Lafayette, CO: Mayor Chris Camerson Interview

Chris Cameron
Years in Lafayette: 10
Elected Mayor: 2007

Prior civic involvement: elected to City Council in 2005; PTA and Library Board

Q:  Why do people enjoy living in Lafayette?

A:  I think we’re still a small town, people are friendly and we’re a strong community.  You run across the same people every day.  You see people at 10:00 AM and 9:00 PM; you see them at King Soopers and then you see them at the Rec Center and you see them at the library.  Because there are so many connections, there’s that strong sense of community.

I think the location is great because we’re kind of self-contained.  Really we have everything we need here in Lafayette, but if there’s something you want that we don’t have, it’s close enough to get to.  You can go to sporting events in Denver or concerts in Boulder or you can go to the mountains.

In January, we received an award as one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People from the American Promise Alliance, which is a national foundation headed by Colin and Alma Powell.  It looked at five criteria: education, opportunities to help others, caring adults, safe places and a healthy start.

Another thing that’s great about Lafayette is the diversity.  A child growing up in Lafayette is going to have an understanding of what the rest of the world is like.  They could go to New York City and be in a very different culture, but for the most part, people in Lafayette are used to meeting people of color and people with different abilities and different ages and interacting with different sorts of economic backgrounds.  We’re a town where a normal part of our lives is that there are different people; I think the diversity here is a strength.

Q:  What projects are you excited about concerning Lafayette?

A:  We’ve been working on downtown for a long time.  We will be naming a firm at our next City Council meeting to develop the Festival Plaza next to the Starkey building in Old Town; we’ll be building a park, a plaza and gathering place that should attract people downtown both to hang out and patronize the businesses and restaurants and make the Old Town a more desirable place to live.  We’re hiring a downtown coordinator.  I think this is a significant step that is really going to help downtown.

Along with that, we’re starting to see a little up-swing in cultural and public art.  Our public art committee has been working really hard.  They have placed one major installation every year for the last couple of years.  The cultural arts commission just put children’s art banners, I think are just amazing, along downtown’s main corridor.  They’re doing something called Invitation to Stare, where they contacted the local business property owners who don’t have a tenant currently and they are using the windows or store fronts to display art.  When people are walking up and down the street, rather than looking at empty store fronts, they’re looking at art and I think that’s exciting.  We’re taking some of those disadvantages, with the economy being down and our budgets being tight, and being creative with ways to improve quality of life that doesn’t cost a lot of money.

I also think of the things that we’re doing for energy sustainability and the environment.  We’ve been doing zero waste events for a long time, and we’re trying to increase the number of zero waste events we do.  We received an award this year for recycling from Eco-Cycle, and city staff is just being bombarded with requests from other cities on how to implement our curbside recycling and waste disposal program.  That was one of the most challenging political decisions we had to make, and it has been very successful.  I’d like to see it expand to composting.

The other recent project I want to mention is the naming of Romero Park for Mike Romero and his son.  That goes back to the people aspect of Lafayette.  We do pay attention to what people are doing and we try to honor and support those people who are really doing things for the community like the Romero’s have done.

Q:  What motivated you to become mayor of Lafayette?

A:  I didn’t really go into any of this thinking that one day I wanted to be the mayor.  The thing that’s been important to me is the community building.  Everything that we do requires building relationships between people whether it’s relationships between the community and the Council or relationships amongst the Council members or between the city and outside entities.  If we don’t have good relationships, then we really can’t get anything done.  People began encouraging me to consider being Mayor to build on my interest in this communication.

I think the more we can cooperate with each other and work together, the better things work for everyone.  That’s part of what the 100 Best Communities Award was about too.  It was about having collaborative relationships and maybe getting more done than you would expect to get done given limited resources.

Q:  What are the biggest challenges facing Lafayette now and the future?

A:  If you were a realtor you’d probably say, “Location, location, location.” I say, “Money, money, money.”  I think those of us who are elected officials and the city staff and citizens themselves, we all just want so much more than we can get with what we have.

