas almost and commute into Longmont to work on a daily basis. Right. And, you know, that's people move out of town if they can't afford to live here. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, and I'm having people who tell me that, you know, they've lived and they've paid their house now. They wanted to retire in Longmont, but they don't know if they can stay because suddenly the taxes are very high on their house. It's appreciated now. Everything is more expensive. Such is the nature of the beast. Yeah. So affordable housing is important. Yeah. It's big. And workforce housing is a big issue right now. So, you know, we could mandate that all the policemen and the fire people and whatnot and all the city employees have to live in Longmont. But right now they couldn't afford to live in Longmont because the real estate is so high. So unless we had a program, some incentive so that the city helped them acquire something, so then we could mandate that they have to live in town. Because I think from my perspective, the fire and police personnel should live in their community. And I think the people who work for the city should live in the community. You know, if you don't buy into the city, you have to kind of wander. So, okay, it's interesting. Yeah. So you kind of want people to have a skin in the game. Skin in the game. Yeah, that's a good point. Interesting. Yeah. Well, Ron, is there anything, this has been a good conversation and I hope to talk to you again sometime soon. Is there anything else that you haven't said that you'd like to tag along? No, just, you know, from my perspective, we have an opportunity to add somebody who has some business experience, who has had some government experience, because we get a lot of now it looks like the last couple of cycles, council people who have never been on any boards of commissions, who really don't kind of understand what they got themselves into. So the first thing they want to do is meet less frequently in hopes that the problems will go away. And they're not going to go away. Yeah, you probably need like a nice city, probably need a healthy mix of, I think you do. Yeah. To get a balanced view on the whole community, I think council should represent. It should be. A large breath of, you know, the community. But let me say, I'm no stranger to the neighborhoods. I used to be president of the neighborhood group leaders when we had seven organized neighborhoods. And I think the last count is there were 42. So yeah. Yeah. So and I was liaison to the library board and the police department and whatnot. So all right. All right. Ron for city council. Thank you. I like to earn your vote and trust and respect. Yeah. Well, let's, you guys, thanks for watching today. It's been a good conversation. Don't forget to celebrate Longmont. And if you'd like to chat with me sometime, you know, somebody who's passionate, crazy about our town, I'd love to hear from them. So you can follow us on Facebook, celebrate Longmont, and on YouTube channel, you see our latest videos. So God bless you and hope to see you soon. Thank you. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to our channel by hitting this button here or watch another video.