Saratoga Mayor Ed Glode is planning to head up a committee to clean up the town, with the focus more on the final product of beautified properties and less on ticketing for non-compliance.
According to Glode, complaints about junk have been made for years and there had been a committee working to clean-up areas of the town, however it was temporarily disbanded. The Dec. 8 planning commission meeting brought ordinance enforcement to the attention of the town, and Glode has been considering potential methods to move forward with cleaning up the town. Glode is looking to form a group of about seven.
The group will adopt a non-confrontational approach to “try to help people help themselves,” Glode said. “Some people have some clean-up that they want to do but they can’t afford it. That’s one demographic of non-compliance in town, one of several,” Glode said. The quickest to improve, that is not as big, is light industrial, Glode said.
“We all agree that we probably need to revise the nuisance ordinance, which is not the only ordinance that has not been enforced, but if we do all this, that might be the most important one,” Glode said.
Much of the input about cleaning up the town has come from comments on the first master plan survey, and with a new survey under way right now, Glode hopes for another large response.
Trucks are another common complaint in town, and though signs have been ordered, trucks have still been spotted in town. “We might focus a little enforcement there too,” Glode said, adding that despite a streak of diligent enforcement in recent months, the town is back to where it started. “A lot of people got the message not to go over that bridge for a while.”
As winter has arrived in the Platte Valley, Glode said that the tourism industry is one of the only growing industries in Wyoming. “As we try to keep this place alive in the wintertime, that’s our only chance, is tourism,” Glode said, adding that cleaning up the town is the long, drawn-out plan for success. Otherwise, Glode said the town will focus on marketing itself and hosting events that are appropriate for the number of hotel rooms in town.
As for increasing the number of hotel rooms in town, the average annual occupancy is below prosperous, Glode said. However, larger events, such as conferences at the Platte Valley Community Center, cannot be accommodated. Glode called this a “chicken and egg” situation, adding that a hotel business cannot be incentivized at the moment. “It’s a tough deal because if we had two or three of those big chains coming in here, then the little guys go away,” Glode said. “We don’t want that.”
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