When I first covered local government decades ago, I saw town councils as an opportunity for grandstanding but little else. The position of mayor didn’t seem to matter one way or the other.

But I’ve come to understand that the job of a council member is challenging and important. You don’t just waltz in to say yea or nay. The task demands attention to detail and a grasp of everything from high finance and road repair to solutions for the unhoused. It’s also time-consuming and basically unpaid.

The three towns all face failing water systems and roads, due primarily to inadequate budgets and decades of deferred maintenance. The Biden Administration’s $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 offered a lifeline for these 150-year-old municipalities, which hustled to put together successful proposals. While the Trump Administration didn’t claw back grants already awarded, it hasn’t offered further funding.

Each town faces water insecurity, and both Paonia and Crawford have ongoing or just completed capital projects to rehabilitate springs and replace storage tanks and pipes.

Delta faces some $40 million in upgrades for its water and sewer systems, but the city’s current focus is the grant-supported $13-million-dollar rejuvenation of its Main Street, which runs for 15 blocks through the commercial center. The main drag, dotted with empty storefronts, is also US Highway 50. The council hired consultants to study whether to reroute water pipes from the center of Main Street to alleys close to the business strip, upgrading the system.

After months of indecision, Delta opted for the status quo even though the water system is 60 years old. “The pipes are basically okay,” said City Manager Elyse Casselberry. But when they spring a leak on Main Street or elsewhere, there’s a freakout from the Delta Council, followed by sighs of relief when the break is repaired.

As for the towns’ deteriorating roads, many must be entirely repaved, a major expense that requires state and federal funding. Paonia’s streets are notoriously potholed, but repaving must wait until water pipes running beneath them get repaired first.

The economics of town government are challenging. Crawford, with an operating budget of $250,000 and a staff of four, debates expenditures as small as $500. Just down the valley, Paonia’s payroll alone is $1.4 million, and its $6 million budget—as prepared by Town Administrator and Treasurer Stefen Wynn—is complex and detailed.

During a recent budget session, one Paonia trustee was so overwhelmed by the many spreadsheets that he suggested each department should simply be presented with a total and told to work within it.

“I strongly disagree,” said Mayor Paige Smith, who then gave a civics lesson on fiduciary responsibility. “Just a thought,” said the trustee.

Delta, meanwhile, is undergoing a budget overhaul, trimming staff and departments, cutting recreation center hours, cancelling projects deemed inessential, and even trying to sell its parks. The City still holds large fund balances, created in part by as yet-unspent grants. But as any good town manager knows, a city should live within its means. Casselberry cut $2 million from her first draft, and the 2026 budget is now about $53 million, including capital projects.

A recent boon to all the towns is hefty sales tax revenue from mail order purchases, primarily from Amazon. The tiny Crawford post office reports 300 to 500 packages per day.

At each town’s meetings, I’ve watched council members exercise self-control and perseverance, even as public comment periods grew heated. I may grow impatient in the third hour of a tedious meeting—will it never end?—but the mayors, be it Christian mental health counselor Chris Johnson from Crawford or former environmental regulator Smith from Paonia, remain energized and determined.

Even Delta Mayor Kevin Carlson, a funeral director discouraged by what he calls constituents’ “negativity,” remains steadfast. It’s a sworn duty, and the mayors and their councils fulfill it to the best of their abilities.

The least I can do is cover it.

Marty Durlin is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She grew up in Delta and reports for public radio station KVNF and the weekly High Country Spotlight.

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I would earn, the representative explained, $340 for “this one-time use.” Is that one-time use like a wet wipe—disposable, expendable, easily sacrificed?

Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier collected 20 years’ worth of my essays to argue that 20th-century Montanans developed unique views of how nature worked, as captured in the wilderness-adventure and resource-extraction connotations of “the frontier.” The book felt particularly foreign to anything in the world of AI.

All the writers I know feel particularly vulnerable to AI. Most of today’s commercial AI programs are “large language models,” with skills not in logic, reasoning or math but merely in generating text. That directly threatens writers’ jobs.

Worse, replacing a human writer with today’s generative AI is like replacing a wild raspberry with an artificially flavored Crystal Light. The error-filled, uncreative products of AI threaten not only writers but also the joy and usefulness of reading.

