Editor’s note: At his request, Dan Maloit’s answers were collected during an in-person interview. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Relevant experience
For serving in public office, the same as everybody else in the sense that I live in the community, have practical experience from having been a father, being in business, both management and sales, and then having seen a little bit about how politics works in the state. (Maloit ran for Colorado State Board of Education in 2022.) I’ve experienced buying a house, renting.
Beyond that, when I was in the service up in Iraq and Afghanistan, I worked on large diplomatic projects.
Priorities
- Plowing residential streets
- Improved community events
- Cutting wasteful spending in the town budget
My priorities are things that make people proud to be from Erie, things that impact our lives every day, that we can touch, see and feel and actually get some benefit out of and making sure that our town is respectful of the resources that it has.
How many people are working two or three jobs? They have a hard time to live in Erie to begin with, and if they do, they’re probably working an entry-level job, and they’re doing DoorDash at night, and they’re probably living with three or four roommates, and we collect taxes from them, and we’re gonna waste it? That’s not okay.
Lightning round
Do you support Erie joining RTD? No
Do you support allowing recreational marijuana sales in Erie? No
Do you support more diversity of housing in Erie (townhomes, apartments, efficiency units, etc.)? Yes, but not with government mandates or intervention
Do you support the development of the Draco Pad? Erie does not have any control over the development of oil and gas
Do you support local efforts to increase the minimum wage? No
Do you support an end to the state prohibition on rent control? No
Do you support government interventions for human-caused climate change? No
Do you support for SB24-157 which narrowed the definition of what constitutes a public meeting? No
When was the last time you paid rent? How much was it? And where?
Summer of 2017. I don’t want to discuss specific numbers.
Long-form questions
What would you say are the top three issues facing Erie, and what are your plans to address them?
- Growth and development
- Erie’s shifting identity
- Quality of life
Growth and development
Are we going to increase the retail infrastructure to support the town? Are we going to increase and expand our physical infrastructure to move in and out of town? Okay? Are we going to be a bedroom town? Are we going to be a town where you live and do business? And I think that’s a question we need to work on answering.
Shifting identity
Erie has an identity that it had prior to 20 years ago. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen people were coming to Erie, becoming part of Erie. Right now there’s this question of, are we going to become Boulder? Are we going to become something different?
I’d like to see Erie maintain some sort of unique identity that focuses on the town. So I think the Home Rule is actually good for that, because it allows us a lot of freedom to create and maintain that identity. Not, ‘Hey, we’re never going to change.’ Not, ‘We want to be something that we just moved away from.’
Quality of life
We have to reduce the impediments to increasing certain quality of life issues. A great example, I think, is the cell phone signal in this town. So many Coloradans, so many people today don’t even have a landline. How do you call 911?
There’s certain parts of my house. If you stand there, you’re fine. But I will lose signal 15 feet up my driveway. We need to fix that. There’s a mixture of NIMBYism, you know, ‘I want a cell phone tower, but now where I can see it,’ and onerous regulation that prevents anybody from actually setting up different different types of solutions.
Same thing with snow plowing, same thing with looking at different solutions for parking, getting people downtown, making it available for more business, so people can get it in town.
What are your perspectives on the planned growth? What mechanisms would you use to handle growth responsibly?
I think it’s a balance. I think that there’s no one answer, but the growth has been happening. It’s going to keep happening. But how do we do it in a controlled manner so that we support the people as they come in, so they don’t regret it two, three years later? ‘Hey, it was great. It was an easy drive and a great view, and now I have four buildings that block my view, and now my house just went down in value, and I can’t get in and out to work. Okay, now we have buyer’s remorse.’
It’s the growth in relation to the infrastructure we have. Our roads are too tight, so it’s hard to get in and out of Erie — it shouldn’t take as long as it does.
We still don’t have a real grocery store where the main part of Erie is. We’ve got Safeway and King Soopers, but they’re right on the edge of town. They’re not here where everybody is. And that’s something that needs to be looked at.
We need to slow it down, figure out what’s next, make sure that we’re not just rushing through it because we’re on autopilot. Let’s figure out what the impact is. Can our roads handle it? Do we have the infrastructure so people actually do business here? If we don’t do business here, we’re not collecting tax revenue on the retail space, then how are we going to build the infrastructure to support the new residents to keep them here?
