Crested Butte is as creative as towns get

Creating a Colorado Creative Distric

There’s no doubt Crested Butte is an eclectically creative community. After all, it’s why many of us call this place home. You get a sense of it upon arrival to this end of the valley. One look at a hand-painted public bus may prompt curiosity. So might the often costume-clad locals gathered in the street on a random weeknight.

This town’s creativity is why a large percentage of tourists visit, and it’s a foundation of the town’s spirit. It motivates townspeople to develop innovatively, and to preserve wisely. Being creative is part of Crested Butte’s history. And now it’s a stated goal for the town’s future. While Crested Butte is absolutely a creative district, it is not a certified Creative District. Not yet, at least.
In 2011, the state of Colorado passed law HB11-1031, which encourages communities to form Creative Districts in order to attract artists, entrepreneurs and visitors, to create and enhance hubs of economic activity, to showcase cultural organizations, events and amenities, to help beautify and develop healthy communities, and to improve the quality of life of Colorado residents.
According to the Colorado Creative Industries (CCI) website, “The state’s creative districts are capitalizing on Colorado’s creative assets to grow their local economy and to improve the quality of life for their residents. The goal of this program is to help Colorado Creative Districts achieve the administrative structure, funding streams, community engagement process, strategic plan and staff structure that provide both immediate sustainability and opportunities to evolve creatively. This is not a grant-making program; rather, it is a program meant to develop the capacity and sustainability of creative districts as an economic and community development tool. The program is set up as an incubator to assist creative districts with a variety of elements that will ensure success.”
How creative?
The old Town Hall is now a theatre and art gallery. The library used to be a school. Thirty years ago, the Center for the Arts was a county shop and a maintenance yard. It took the Town Council and local citizens being creative and visionary to think that an old town shop could become what it is today. If you look at what we have today because of the creative decisions made 30 years ago, it’s a result of such outside-the-box thinking—plus the town supporting the arts and entrepreneurs and allowing the town to blossom.
Local artist Shaun Horne, owner of Oh Be Joyful Gallery and president of Artists of the West Elk, said, “The Creative District process defines creative in the broadest sense. Welders, chefs, musicians, funky bike makers—the people that are starting to give up skiing and dirt biking are getting into their creative years, picking up painting and playing the banjo and stuff. As a writer, you are creative,” he told me. “All the home builders are creative. These aren’t guys putting up a thousand track houses per month. They’re sculpting and there’s local art going into them.”
Jenny Birnie, director of Crested Butte’s Center for the Arts, reported that growth is off the charts for the arts. “Once I started adding it up and seeing how much our organizations and audiences have grown, I was amazed,” she said. “We were involved in the Americans for the Arts Economics Prosperity study in 2010. What it did was help us determine the economic impact for the arts in Crested Butte. We’re going to do the study again because we’re pretty sure things have practically doubled since.”
The study asks audience members to look at how much money they spend on an evening enjoying or participating in the arts. Say they go to a concert, and a ticket is $50 to $60. But first, they go out to dinner and spend another however-many dollars. They also might pay for lodging (if they are visiting), and possibly even transportation. Birnie emphasized the importance of understanding and being able to convey the economic impact of the arts in our community.
“If you look at almost anything that happened last July…Wine and Food Festival, Music Festival, Film Festival…all have had significant growth over the past five years, and a lot of attendees are coming from out of the valley. The impact is really significant.”
Birnie resurrected the local Arts Alliance (an informal gathering of 14 non-profit arts organizations) with the support of the Crested Butte Music Festival about seven years ago. The original Arts Alliance, which kind of died off about 15 years back, was mainly focused on facilities. The new Alliance wants to collaborate more and help member organizations grow, and to make Crested Butte a nationally recognized arts destination.
So naturally, when the state of Colorado offered a Creative District certification to those communities that qualify, the Arts Alliance of the East River Valley and the town of Crested Butte figured we fit the criteria.
“One thing I think CCI really likes about Crested Butte is it is unique in so many ways,” Birnie said. “They love the historical aspect of Crested Butte and how it’s grown. They love how we take care of our own. When they came to the site visit last summer I think they were here for like five minutes and said ‘Wow, this is a really creative place!’ Now we’re basically in a two-year program where we’re trying to get certified.”
Birnie noted that the Arts Alliance applied for the designation a couple of years ago as an entire county (Gunnison County), and CCI thought the proposed district was too large. “We thought we should try it differently this time, after learning a Creative District is supposed to be a small area. Out of Gunnison, Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, we all agreed it should be Crested Butte. As we’ve taken the next steps in this process, it’s unbelievable how many people are creative here.”
Crested Butte town planner Michael Yerman agrees. “It’s the people in the community who work from their laptops and make a living by telecommuting, doing web design, writing, metal workers, blacksmiths…The most important thing for this to be successful is to bring the people who have always kind of been on the edges, who haven’t really had a defined role, bringing them into the process and recognizing what they do and how vital it is to our community.”
Yerman used one longtime Buttian as example. “Doug Bradbury is a quintessential creative. He basically developed mountain biking, developed the Manitou fork (a front suspension fork for rugged terrain), he developed a company around it, and now he’s the fabricator of the rollover cattleguards on our local trails. That’s the kind of person who’s kind of on the edge of our community and hasn’t really been recognized…he’s a reason that we’re recognized as a real mountain bike community. He dedicated hundreds of hours to building trails and making the sport better.”
Horne truly believes there are some great upsides to Crested Butte becoming certified and really wants the community to take the Creative District process seriously. “This is prime time to make some big moves. I’m very focused on the possibility of engaging creatives for real,” he said. “Crested Butte could really do some good by developing cultural events that pull from the Front Range. In Telluride, every summer and every winter, they have some events pulling people in from all over. A film festival, a balloon festival….It’s great for many creatives in that town, the people that have the art shops and jewelry shops. The people that go to Telluride have some money typically. I think Crested Butte has great potential. We have great attributes a lot of other Colorado towns don’t—for example, great patronage. We also have millionaires running all over this town. These culturists spend money all over the place. Most skiers and mountain bikers don’t do that.”
Horne said his gallery looks awesome but isn’t always financially viable. “This summer was bonkers. So great. But winters have slowly been getting more tepid.” During summer, the Film Festival draws people from the Front Range. The Wine and Food Festival brings new people driving in from all over. The Arts Festival brings in a ton of out-of-towners. These cultural events can bring an important clientele to Crested Butte, but the Arts Alliance agrees we’re not really taking advantage. “Our summers are good enough, for sure,” Horne added, “but in winter we kind of sit around waiting for people to walk in our door.”
Yerman, who has experience in this field since helping Salida become one of Colorado’s first certified districts in 2013, is helping to lead the effort for Crested Butte. “To be a certified Creative District there needs to be recognition within the town government of that Creative District,” he said. “That can be done via the adoption of the strategic plan we’re preparing, as a formal opportunity for the Town Council to regulate the Creative District.” Yerman added that there are various ways to be recognized, but dependent on whatever the strategic plan outlines, that will be the guiding document on how to actually go forward. But to be certified, he reiterated, the town government of Crested Butte has to actually recognize us as a Creative District.

