Imagine a small town of 1,600 just far enough away from a neighboring resort area to have been buffered from serious growth pressure over the years. Imagine the resort area becoming so expensive that the people who work there can’t afford to live there any more. Now imagine the small town suddenly facing a 2,000-unit subdivision proposal designed to accommodate those resort-area refugees.

Welcome to the recent reality of Hayden, Colorado, a small Yampa Valley ranching community thirty miles west of Steamboat Springs that faced down the threat of overnight, unplanned growth with effective tools, good process and great leadership. Out of potential crisis, Hayden’s residents spun opportunity, launching an ambitious public process to address not just the subdivision proposal, but the community’s vision of its future.

With a generous grant from the Gates Family Foundation and in partnership with the Orton Family Foundation, Hayden first brought in the planning firms, Winston Associates and Donley & Associates, to apply CommunityViz visualization and decision-support software to assess the economic costs and benefits of adding 2,000 residential units to the town. The results clearly showed that the proposal would create unacceptably high infrastructure costs for the town and the developer promptly withdrew the application.

Capitalizing on this momentum, Hayden set about producing a Community Video to help expose and articulate the community’s heart and soul, defining the special attributes that make Hayden uniquely Hayden. The video featured interviews with 60 residents and enjoyed a gala town premier. Out of the video and a set of targeted public meetings a blueprint for growth emerged. The town brought CommunityViz back, this time to help residents visualize multiple growth scenarios, analyze associated costs and settle on a scenario that best reflects the town’s core values. A community website, yampavalley.info, helped turn out 120 residents for a summit meeting in late November of 2004 where participants viewed CommunityViz scenarios and used keypad polling technology to vote on preferred approaches to growth. The success of this process led to the adoption in April 2005 of an extensively revised and forward-looking Comprehensive Plan and more recently the adoption of revised zoning regulations.

On one level, Hayden’s is a story of how planning tools and technologies can help change the way decisions are made. At bottom, however, it’s a story about passionate people and committed innovators: a new mayor with a vision, a planning commission committed to Hayden’s long-term interests, a local project coordinator who worked tirelessly to boost public attendance and improve the level of discourse, and town residents who courageously charted the town’s future growth. Thanks to good people, good tools and good process, Hayden is now well-positioned to safeguard its values and steer change for the better.