San Miguel County Commissioner, CO

Available to speak on the following subjects:
Lobbying state and national representatives, county government, green organizing and strategy, cultural issues, rural issues, including agriculture, resort economies, affordable housing, transportation, open space, motorized recreation, and public lands

Bio
Campaigning for a fourth four-year term as a rural county commissioner in southwestern Colorado, Art Goodtimes joined the party in 1998, when the Colorado Green Party achieved ballot access. Telluride is the county seat for San Miguel County, where Art has won two partisan elections as a Green and will be trying for a third in 2008.

Campaigning for a fourth four-year term as a rural county commissioner in southwestern Colorado, Art Goodtimes joined the party in 1998, when the Colorado Green Party achieved ballot access. Telluride is the county seat for San Miguel County, where Art has won two partisan elections as a Green and will be trying for a third in 2008.

He was elected by his Colorado colleagues as a member of the National Association of Counties Public Lands Steering Committee, where he has chaired the Platform ReWrite Task Force. He has testified in D.C. before House committees and lobbied Congressional leaders. He served two years as secretary of Club 20, a conservative Colorado Western Slope lobbying organization, founding a progressive caucus as part of his ten years as a boardmember of that group.

Deeply involved in public land management, Art is Chair of the Burn Canyon Monitoring Task Force, which as a program of the regional state collaborative group, the Public Land Partnership, won two national awards in 2007 - one from the US Forest Service Chief and another from the Department of Interior. He has also served two terms on the BLM's Southwestern Colorado Resource Advisory Council, as well as dozens of other boards and commissions, including the Conservation Leaders Network, Western Colorado Congress, Colorado Progressive Coalition, and Colorado Rural Development Council.

Goodtimes is a poet, whose most recent book, "As If the World Really Mattered" (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2006) has received favorable reviews in the Bloomsbury Review in Denver, Catalyst in Salt Lake City, and Poetry Flash in San Francisco. He is founder and director of Talking Gourds, a Telluride performance poetry festival in its 19th year. He also continues to write a weekly opinion column in Telluride, as he's done for 25 years. He is a former reporter and editor.

His recent speaking engagements including being keynote speaker at the Community Alliance of the Yampa Valley annual meeting in Steamboat Springs in 2008, and in 2007, keynote speaker at the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in Laramie (Wyoming), speaker at a national Wilderness training in Tucson (Arizona), keynote speaker at the annual Quivira Coalition meeting in Albuquerque (New Mexico), and graduation speaker for the Department of Natural Resources at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Other awards include the Telluride Institute Visionary Award, 1996; U.S. EPA's Region 8 Environmental Protection Award, 1998; NACo's Achievement Award /Watershed Protection Program, 1999; U.S. Soil Conservation Service's Earth Team Award, 1999; U.S. EPA's Indoor Air Advisory Award, 2003; Colorado Weed Management Association's Commissioner of the Year, 2003; and Club 20's Johnson-Theos Bridge-Builder Award, 2005.

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