We all know it’s a down economy, but things are always more complicated than they seem.  If money for one thing comes from here, then it has to be taken from somewhere else.  It is a very complex system.  When you ask what’s in the future, I don’t think money in this size of a town is going to change.  I think the economy is eventually going to come back, but when it does, we’re going to be faced with “how do we make up for lost time?”  Take the example of capital improvements.  How do we make up for the time we lost that we couldn’t pay for those capital improvements and yet simultaneously create a cushion for the future so that when the next economic downturn comes we’re prepared for that?  It’s kind of feast or famine.  I probably won’t be in Council by the time the economy is great again.  B ut, I hope who ever is on Council doesn’t think that it’s opportunity to say, “Oh, well, let’s just spend our money like crazy.”

I think we’re always looking for ways to benefit the people without an economic cost.  Like the Festival Plaza, we applied for a grant from the Department of Local Affairs and a quarter of a million dollars is coming from DOLA and we’re paying the other quarter of a million dollars.  We wouldn’t have been able to do that on our own.

Q:  How do you envision the evolution of Lafayette’s residential housing stock?

A:  We have a voter-approved growth management ordinance; with a cap of 200 housing permits per year plus 50 charter affordable housing permits and this has a huge impact on our housing.  We’ve actually grown at a much slower rate than growth management would allow for the last several years.  I think one of the interesting things about that is the City Council is going to be looking at the unintended consequences of this policy.  For example, there are families living in Lafayette who have to deal with construction in their neighborhoods for long periods of time.  It’s possible if you move into a new development, or you move next to a development that can only build fifty homes a year, you’re looking at 3, 5, 8 years that you’ve got construction vehicles turning in and out, whereas if that development could build 250 homes two years in a row they’d be done that much sooner, and that could cause less disruptions in that neighborhood.  The way things are now with the growth management restrictions and they way the allocations are done, we have a lot of neighborhoods that have constant construction.  So, I think that’s something that we’re going to have to be wrestling with because it really does impact the quality of life for those residents.

I think as far as evolution, we need to continue diversifying, making sure that we have a variety of housing styles.  We’re looking at our population getting older.  I’ve heard that empty-nesters are moving out of Lafayette because we don’t have the kinds of homes that they would like to retire in.  There are people wanting more one-level homes.

I think we need to continue looking at affordable housing because we do have a really economically diverse population here and I think everyone deserves to live in quality housing.  We just need to be thinking creatively about making sure that we have a range of housing.

We need to be thinking about rehabilitation of existing housing.  The trend locally and nationally seems to be infill projects and I think some of those are on the horizon for Lafayette, but I wonder what the local appetite for that is.

Q:  Is Lafayette doing anything special to attract businesses?

A:  I mentioned earlier we are hiring a downtown coordinator and that person is going to do a number of things.  They will be trying to attract more business to the urban renewal areas.  Business retention is important as well and that person is going to be responsible for working on that too.

Lafayette actually has a long history of being pretty flexible with economic incentives.  I think our staff has been really good at not having a one-size-fits-all attitude.  What we did for Vitamin Cottage is different than what we did for King Soopers, which is different from what we do for a primary employer like Dharmacon.  We try to figure out what businesses need and we’re targeting those businesses that are going to be to our benefit.  Our thinking is, if you want to come to Lafayette, here’s what is available for you; we want to find out what we can do to meet your needs that will also meet our needs.  I think we’ve been open to that sort of thing.

Q:  Could you share a couple of your favorite “only in Lafayette” experiences?

A:  I frequently hear people talking about our Latino Advisory Board and how it was the first one in Boulder County.  I don’t know that anyone else nearby has formed a Latino Advisory Board yet, so that’s sort of an example for other communities.

The group called Lafayette Recycles was in large part responsible for our city-wide recycling ordinance.  I think the citizens coming together that way and having that grassroots effort, you could call that an “only in Lafayette” thing.  It’s kind of unusual to have a big strong group of people come out in support of something and I think that was a really great showing by the community.

Our homework center and our Reading Buddies program are kind of unique and they provide a lot of support for children and families in Lafayette, helping them academically and also giving them a safe place to be when they’re out side of school.

Q:  What do you enjoy most about living in Colorado?

A:  The sun and the weather.  I grew up in Colorado and I’ve lived in Kansas City, Chicago, Washington D.C., and I’m glad to be back here.  I do think there’s something about the people too.  People here are real.  People are friendly.  I think that’s really it:  people are genuine and kind and not as caught up in the rat race maybe as much as other places.