By Lindy Browning | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Independent-minded, solution-oriented, and practical pragmatism is what Ben Van Dyke says is missing on the current Grand Junction City Council.
He intends to change all that, for the residents and businesspeople in Grand Junction, if he is elected to City Council in April.
“I never thought that I would run for any political office, it was never something I had thought about until the disastrous way the Council handled the unhoused in our community, and then watched as they created another disaster with 4th and 5th Streets,” Van Dyke said.
Van Dyke is a fourth-generation resident of Grand Junction, and his roots run deep in the Grand Valley.
He is a father, husband and business owner. Since the late 1960s, his family has served the Grand Junction community through their local Van’s Car Wash locations. This legacy of service has shaped Ben’s values and commitment to fostering a vibrant, thriving city for future generations, he says.
Through his decades of community involvement and business experience, he has seen the challenges and has a vision for future opportunities in Grand Junction. With his family’s business located in the heart of downtown, he has had a front row seat to what he says are mistakes made under the current Council’s majority.
“I am running because the local community isn’t being heard or prioritized over small minority special interests,” Van Dyke said. “I want to be that bridge between the local community needs and the Council. I will stand for the local businesses and residents.
He continued, “Some members of the current Council are focused on prioritizing the agenda of special interests and a lot of people are not feeling like they are being heard.”
Solutions to housing
When asked to name his top priorities, should he be elected, affordable and adequate housing supply was in his top 5. Van Dyke says he believes suppressing affordable and adequate numbers of housing units, in large part, are excessive fees charged to builders, an over lengthy process for permitting and over regulation from both the state and the city.
“We have to streamline the process for builders across the board. We have to reduce the regulatory burden to make the cost of building, what we as a community need, more affordable housing,” he said.
Van Dyke notes a belief that being over focused on “affordable housing” is not addressing the overall issue in the community.
In some circles, “affordable housing” is a pseudonym for high-density housing.
“I don’t think 15-minute cities are what the majority of the community wants,” he said.
Van Dyke is hopeful the multiple apartment buildings that have been built around the city will start easing the cost of rents, but that people also want single-family homes. He believes that by streamlining the process and reducing the timeframes, all housing needs in the community can be better met.
Permanent solutions for the homeless
Van Dyke has been involved and outspoken on errors he says the current Council made while making policy for the nearly 2,300 homeless people in Grand Junction.
The whole issue began when the current City Council closed Whitman Park and gave nearly $1 million to the Resource Center to put in a pop-up tent as a “temporary” measure on the corner of Ute and 2nd Street.
It didn’t take long for the public to begin to see that the center was quickly becoming a place where crime, public safety issues, open-air drug use and sales, and human waste crept into the surrounding area and began to negatively impact residents and businesses in the area.
“They spent a million dollars to put the Center there, now they are going to have to spend more money to move those services somewhere else. The council paid for that whole facility and then signed it over to the Center. That money could have gone to a permanent solution,” he said.
“I would like to take a more thoughtful approach to solving this problem. I would like to work on a solution that provides people a path to self sufficiency. I realize not all of the people who experience being unhoused can and want to be helped, but those that do, it makes sense to build something up that allows them to move forward as they are ready, by coordinating services with existing organizations and not duplicating services,” he said.
He has considered the many service providers assisting those experiencing homelessness.
“What we don’t have is a place for people at night. I can’t help but think if the Council had put those million dollars toward something like that, in the appropriate location, that would have been a more responsible use of taxpayers’ money,” he concluded.
Public Safety
Van Dyke is a believer that a safe city is the cornerstone of a thriving community, he says, and that now, more than ever, it is critical to support the police department and officers serving the community.
“I would like us, as a city, to focus on more funding for our police. We keep losing officers because we are not offering enough in pay and benefits, and it’s hard to retain the best and the brightest police officers when they have to move somewhere else to make a living for their families. We also need to support them publicly, and stand with them in support as a Council,” he said.
Through the last few years, police officers have not enjoyed the same public support that they once did, he says.
Van Dyke is very much in favor of community policing to foster a trust between the community and its law enforcement officers.
“If we were using the public’s money in a more thoughtful and responsible way, I think that we would have the support of the taxpayers to focus on paying our public safety officers a competitive wage,” he said.
Supporting law enforcement, first responders and community programs that enhance public safety are one of Van Dyke’s top priorities. By investing in better infrastructure, street lighting and community policing initiatives, he believes that every neighborhood in Grand Junction is a place where families can live, work and play, without worry.
Streets and infrastructure
Concerning the recent changes to 4th, 5th and, potentially, 7th Streets, Van Dyke is not in support of the changes. They were billed as a safety improvement, but local reporting has indicated that it’s quite the opposite. Locals have even written a song that captures the sentiment of the majority of residents called “Silly Streets”.
According to multiple Facebook posts and letters to the editor in the local legacy newspaper, he has stated that he would like to see the changes to the streets made by the current Council reversed.
The current Council is not looking at how some of their policy is creating problems that didn’t exist.
“The street projects were expensive and the majority hated it,” Van Dyke said. “Some members of this Council don’t seem to understand that the money they are spending isn’t their money, it’s money the taxpayers provide, and it’s not spent on the public’s priorities.”
He often hears from residents who feel the current Council abuses and wastes their tax dollars, and his approach will be driven by prioritizing the community as a whole, he says.
In a Facebook post, Jody Visconti Clow provided some insight as to how the current Council threw out recommendations from the local steering committee.
“As part of the Pedestrian Bike Steering Committee, we spent months looking at options. This was not one of them,” she said.
Added trails, extended sidewalks and improving safety features, such as adding lighting and replacing lights that were burnt out and repairing damaged sidewalks and trails, were among recommendations to the Council, she wrote.
“We spent months working together on those recommendations, using surveys and input from the community. The consulting firm was experienced and had ties to Grand Junction, yet everything was tossed aside for a pilot program,” Clow said.
Van Dyke has said these local voices are the voices that should drive policy and spending, “not a predetermined special interest group or political agendas.”
Van Dyke is running as an independent.