Looking back on the local civic initiative “Dream City: Vision 2020,” the title and intent seem so stilted, so full of blind hubris. In 2008, we were going to vision our way to a better future and shape the greater Colorado Springs area into our dream of a city. We were projecting over a decade ahead to what 2020 would look like. 2020!

Even with more than 3,000 residents engaged in the process, we clearly lacked any Nostradomus. Nobody saw how a pandemic might disrupt our city and our lives. Nobody saw this particular dumpster fire.

Still, but for that one blind spot, “Dream City” and other similar projects at the time might have provided some propellant toward getting a stagnant city moving again.

I’m admittedly biased. I helped launch the thing. I had seen how civic initiatives had enabled cities as diverse as Dubuque, Iowa, and Portsmouth, NH, to get traction and move forward with visionary ideas. I was The Gazette’s entertainment editor at the time, and I thought that having a newspaper at the center of that kind of visioning process could give more citizens a seat at the table. This could be a real grassroots, bottom-up deal. I joined with Amanda Mountain in Gazette Charities, and we partnered with some of the major cultural organizations in the region:

• The Pikes Peak Library District, which brought in a series of speakers about civic engagement and displayed the art renderings that local architects produced.

• The Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR), which engaged artists, musicians, actors, dancers, architects and arts advocates with a series of Dream City Arts Summits.

• Leadership Pikes Peak, which, with help from the national organization Everyday Democracy, helped create the structure for small group discussions and the distillation of thousands of ideas into coherent vision statements.

The Gazette, meanwhile, served as an outreach tool, encouraging every sector of the community to get involved. We ran more than a dozen guest columns from community leaders and others on their visions for 2020, and we regularly recruited citizens to get involved.

Susan Saksa, who was the executive director of Leadership Pikes Peak, found inspiration in those efforts. “We had a call out for facilitators and 100 people responded and showed up to be trained,” said Saksa, now a nonprofit consultant. “I was blown away. One hundred people, and they were all really engaged and really good.”

Those facilitators ran more than 300 brainstorming sessions with business leaders, non profit organizations, groups of disabled citizens, city and county officials, school groups, and others.

Some of the ideas they generated were general, about smoother traffic flow through the city or a more vital economy. Others were specific, such as building an outdoor amphitheater on the scar on the mountain or wheelchair accessible trails.

The ideas generated were then filed into 10 specific categories, corresponding with the work the Pikes Peak United Way was doing on Quality of Life Indicators. They included the economy, social well being, transportation, health care, the arts, culture and recreation, the natural environment, the built/planned environment, community engagement, public safety and education.

Experts in each area then worked with those ideas, compiling them into a series of vision statements, which were presented to city council, county commission and about 200 citizens who attended a “Dream City Summit.”

I was feeling pretty good about that work until I ran into one of the facilitators last year.

“What ever happened to Dream City, anyway?” she asked. “We did all that work and then … nothing.” It was a gut punch, and it made me wonder. Was it all talk?

Certainly, engaging that many people in visioning and never actually getting them to work on an action plan understandably left some feeling like it was a waste of time. I have to admit, that was the weakness of Dream City. It was intended as a grassroots visioning exercise, and the action plans would be up to the community.

Sam Gappmayer, then president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, got it.

“I think Dream City is one of those 30,000-foot kind of things that brings people together,” he said. “People coalesce around the dream or vision and we all go separate ways. We do our work and it propels the community forward in a number of ways.”

Architectural designer Stella Hodgkins recalls “Dream City” as an inspiring experience.

“It was an incredible experience, allowing us to harness the community’s thoughts and desires for our future,” she said. “Our local architects and planners beautifully translated the vision statements into visuals that allowed citizens a peek into what our built environment could look like in the future.”

Susan Edmondson, who was involved in Dream City when she ran the Bee Vradenburg Foundation, is now CEO and president of the Downtown Partnership, where she’s helped turn many of those visions into tangible community assets. Among them: more vital businesses and more residential space downtown.

“I do think this (“Dream City”) one was more creative initiatives at the time, involving more creative thinkers, and it came up with hopeful and visionary ideas,” she said. “And it’s kind of amazing to look back on it and many of those bold things are coming true.” Among them: dynamic gateway signage into downtown, the redevelopment of the Ivywild School into a mixed-use community marketplace, an expansion of healthcare institutions and a downtown arts bus.

Debra Thornton, executive director of the Imagination Celebration, said “Dream City” inspired her to create the What If Festival, a massive family celebration of art and innovation.

At a moment when I found myself wondering about the value of “Dream City,” author Peter Block set me straight. He had just written the great book, “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” and the library district had brought him in to talk to “Dream City” participants about the power of civic discussion.

Block told me not to worry so much about the vision statements and possible outcomes I’d been obsessing over.

“If you look at what Pittsburgh comes up with its visions, it’ll look a lot like yours,” he said.

He said people generally want the same things of their cities: safe walkable streets, clean water, strong neighborhoods, thriving small businesses.

“But the strength of these things isn’t the actual visions,” he said. “It’s the process itself. It’s getting people to sit at a table next to people they’d never sit next to and working on something as important as the community’s future. It’s those connections, many you’ll never see, that build community.” Connections. Well, I certainly made many during that process. One was with folks at the United Way, and if there was a single baton passed from “Dream City,” they’re the ones running with it.

From the outset, we had chosen community categories of “Dream City” to align with United Way’s Quality of Life Indicators. That way, there would be a way to keep track of how we’re doing in each area.

“Having a mechanism that can get into weeds about how we’re doing with things like transportation, economy, healthcare is a great way to see how that visioning matches with reality,” said Cindy Aubrey, president of CEO of the United Way. “We hope to have new reports – which we’ve changed from Quality of Life Indicators to Peak Progress – released in phases over the coming months. We expect it to show our strengths, weaknesses and point to ways to make a great community into something extraordinary for all our residents.”

Feels like our visions are in good hands.

Warren Epstein is Executive Director for Marketing and Communication at Pikes Peak Community College.

“I don’t believe even the most visionary among us could have foreseen what has transpired since we emerged from the great recession. We’ve added 40,000 high paying jobs since 2015, most in high demand areas such as software engineering and cybersecurity. That in turn has caused us to have the fastest growing millennial population in the country.

“Downtown has undergone a dramatic transformation, including the Olympic Museum, Weidner Stadium, Robson Arena and several new hotels and hundreds of new residential units. The new Summit House on Pikes Peak and reconstructed Cog Railroad will also enhance tourism.

“Thanks to citizen buy-in we’ve overcome a billion dollar public infrastructure deficit in five years. Our roads and storm water system have improved dramatically. Our healthcare infrastructure has improved tremendously, and now includes a Children’s Hospital. The airport has grown general aviation and the business park and we’re on the cusp of significant expansion of commercial air service.

“We’re adding affordable housing at a record rate and our management of homelessness is as good as any large city in the country. For five years now we’ve been listed in US News and World report among the 5 Best Places to Live in America and for two years in a row we’ve been their Most Desirable City in America.

“By the way, when COVID is behind us, I’m confident Colorado Springs will be statistically shown to be the most economically resilient large city in the country. Already 93.5% of those laid off in March and April have been reemployed, much higher than Denver. Our unemployment rate is now significantly lower than the statewide rate.”

Warren Epstein

Courtesy of Warren Epstein