The Aspen City Council is going into its second calendar year since the March 2025 election shook up its makeup, and it has a long list of big- and small-ticket items to tackle in 2026.
While each council member has individual goals to start tackling things like water conservation or wildfire resiliency, the council is continuing to focus on some of the city’s biggest and most costly projects yet.
They call them “the big three:” The Armory Hall redevelopment project, the Lumberyard affordable housing development, and the entrance to Aspen. Those major infrastructure projects are the only ones listed as priority projects in the council’s 2025-2027 goals, which were formally set after a retreat last spring, and the council is hoping to keep the momentum going on those projects that have each been years in the making.
“Obviously, the wheels have started to turn with the three big projects, the Armory, the entrance and the Lumberyard,” Councilman John Doyle said. “I think we need to continue to focus on them, but like I said, they’re already in motion.”
Last year, the city council made significant strides on the three projects. Council members approved a contract with a developer for the Lumberyard, which is the city’s largest-ever single affordable housing development. They formally approved the land use review to redevelop the Armory into a food hall and community gathering space, and they directed city staff to move forward with a reevaluation of the entrance to Aspen.
But there are still steps to take on all three of those projects, which the city council will review throughout the beginning of 2026. It includes selecting a master lease operator for the Armory (a request for proposals for an operator closed late last year), determining an employer priority program for some units at the Lumberyard and conducting public engagement for the entrance to Aspen, efforts for which have been delayed slightly because of the October federal government shutdown.
Construction on both the Armory and Lumberyard are scheduled to begin later this year.
“I think that we want to see through and kind of carry on a lot of the priorities which we set, which were all infrastructure related, the Lumberyard, the Armory, reevaluating the entrance to Aspen, making sure those all continue to move forward expeditiously,” Councilwoman Christine Benedetti said.
City council also set goals outside of the three priority projects. Those include enhancing and optimizing early childhood education, improving resource and infrastructure resilience and improving traffic flow and congestion.
Several council members sat on the Transportation Coalition for the 21st Century, which gathered monthly last year to discuss valley-wide solutions to ease congestion on Highway 82. Mayor Rachel Richards was vocal during her campaign last year about wanting to increase collaboration with governments throughout the valley. Now in office, she said she wants the council to continue tackling congestion with other partners in the valley.
“At a certain level, our problem is a sheer volume problem; it’s not just the commuters, it’s not just the locals, it’s not just the school drop off, it’s an integration,” Richards said. “I think there needs to be a lot of work done with our community and the valley community to answer questions like, ‘Is congestion bothering you too? Is that something you take seriously enough to start doing transportation demand management measures in, say, Basalt?’”
Council members also pointed to the lack of snow, and what that might mean for wildfire risk in the summer, as something they want to focus on in the next few months.
They discussed wanting to improve water storage in the city and incentives for residents who use less water during dry periods.
“This winter, I think this is going to be a huge wake-up call for everybody in the western U.S.,” Doyle said. “In my 45 years of living here, this is the driest, warmest early season I’ve ever seen. … I think we need to move forward on water storage, and trying to make transit better because as the planet continues to warm, we’re going to see more people moving here to escape hotter temperatures elsewhere.”
“We’re going to need better water storage to serve more people,” he added. “We’re also going to need to work on better water conservation measures. Our biggest water use is watering lawns in the summertime, so is there a way we can address that and maybe convince people to change their landscape.”
Councilman Sam Rose said he wants city council to continue establishing wildfire resiliency policies in the city to avoid detrimental impacts to the city’s infrastructure.
“Can Aspen be a community that hopefully … can be more wildfire resilient moving forward so that, instead of worrying about evacuation — which we always should know about — we have a community to come back to,” Rose said. “Those sort of things like hardening the infrastructure and creating boundaries so that we can capture wildfires quickly after they start to make sure they don’t just become catastrophic events like we’ve seen in other communities.”
But the council also doesn’t want to take on too much.
Benedetti said one of the collective goals that came out of last year’s retreat was to focus on maintaining a high level of service quality from the city.
“We have a lot in the pipeline, and there’s also just so much that staff can handle at one time and still maintain a really high level of quality,” Benedetti said. “I think that council is aware of not overburdening staff with too many kind of additional side projects at this point, and make sure the ones that we have that are huge are being done.”
As leader of the city council, Richards said she also wants to continue maintaining positive relationships among council members and continue working efficiently as they have in the last year.
Each council member told the Aspen Daily News that the current makeup at the council table felt productive. Councilman Bill Guth could not be reached by time of publication. While council members don’t agree on every issue, Richards wants to make sure they can continue moving forward on issues facing Aspenites while still respecting one another’s opinions.
“I’d like to improve my skillsets as we go forward, continuing on coalescing around answers we all can support and activities to move things forward,” Richards said. “And, you know, just the council’s respect for each other and that each of us contributes differently in our own way. We’re all different people, but we come together as one in terms of what we can do for our community.”