On the morning of January 29, I realized I had not heard from the Town of Crestone yet with regards to whether or not they wanted me to produce the Fourth of July event for the town.
I decided to go ahead and reach out because last year I had applied for and won a Saguache County sales tax grant. So this year, intending to both produce the event, and also to file the grant application, and do the reporting for them, I needed to get authorization to do so.
I reached out to trustees Benjamin Byer and Adam Kinney, and was informed that there was a special board meeting that had been called for that day (within an hour of reaching out).
I was encouraged to speak, and when I arrived, it was definitely divine timing that moved my presence there. Because on the agenda, they were discussing allowance of any events in town, including Fourth of July, the Music Festival, and the Energy Fair. As the person involved in all three of those, I was surprised to know that I was not invited nor even told about the meeting.
When I reached out to other town residents, I found out that no one knew about the meeting. In fact, it seems that trustee Laki didn’t even potentially know about it as she did not give any notice that she was not going be there.
Nevertheless, we discussed how seemingly most of the town was adamantly against the noise in town as (trustees) put it.
I reminded them that events are the way that sales tax revenue from businesses in town thrived, but that fell on deaf ears. Surprisingly, a number of the board members were in favor of creating a standardized way of having events in town, however the mayor was adamantly against having and in fact, even offered that the Fourth of July simply have a parade and no amplified music. I informed them that I would not produce a Fourth of July event if there was not amplified music. After sitting at the meeting for over an hour and a half I had to leave because of other scheduled meetings.
A request for a committee to discuss the situation was offered by other trustees, but the mayor wanted to control the conversation, so declined and decided to make it a town board conversation only. It is troubling that the nomenclature consistently used by the trustees when they refer to “community” only refers to the 100 or so voters in town.
The other couple of thousand of us outside of the town who utilize and make money for the Town of Crestone by shopping in town and most recently, by providing taxes over the Covid years to them are not considered “the community.”
I do not know the answer to this current situation other than just to wait for the next board who will be voted in in May. However, as it stands the community at large, i.e. the entire Crestone-Baca community, is most likely not going to enjoy events this year in the Town of Crestone unless something is done.
Respectfully,
Nick Nevares