Incumbent Eagle County commissioner Matt Scherr stresses ‘community values’ in seeking reelection
Minturn resident seeking second term after being appointed, then elected to county board
Matt Scherr’s Eagle County arrival story isn’t unusual: Fresh off a layoff from a telecommunications company, he followed a former girlfriend to Vail.
Scherr has since built a life of service, in the community and in elective office. He’s worked as a volunteer, as well as at the former Vail Leadership Institute. There, he came to know many of the pioneers and “great minds” behind the creation of Vail. Scherr went on to run the Eagle Valley Alliance for Sustainability.
During that time, Scherr, a Democrat, was elected to the Minturn Town 撸先生. In the middle of that term, he and his young family decided to take a sabbatical to Ecuador. That adventure began in 2010, spurred by a desire that he and his wife, Diana, had to share their love of travel with their two kids.
“We’d always talked about what it would be like having our kids experience what we experienced as young adults,” Scherr said.
But, he said, the family’s finances 鈥� shrinking income from their Eagle County rental properties and growing property tax bills on those properties 鈥� cut the trip short.
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Returning to Minturn, where the Scherrs have spent 23 of their 25 years in the valley 鈥� Scherr again went to work, and soon enough was back on the Minturn Town 撸先生.
He was in the midst of a two-year term as mayor in 2019 when former Commissioner Jill Hunsaker Ryan, a Democrat, resigned from . Scherr, along with six other residents, applied for the vacancy and was appointed to the job by a committee of the local Democratic Party.
Scherr ran in the 2020 election and won, and this year is running for the second time, against Avon resident Gregg Cooper.
Trying to ‘make change’
Scherr said he decided to seek elective office because “I was trying to make change in a way that was going to be truly impactful, and 鈥� change has to be through policy.” He decided he’d learn more and apply more of that education on the Minturn Town 撸先生 and, later, on the Eagle County Board of Commissioners.
But a part-time job on a Town 撸先生 and a full-time job on a county commission can be quite different.
Scherr noted that a commissioner’s position is “really more of a job” than a position on a Town 撸先生.
“I can’t imagine anyone thinking this is a part-time job,” he said.
The time commitments include a lot of policy, as well as partnerships outside the county boundaries.
Scherr said he’s been “heavily involved in the legislative process,” an important job, since almost all of Colorado’s counties are arms of the state government. As part of that job, the county is involved in a couple of state associations, Colorado Counties Incorporated and Counties and Commissioners Acting Together, both dedicated to influencing policy at the state level. The county is also an associate member of the Colorado Association of 撸先生 Towns.
The county is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop a rail line from Utah hauling crude oil along the Colorado River.
“The county does a lot of work the towns don’t do,” Scherr said. Perhaps the biggest of those is supporting the community and the local workforce, he said.
“To me, the idea is to do the best you can for people. 鈥� The focus, for me, ought to be on people.” That includes public health and human services, “because it’s the right thing to do.”
That includes ensuring that there are parks, community centers and other amenities, because without those things, there isn’t a community, and without a community, there isn’t a workforce, he said.
Big change on the board
The Board of Commissioners is in for a significant change in the coming year with the retirement of Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry, the board’s resident expert on water.
Chandler-Henry will be replaced in January by fellow Democrat Tom Boyd, who is running unopposed on the ballot. Boyd won June’s primary election for his party’s nomination, and there’s no Republican or other candidate for the seat.
Scherr said if he earns another term on the board, he doesn’t see its mission changing all that much.
Housing availability and cost will be of paramount importance, he said. Taxation will be a tricky issue, although that will be largely determined by state legislative action.
“We need to act in a way that’s transparent,” he said. “We need to have hard conversations, and explain how government works.”
Those conversations can be especially hard when it comes to controversial topics surrounding land use.
“You try to talk to people, and help them understand the decisions,” he said, adding that everyone from elected officials to staff members 鈥� the people who really do the hard work, he noted 鈥� “does the best they can.”
No matter the difficulty, “to some degree those decisions are based on community values,” he said.
