Mayor Troxell talks progress, endeavors within Fort Collins community
Serving his third term, Mayor Wade Troxell first began as a city council member but when he was 14, he was appointed mayor for the day. During his time as a city council member, he represented Southwest Fort Collins District 4 for two terms. In this past local election, 73.78 percent of Fort Collins voters re-elected Troxell, however, this will be his final term.
Troxell is a Fort Collins native. He attended CSU for all three of his degrees and eventually accepted a faculty position at the University teaching mechanical engineering.
“It’s interesting,” Troxell said, “as mayor you’re always the mayor, even when you’re in your class and when I go on trips with the University, I’m the mayor.”
Beyond the Oval: What does the day and the life look like as mayor?
Mayor Wade Troxell: There is no typical day, but because I’m a citizen legislator, I have to balance my full time duties at CSU… The things that you would think I do, I do. And that is I help set the agenda for Council. I help the leadership team, which is the city manager, the deputy city manager, there’s two of them. There’s the city attorney, the mayor pro tem and the city clerk. We meet weekly and help set the agenda and then run the meetings. So I run the council meetings as well as any other meetings that I participate in. I keep pretty busy. My wife calls this my hobby so I enjoy it, it’s a great community. Growing up here, I think about Fort Collins and great leadership of the past and the legacy of many who have gone before and then the future and what that brings.
And what goes into a “great community?” How are you striving towards making Fort Collins great?
I look at some of the values of Fort Collins. We’re friendly, we’re an inclusive community, we’re a very vibrant, dynamic place. It’s changed, now there are jobs here in Fort Collins, where growing up it was smaller and slower, so the vibrancy of a very complex community with high tech businesses with HP and Intel and Woodward and a lot of startups here in Fort Collins and creating a community that is even more livable than it is today, 50 years from now. So for me, what makes a great community is a place that people love, engage with their community, and it’s a totally livable community, it’s safe — great place to raise families, start businesses, great place to go to school, do research, create an invention, start a company — and that’s Fort Collins.
What progress have you made while mayor, in terms of it’s policy change or introducing new policy?
I can point to a number of things that have happened while I’ve been on Council and just to mention a couple that are happening next month. We are opening a white water park, so that’s a legacy project. We’ve turned on our first customers for our broadband utility, where we are running gigabit broadband to every premise in the City, affordable high speed gigabit symmetric services without data caps and without contracts, so everyone in our community has access to the best and fastest broadband. Low income neighborhoods as well as students and faculty and staff and everyone has the best internet that can be provided.
On the topic of low incomes, what are you working towards to combat homelessness in Fort Collins?
Maybe 30% of those are people that live in our community fall in difficult situation, and we have a very strong network of Homeward 2020. There’s 43 different nonprofits that provide services to our homeless community so one is Neighbor To Neighbor. If someone can’t make rent, through Neighbor To Neighbor, they provide that bridge of rent so they don’t become homeless so one of the best ways to not have homelessness is to avoid it if you can. So we have a large network of nonprofits that do provide services to homeless community. But it’s much more complex than that. There are people with mental health issues, addictions, alcohol, drugs and also there’s a transient population… When we talk about mental health, it’s not simply those who can’t find housing, often times they have a lot of challenges that prevent them from maintaining a housing situation. But we do a lot of things in Fort Collins, including a housing first initiative — Redtail Ponds and then the Mason Place is another one that [provides] permanent supportive housing with supports infrastructure around to help with some of the issues such as addiction or mental health.
In your opinion, what is the biggest threat to Fort Collins today?
Some of the challenges we have are affordability, attainability of housing. Transportation is often mentioned, [things like] train horn noise. Those are the most prevalent issues that people mention.
And as Fort Collins tries to build more attainable housing and continues to expand, what will happen when Fort Collins eventually runs out of land?
Cities are dynamic. Our northeast is most of our buildable area, but we actually have a considerable amount [of land], so now we’re 177,000 people, in about 30 years we’ll build out at about 250,000… We are now more of an infill city so the projects are not simply greenfield but often times they are building up. Lot of higher densities, transit oriented development that are closer to transit lines so there’s less single car occupancy travel and more public and multi-modal with bicycle and pedestrian.
Speaking of multi-modal transportation, e-scooters are coming to Fort Collins. How do you think this will improve or hurt the community?
I think there will be a net benefit. I think you have to be aware if you ride them, I mean there are safety issues. But I think it does provide an alternative form. We’re offering a one year pilot with one provider, so if they turn into a piles of junk and/or if there are a lot of pedestrian or bicycle or car conflicts the pilot might end… I think there will have to be responsibility in terms of the riders to ride safely. I think it can be a great form of transportation in our community.
Any additional comments?
Being born here, Fort Collins was 20,000 people and now its 177,000 people, so 8.5 times bigger. And some people think that the growth is an anomaly, and in my life, that’s been Fort Collins. And part of that is Fort Collins is even become a better place. Are we perfect? No, but Fort Collins is special in so many ways. It’s a great place to learn, and enjoy nature and to hopefully find a place if you want to stay, so I think it’s wonderful in so many ways.
