Chamberland in the race as GOP’s candidate for commissioner

“A three-pronged platform”

The Gunnison County Republicans have chosen Phil Chamberland to face Jim Starr in November’s race for County Commissioner.

Chamberland emerged as the Republican candidate after getting 83 percent of the 42 votes cast in the delegate race Wednesday, April 7 against Mark Ewing, who conceded with fewer than 10 votes.
Ewing says he learned a lot about the political process and himself during his run, and has found himself to be surer of his ideas and who he feels comfortable representing after the experience.
“We always go to our positions and defend them and then we argue and that’s what we see in government at the national and state level,” Ewing says. “I went into it with the idea to change that.” He hopes to come back to the table in the future with a different approach to help different interests in the valley find common ground.
But Chamberland is looking forward to starting a campaign that he has been preparing for with regular trips to the commissioners’ meetings since he announced his run for the post early this year.
“I’ve been involved in about 14 boards and commissions [in the Gunnison Valley], so I’ve always been active and had a good grasp of what goes on in county government,” Chamberland says. “If I’m lucky enough to be elected then I want to be able to hit the ground running.
The best place to be educated is at those meetings, so I go to as many as I can.”
What he sees between those meetings and his time in the community as owner of Gunnison Valley Construction is a county at a critical time, when families are being forced to leave the valley for jobs or a lower cost of living.
So Chamberland is hoping to sing a familiar refrain in a different key with calls for “truly focusing on economic development in the county” to help bring the local economy back to a point where it is sustainable and growing again.
As a commissioner, he says he would try to introduce new ideas and encourage leaders in every county department to make job creation and retention “job one.”
“When we look at the growth of other resort communities compared to ours, they’ve been growing about seven times faster,” Chamberland says. “A reason for that is our regulations are too onerous. We should start looking at some of the regulations that are causing people to look past Gunnison when setting up a business and try focusing our energy on incentives that make Gunnison a more attractive place for business.”
In the wake of a slowing economy and abysmal population growth in the county, Chamberland says he would also like to see government spending grow accordingly—which is to say not much.
“I think if we continue to spend that kind of money with a population that isn’t growing, there is going to be more money that comes out of pockets of people living here,” Chamberland says. “We need to find a way to pay for government growth to be in line with county growth as a whole.”
Affordable housing is also a concern for Chamberland, who thinks the current way the county is going about raising money to provide housing for an essential, however low income, workforce. At the same time contractors pay into an affordable housing fund with every project, “in over-regulating ourselves we’re creating a situation where it’s more expensive to build. There have been some great reports that we can springboard off of that were commissioned,” he says.
And Chamberland hopes the combination of new ideas and an understanding of how the county government would serve him well as a county commissioner.
“If I can’t convince the other commissioners that my message is strong enough to be pursued, then maybe we need to look at what those ideas are,” Chamberland says. “Consensus is the way that government works and I don’t see that I’m so radical that I would be working on changing the focus. And I couldn’t imagine that the other commissioners wouldn’t also want to focus on economic development, because we’re losing too many people.”