Politics in Aspen

Politics in Aspen

By Jay Cowan

Photos by Bob Krueger

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Politics in Aspen have been weird and convoluted since silver miners and the U.S. government screwed the Ute Indians out of their ancestral hunting grounds more than a century ago. Conquest and pillage is an unhappy foundation for a beginning, but it mirrors that of America and most of the world. And it has begat problems—and thus government, and thence politics—right from the start.

Once silver was demonetized and the Roaring Fork Valley was released from the thrall and the boom times of the silver barons, it muddled along through the inevitable daily acrimonies that attend all small towns until its rebirth as an international resort and cultural destination after Word War II. Then those petty squabbles became enlarged and were accompanied by a whole host of new ones, often surfacing in Aspen before they were seen anywhere else.

Land-use and zoning issues, always arcane, were given new and torturous life by resorts, by exploding growth, by greed and angst and new problems fashioned by new industries. Conflicts have arisen between the environment and land development, between tourism and ranching, between mining and real estate, between recreation and private property.

Some of them distilled down to rewrites of the same old class struggles. Others were new territory, where Aspen was breaking trail on issues such as guaranteeing historic public access to places like the Hunter Creek Valley that were threatened by private home building, the veiled extortion of ski areas by mineral-rights holders proposing mining on their slopes if they didn’t get paid off, and attempts to preserve open space and environmental integrity by limiting density and home sizes.

By the late 1960s, what had come before in the way of local politics was being swept up in a worldwide cultural and generational maelstrom that would transform everything. Reflecting Aspen’s tendency to be on the leading edge, this revolutionary turmoil struck suddenly in Pitkin County.

In many ways, it culminated with the “Hippie Trials” (read the story here) and Aspen lawyer Joe Edwards’s campaign for mayor in 1969. He lost by only six votes in what was a watershed moment in local politics that marked the emergence of a whole new political force in the valley, one in which famous local author and political junkie Hunter S. Thompson played a large role. After strongly backing Edwards, Thompson ran for sheriff in 1970 on the Freak Power ticket, attracting international attention for a platform that included promises to legalize soft drugs and tear up the streets and plant them with sod.

“The elections here really were more non-partisan before Hunter came along,” says Linda McCausland, who has been a significant political player in the valley for years with the Republican Party (though she stresses that her views are her own and not necessarily the party’s.) “He figured out how to do what he wanted by using the Democratic Party. He really was very smart about that. If it hadn’t been him, it would probably have been someone else. But now his disciples are still influential, so I think that was a very significant time in local politics.”

Hunter lost the election but, combined with the Edwards near-miss in Aspen, it paved the way for important victories to come. Edwards and law partner Dwight Shellman were elected as county commissioners and soon joined by Michael Kinsley in an activist troika that rewrote the zoning laws of Pitkin County to help control growth.

“In the Roaring Fork Valley, we’ve seen a good continuum onward from Edwards, Shellman and Kinsley, who put the environment ahead of profits,” says Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a major participant in much of the valley’s liberal politics since the mid-1970s. “If we didn’t have growth controls that were created back then, it would look like a strip mall here now, like the Eagle-Vail corridor.”

Another focal point for the new politics was the sheriff’s office. “I definitely think one of the big events in Pitkin County was when Dick Kienast was elected sheriff in 1976,” says Braudis. “That took us from the Neanderthal era into the modern community-based era of policing. Prior to then, it was pretty much all rednecks and crackers. Dick took advantage of the fact that the sheriff is an elective office, where police chief is not. And he struck when the electorate was ready for intelligent cops.”

Because of Aspen’s strong commitment to the arts, its electorate was increasingly peopled by creative, progressive residents who supported civil liberties, protecting the environment, limiting development and freedom of expression. The latter was important because it included the widespread use of drugs, which was generating heated legal issues nationwide. Kienast, and later Braudis, both gave low priority to prosecuting people for soft drug use, a stance that some locals felt only magnified Aspen’s reputation as a haven for “dirt, dope and dogs,” as one magazine put it.

Kienast and Braudis redefined the role of small-town sheriffs in upscale resort communities. By the time Kienast was elected, Aspen was no Mayberry, and being the Pitkin County sheriff was no Andy Griffith show. It has involved major mountain rescue operations, high-profile trials, tracking escaped serial killers, the messy deaths of celebrities such as Spider Sabich, Michael Kennedy and Ken Lay, and complicated land-use disputes that have consumed a surprising amount of county law enforcement’s time.