Steve Boyd, the new city manager for Glenwood Springs, grew up in the city and, after a short stint away, came back to be a big part of it. Many Glenwood Springs residents may know Boyd personally or have seen him around; so for those that haven’t, here are his responses to questions shared by the Post Independent.

1. Tell us about your background of growing up in Glenwood Springs, then going off to college and why you came back.

Glenwood is an ideal place to grow up. It’s a lot of little things like learning to ski at Sunlight which, to me, beats the crowds at big resorts where one wrong turn can put kids and parents in completely different lodges. I was never good enough to have made football or baseball teams at big 6A schools so it was nice to get to actually play a little. And the people that are here are here because they want to be, which is fantastic. After college the jobs that interested me were in big cities, but I wanted to stay close so I chose Denver. I really liked it there but I had a good chance to make it back and this has always felt like home. Maybe it’s not perfect here, but it is better than any other place I’ve ever been.

2. What jobs have you had since you moved back?

I took the position of purchasing and contracts manager at CMC in 2009 because it put me in the middle of the action across all of its campuses. I’d probably still be there but the writing was on the wall that my wife was going to become the CFO, at which point she would have been the boss both at home and at work, and you know we just can’t have that. So I put in for finance director at the City when it came open in 2016.  I then took the title of COO because our city manager had too many direct reports and I picked up some other departments like IT, city clerk and municipal court.

3. You didn’t apply for the job originally, what is the reason that you chose to take it now?

I hadn’t really thought about it. I’m not the most extraverted person in the world so the idea of being the life of every party can be exhausting. I figured there would be too many parts of this job that I just wouldn’t like and was happy in my current job. I served as interim city manager for a few months during our search which gave me a better understanding of what life would be like and my mind started to change when I saw how much everyone helped me.

4. From your perspective as city manager, what is Glenwood’s biggest challenge?

It is the combination of the high cost of living here and the revenue constraints we have in our general fund. In something like our electric or water fund we have some control over the amount of income, we realize.  Revenues in the general fund are mostly taxes and fees for government services, where our influence is limited. Our expenses are mostly wages and benefits, along with things like technology and liability insurance that are not very discretionary and simply go up each year more than our revenue. So as the city grows we see call volume going up in departments like police and fire, but we don’t have enough money to add personnel to keep up.  As we become more understaffed it strains our ability to provide good service in lots of areas, from streets and parks, to things like finance or the city clerk’s office. If you look at the 2024 budget I think you’ll see that it’s pretty lean and focuses only on maintaining the assets we have and not a lot of new toys.  We are going to have to solve this at least in part on the revenue side where there aren’t a lot of easy answers.

5. Are you excited to be city manager?

Yes. I have a lot of respect and affection for our staff and our residents which makes it pretty easy to work with everyone. I keep looking forward to what’s next because different days bring different things.

6. What big changes should we expect from you?

You probably won’t see any. We are just going to try to keep getting more efficient every day with the resources we have. I’ll leave the decisions on big changes to the city council.

Hopefully these answers give some insight into Glenwood Springs’ new city manager and how he hopes to handle things. The Post Independent wishes him good luck in his new position.