Do you believe there is a need for more government-subsidized affordable housing in Erie? If so, what is your plan to make it happen? If not, why not?
I don’t think that it’s the town’s place to subsidize one type of housing or the other or to make illegal one or the other. If apartments are what’s driving the market, we need it. I’m not trying to be that free market evangelist, but if we know that we’re getting too many standalone housing or we have put an apartment building
We should have systems in place to help that person and subsidize if they need help with their housing, versus we’re going to intentionally lower the price of housing, which ends up long term, being absorbed by or still not actually impacting the price long term.
Given the realities of a changing climate and limited government resources, how do you plan on balancing mitigation and adaptation for already-impacted populations in Erie?
Some of the mitigation is making sure that we understand what the threats are, making sure our regulations actually match what’s happening locally. We can impact certain things, but we can’t impact the total CO2 two going into the atmosphere with a small town like Erie.
Should we be having regulations around homes being very energy efficient? Probably. Do some of them go overboard? Probably.
As a town council member, what tools at your disposal would you use to protect residents from the impact of existing and future oil and gas operations?
What is the impact that we’re worried about? Is it, you know, the burnoff valves like we can see just to the right of that house? Okay, what’s the impact of that? Is it actually having an impact, especially in relation to the fact it’s right next to the landfill? Is this a resource, or is this a
an obstacle that we have to just tolerate and deal with? Are we talking about the impact to the economy of not having it here? Are we talking the potential impact of drilling down and disturbing the subterranean environment? Where are those regulations kept?
Drilling regulations are not kept in the town. We’re really just talking about are we going to NIMBY it, or are we going to put certain things in place, like, ‘Hey, we have to accept this is going to happen, so we can’t stop it, because there are state and federal laws that are superseded.’ So are we just going to put in a law that’s going to get overturned after 10 years of wasting taxpayer money on a lawsuit that ultimately fails? That seems foolish.
We’ve had noise ordinances. We have, you know, waste ordinances: When you’re done at a site, you have to clean it up. I think that’s where we have to look to minimize the impact, but still again, minimizing the impact of, are we wasting money on things that are foolish and ultimately lead to nothing.
What efforts do you make in your daily life to consider and understand people with different lived experiences from your own?
First off, experiences are lived. We’re adding too many words.
I think that I bring a pretty unique set of experiences to this race, in that I’ve worked with Jordanians and Saudis and Afghans, Afghans of different tribes, different sects of Iraqis, both Shia and Sunni, tribal in the countryside, tribal in the cities, cosmopolitan Iraqis and Baghdad versus small farms way up in the north. And I think that that’s such a unique experience.
Most people aren’t going to just say something for no reason or just lie. So why are they saying that? Why do they believe what they’re saying? How can I understand that? And now we seek to understand both through active, reflective listening like, ‘Okay, I hear you’re saying this. If I had the same set of knowledge that you did, I’d probably say the same thing.’ And now let’s try to exchange our knowledge so that you see where I’m coming from, and I can give you the facts that I think would change my opinion in your shoes, and you tell me what I’m missing.
I think that that’s the way that I go through it.
When’s the last time you changed your mind about something, and what was it?
The student debt crisis. About four years ago, I heard an interview from a younger person, and she was talking to a mathematician. The mathematician’s view is the age of a person holding a position has gone up faster than time has elapsed, because baby boomers aren’t leaving these roles, which means that Gen X and older millennials are sort of sitting stagnant in these mid-management roles.
And that means that you’ve got younger millennials and Gen Z coming in, in roles that they can’t go anywhere. They’re stuck there, and prices have gone up because housing is unaffordable, and then they’re given these degrees where the price has gone out of control, but the degree is not giving them anything useful?
So if you asked me, 10 years ago, ‘Do you support some sort of changes to the student debt crisis?’ I would have said, ‘You took the loan, you deal with it.’ I still don’t think it’s the government’s job to pay it off, but I think that there’s ways to put mechanisms in place to incentivize the cost of college to come down.
What question would you ask a fellow candidate on the ballot?
How do they view elected office? Because to me, it’s not there for your own ego or advancement.