Next steps
The Arts Alliance needs the town’s input on what everyone would like to see. On January 22, all residents of Crested Butte are invited to a big community kick-off meeting at the Center for the Arts at 6 p.m. The Arts Alliance is doing everything it can to pack the house on that date. There will be live performances, drinks from Montanya’s and other beverages, food from local creative chefs and more fun. “This will really be a chance for the people of the community to get pumped up,” Yerman said. “The whole point of the meeting will be to get people motivated and involved in the process.”
CCI does not completely prescribe steps. Once certified, they’ll offer some guidelines on how to engage the community, but the Arts Alliance hopes to have the strategic plan done by the end of summer. “We want the town’s input on how they can engage,” Birnie said. “There should be a lot of creative evaluation, so if that’s a long process, that’s good. A lot of it is getting people excited and finding out what the creative possibilities are. Once we can say we have 100 ideas…we have 50 ideas…okay, we can only have five…then we can focus on specific things.”
In Salida, Yerman said, instead of ordering something like bike racks, they went to their creative community and asked them to build some. In one instance, when Salida was working on a bridge they had a local contractor do the design work. When a town spends tax dollars in the community instead of buying a bike rack out of a catalog from some company in California, for instance, the money is recycled back into the community.
Yerman said there will be short-term and long-term projects in Crested Butte’s plan. “A long-term goal may be to maintain long-term creatives in the community, maintain affordable studio space, improve retail and dining, etc. while a lot of energy will go into short-term projects and determining how to make this district viable for the long term,” Yerman explained.
The underlying difference between this effort and other town efforts is the town really needs to be on board. In this case, it is. Horne said the town has been very supportive of the Arts Center for decades. In fact, the committee steering this drive was created by the Arts Alliance and town government coming together. But Horne compared engaging creatives in this town to trying to harness a thousand Clydesdales to move something. “This pending certification has the ability to engage the community creatively, but most administrators only facilitate,” he said. “They provide a venue for a band, they facilitate artists. But they don’t necessarily lead creatives. We’re headed toward this January 22 meeting at the Center. The arts community is really going to push hard to get everybody in town to this meeting and engaged in this process.
“We have one shot at this,” Horne added. “We have a lot to gain. We’re very much suited for immediate progress. We have a lot of tools, and one of the largest tools is the creative people of Crested Butte. We have this beautiful location, close enough to the Front Range so we could really blow up as a cultural destination.”
But remember, the key part of the Creative District effort is not the money, marketing opportunities or technical/logistical assistance we get—it’s getting all the players to the table. See you January 22.