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With an influx of new residents who have found refuge in Aspen from more populated parts of the country during the pandemic comes more pressures on city services, so elected officials this month agreed to a new complaint system for neighborhood traffic issues.
“We are receiving more one-off requests for traffic calming, and the views of what traffic calming is varies a lot by neighborhood,” said City Manager Sara Ott during an Aspen City Council meeting Feb. 1
. “For some it’s speed humps, for some it’s stop signs, for some it’s street narrowing, for others it’s curb, but what we’ve noticed is we’ve had a change in the number of folks staying here longer, including the high season clearly as a result of the pandemic and some of these folks come with requests for things they might be used to having in other environments.”
Local governing bodies collectively spent 60 hours behind closed doors in 2020 discussing matters concerning the public.
An annual review of executive sessions conducted by Aspen City Council, Snowmass Village Town Council and the Board of Pitkin County Commissioners shows that combined, they held 36 closed-door meetings last year.
The commissioners held the most meetings, with 20, followed by Aspen City Council Town Council with six.
For commissioners and Aspen elected officials, they held fewer executive sessions in 2020 than in previous years.
County Attorney John Ely said typically the commissioners meet out of the public’s view at least 24 times, or twice a month, in a year.
This is that time of the year when the media reflects on the past 51 or 52 weeks through various presentations top 10 stories of the year, top news makers of the year, the biggest surprises of the year, the biggest disappointments, and so on.
Yet in 2020, there’s little disputing presidential election and social-justice causes not withstanding that the pandemic had the greatest impact on our daily lives than anything else.
People lost jobs. People struggled financially, socially and personally. People got sick. Businesses shuttered and failed. Schools closed. Ski areas closed. Events and festivals were canceled.
But life forged on and people came together.
A man walks by planters near the information kiosk in downtown Aspen separating the road from the pedestrian mall on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. (Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times)
The city of Aspen has placed planters at key locations in the downtown area where vehicle-pedestrian conflicts could occur, and hopefully prevent accidents like the one that happened last Christmas Eve in which a woman was hit by a car on the Cooper Avenue Mall.
The planters are not meant to be actual barriers to stop a vehicle but to give people a sense that there is a difference between the roadway and the pedestrian mall, City Manager Sara Ott said.