Routt County commissioners held a nearly two-hour facilitated midyear check-in on Aug. 5 with consultant Mark Collins that focused on progress toward goals, organizational capacity and improving inter-commissioner communication.

Collins opened the session by asking commissioners to identify what is going well and where mid-course corrections are needed. He summarized three interdependent elements he said were essential: "open communication, trust. And my last one is collaboration," he told the board. The conversation touched on staffing turnover, major capital projects such as the airport terminal expansion, federal funding uncertainty, and growing demands on county services.

Commissioners and staff discussed practical steps to reduce missed handoffs and scheduling conflicts. Ideas included sharing calendars (or a shared out-of-office calendar) to simplify scheduling, increasing time on Monday morning sessions for commissioner updates, and elevating committee assignments and reports to regular agenda items. One commissioner raised safety and privacy concerns about sharing full calendars, citing a prior death threat as a reason to block location-specific calendar details; the group discussed compromises such as sharing only "busy" blocks or an out-of-office calendar for longer absences.

The board also discussed the Northwest Colorado Innovation Center and Northwest Colorado Development Council. Commissioners asked for clearer, periodic briefings to understand the return on the county’s dues and the Innovation Center’s activities; staff agreed to provide the intergovernmental agreement and suggested scheduling a work session in which the council/innovation-center representatives would present their work and answer questions.

Other agreed improvements included a proposal to reserve at least 09:30–11:00 Monday mornings for commissioner-level updates (to be sacrosanct where possible), quarterly travel and conference budget summaries for transparency, and more formal committee-reporting on Mondays so commissioners can track outside work and intergovernmental commitments.

Commissioners said they left the session with a clearer set of communication protocols and several follow-ups for staff, and they generally described the meeting as constructive. "I like working with Mark," one commissioner said near the end of the session, summing up the board’s positive tone about the facilitated conversation.