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Tim Waters will serve his last few minutes as a Longmont City council member tonight before Diane Crist is sworn in. In an interview with the Longmont Leader, he reflected on his tenure as a council member.
Waters was elected as the Ward I representative in 2018 in a special election. He was reelected in 2019. In 2021, he ran against Joan Peck for mayor and was unsuccessful. In June, he announced that he would not seek reelection.
“I learned early in this experience that the most important that I could do as a city council member isn’t what you do on Tuesday nights, it’s what you do the other six days,” Waters said.
In 2018, conversations about gun violence and gun control broke out throughout Colorado. Waters and others organized a “Safety and Respect Cafe” at the Longmont Museum. Waters said the purpose was to bring the residents of Longmont together to listen and learn from people on all sides of the issue in hopes of bringing the community together.
Because of his position on the council, Waters has been able to connect with other groups that share similar interests such as the Early Childhood Alliance. He volunteers his personal time to these organizations to make a difference in these areas.
“I don’t sit there with a city council hat on, it’s a volunteer hat on but the platform is created by your status as a council member,” he said. “That kind of work I can do whether I am a council member or not.”
Waters was activated by the 2016 election to become more politically involved. He initially thought he would simply help others in their campaigns. He soon found himself as the treasurer for Marcia Martin’s campaign and soon after a candidate for the special election.
When he began he was excited to be part of a group that seemed to share the same political ideology.
“It didn’t take me long to realize that ideology is the problem and not the way to resolve city-related problems. There is no ideological approach. It’s simply practical. At the municipal level, the problems are really straightforward; somebody has needs and how do you allocate resources and what is the policy environment you are going to create to respond to them,” Waters said.
After realizing this, Waters focused on “building bridges” within the community and approaching problems through the lens of what was “greatest good for the largest number” and then asking himself what that impact would have on marginalized communities.
“I feel pretty good or satisfied with that effort. I reached out and connected with folks in ways that I had not imagined I would be able to connect over views or problems to share and there are ways to share it that are not ideological,” he said.
By keeping an open mind, Waters was able to change his mind on developers. He said he was coached to view them all in the same way, as greedy people who were only out for themselves. However, he learned that some developers were genuinely interested in helping the city meet its goals.
“I feel good about who is working in Longmont and what they are working on in Longmont because they have listened to what we need, they’ve done their best to respond and I think they appreciate being heard,” Waters said.
Waters is proud of the work that the city council began in 2018 and continued on Nov. 28 with the inclusionary housing ordinance.
“I thought it was creative and it probably isn’t the end of the story, but it is an important chapter in the story,” he said.
He is also proud of council’s work on economic development and the envisioning process that branded the area east of Main Street along the river corridor as the STEAM area. He feels really good that the city now has a dedicated budget line that acknowledges how critical child care is.
Waters said he wished he had been able to contribute more to housing the unhoused in Longmont. When he began as a council member he had no idea how long a good idea takes to go from an idea to something that is implemented. He learned that every idea requires the bureaucracy to establish a new set of conditions around those ideas.
“Things just take much longer as the bureaucracy grinds on … There are times when you’d like it to be more flexible or timely,” he said.
Waters said that he has enjoyed getting to know the people of Longmont, from the staff at the city, the connections throughout the community and others whose paths he would not have crossed had he not held the city council seat most of all.
He hopes that future council members approach their tenures intending to “do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, that elected officials at this level set ideologies and political biases aside — at least to the degree that you can — because I do not think that serves anybody.”
Waters plans to continue his work with the Longmont Rotary Club and the Early Childhood Alliance. He plans to continue working with the county on policies to change early childhood education.
“I keep looking for a hill to die on so I keep planting flags and I won’t stop,” Waters said.
