Articles written by Marty Durlin

MARTY DURLIN, Writers on the Range|Jan 14, 2022

For the past year and a half, I’ve been reporting weekly on municipal government in three rural Western Colorado towns. Delta is the largest, at just under 10,000 people. Paonia has a population of 1,500 and Crawford only 400. For all three, the closest big city is Grand Junction, from 40 to 70 miles away. When I first covered local government decades ago, I saw town councils as an opportunity for grandstanding but little else. The position of mayor didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. But I’ve come to understand that the job of a counc...