Wade Troxell to run for Fort Collins mayor
FORT COLLINS – Two-term Fort Collins City Councilman Wade Troxell has announced his candidacy for mayor in the April 7 municipal election.
Troxell, 59, was elected to the City Council in 2007 and re-elected in 2011. He is a cofounder and member of both the Colorado Clean Energy Cluster and the Colorado Water Innovation Cluster.
Current Fort Collins Mayor Karen Weitkunat announced last month that she would not seek re-election when city voters go to the polls in April. The only other announced candidate for mayor is Ward Luthi, who is founder and president of Fort Collins-based Walking the World, a company that offers global hiking tours..
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Troxell’s business experience includes co-founding Sixth Dimension, a provider of smart-grid distributed-energy resources for utilities. As president and chief operating officer, he led the early-stage company through three rounds of venture financing before it was acquired by Comverge in 2003.
In a press release sent Tuesday morning, Troxell pledged to foster teamwork to solve divisive issues facing the city. “Collaboration and public-private partnerships will make Fort Collins a better place,” he said. “Narrow ideology without facing real issues won’t help us move forward toward a vibrant future for all in our community.”
Perhaps the most divisive of those issues is Colorado State University’s plan to build a $220 million, 36,000-seat football stadium in the heart of the city to replace aging Hughes Stadium, three miles west of campus. As a land-grant university, CSU did not need or seek city approval to build the stadium, and its president, Tony Frank, would not enter into an intergovernmental agreement with the city until after its board of governors had approved the project. The plan has sharply divided both the campus and the city. The Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce supports the project, but the stadium’s neighbors are concerned about traffic and declining property values. Some residents are also concerned about being left with paying much of the tab for off-campus infrastructure related to the stadium.
Although Troxell captained CSU’s football team as a student and has been a member of its mechanical-engineering faculty since 1985, he was sharply critical of the process the school and its governors took to approve the stadium, a sequence of events that, in a Dec. 12 interview with BizWest, he characterized as “Fire, aim, and now they’re ready.”
Troxell has served on a City-CSU Leadership Committee along with two other City Council members and Joseph Zimlich, the treasurer of CSU’s Board of Governors, the only member of that board who lives in Fort Collins and who voted against the $242 million stadium financing plan last week. The Leadership Committee has dealt with such issues as transportation and student housing needs, Troxell said.
“I’ve always been committed to what the city can do to minimize the impacts on our community,” Troxell said in an interview with BizWest following the announcement of his candidacy on Tuesday. “As mayor, I would hold CSU and Dr. Frank accountable for what this project would mean to transportation, utilities and neighborhoods – especially the historic Sheely neighborhood, which would be affected most. I want to make sure the city is kept whole.”
Troxell reiterated that the city can have leverage despite CSU’s autonomous status.
“As mayor, I’d get to speak with the governor regularly, and the governor appoints the (CSU) Board of Governors,” Troxell said. “I know there’s a statewide mission for CSU, but concerns of the city can’t be ignored. Since the chancellor system moved its office to Denver, I think it has become detached from its flagship and somewhat blind to our community.”
Troxell recalled a quote from former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y.: “If you want to see a great city, start a university and wait 200 years.” It’s been 145 years so far, Troxell said, and “I’m in this for the long haul.”
On other issues, Troxell said he supports renewal of the quarter-cent sales tax for capital improvements – the “Building on Basics” list that has become popularly known as “BOB 2.0” and which awaits voter approval in April. “I’ve been very supportive of BOB since we started it as ‘Designing Tomorrow Today.’ We can directly see the benefits to Fort Collins,” he said. “There’s a lot of great things we can look back on, like the Lincoln Center, and a lot we can look forward to that will benefit the city in the long term, like restoration of the Poudre River, the whitewater park, the community center and the ‘Safe Streets’ project.”
If elected in April, it would not be Troxell’s first stint as mayor. His father, Harry Troxell Jr., served on the City Council from 1965 to 1971, and Wade, as a 14-year-old already deeply involved with civic affairs, was named “Mayor For a Day” by then-Mayor Karl Carson.
FORT COLLINS – Two-term Fort Collins City Councilman Wade Troxell has announced his candidacy for mayor in the April 7 municipal election.
Troxell, 59, was elected to the City Council in 2007 and re-elected in 2011. He is a cofounder and member of both the Colorado Clean Energy Cluster and the Colorado Water Innovation Cluster.
Current Fort Collins Mayor Karen Weitkunat announced last month that she would not seek re-election when city voters go to the polls in April. The only other announced candidate for mayor is Ward Luthi, who is founder and president of Fort Collins-based Walking the World, a company…
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