While most people fulminate abstractly about AI, this query about buying my book presented a clear choice, sharpened by the specificity of “$340.” If I took the offer, would the knowledge I poured into these essays become available from an AI, decimating my book sales? If my royalties thus fell to zero because I had signed a death warrant for a book-that-is-like-a-child-to-me —was the $340 worth it? 

Perhaps $340 was better than nothing. Many technology companies train AI models by stealing from authors. Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier was among four of my books pirated for the “LibGen” database, which was used to educate AI programs from Anthropic and Meta. Although Anthropic recently settled a resulting lawsuit, Meta and others may yet escape punishment.

What is the proper value of my book? Although $340 is not much compensation for all the work I put in, neither is a royalty of $1.19 per book sold. If my main goal was adequate market compensation for my writing, I probably shouldn’t have published a book in the first place. The book is now 12 years old. At current sales rates, it would take a few years to make $340 in royalties.

When I talked with friends about this dilemma, it felt like none of us knew how to think about the situation. Maybe, as with previous technologies, making the book more widely available will stimulate sales—or maybe not. Maybe AI will thwart young people’s ability to engage in intellectual careers—or maybe its perils are overhyped.

Maybe AI will swallow my entire output without fair compensation—we know that Anthropic and Meta have already tried.

My publisher wouldn’t say which AI company made the offer, how it arrived at that take-it-or-leave-it price, or how it would use my book. Would I feel differently about the deal if AI contributed to the world’s knowledge rather than merely helping students cheat?

As I thought about this, I realized I was reflecting a distinctly human desire, rather than an AI desire. A large language model consumes a book as data. Its model requires ever more data to predict what the next word in a sentence should be.

It’s certainly ego-deflating to think of the product of my research, extensive reading, interviewing, thinking and finally writing as “data.” I’d prefer it to be “knowledge” or even “wisdom” that the AI wants to suck from me. I’d prefer to think that it needs my well-told stories, my keen insights, my brilliant larger points.

But AI doesn’t think in such big-picture terms. It just predicts a word, and then another word, and then another. I realized that this is also a model for how nature works. There’s no grand plan. No knowledge. No story with a satisfying ending. There’s just a single cell reproducing. One leaf reaching for sunlight. A predator seeking its next dinner.

John Clayton writes in Montana and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West, writersontherange.org. Read his newsletter at naturalstories.substack.com.

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So why am I such an optimist about this business? It’s true that the facts about this essential branch of democracy are grim. Since 2004, about 1,800 newspapers have closed in the United States. More than 100 local newsrooms closed just during the COVID pandemic. Hedge funds that buy publications have left a path of destruction in their wake, with furloughs, layoffs and cutbacks.

Many newspapers have become a shadow of their former selves. News deserts are spreading around the country, places where people have lost access to trusted local news sources, and where local coverage has disappeared.

But it isn’t journalism that’s failing. It’s the old business model that funded news outlets for more than a century by relying too heavily on paid advertising.

Four years ago, as a senior editor at the Denver Post, I was faced with a choice. I could accept the inevitability of that decline and help a hedge fund dismantle our Pulitzer prize-winning newsroom piece by piece, laying off friends and colleagues, while investors pocketed the profits. Or I could try something new.

I co-founded the digital-only Colorado Sun with nine Post colleagues and we launched in September 2018 with zero subscribers, zero members and a full-time staff of 10. But we also had plenty of determination and know-how.

Today, we have more than 200,000 subscribers, nearly 17,000 paying members, and a full-time staff of 25. We have been recognized as one of the best news outlets in our region for our public service and high-quality journalism.

We started with the premise that news matters, that readers — our democracy even — deserved more than the hedge funds were willing to provide. There’s a reason the Founding Fathers enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

They knew that a healthy democracy depends on informed citizens, on journalists who ask uncomfortable questions and serve as a watchdog to those in power. Vladimir Putin understands the same thing all too well, which is why he has clamped down on and targeted the press in Russia.

The Colorado Sun developed a business model that is so simple it sounds naive: Give readers non-partisan journalism that is deeply reported, well written and well edited. Treat readers with respect. Don’t bombard them with pop-ups that get in the way of reading stories. Don’t lure them in with clickbait headlines or offer thinly rewritten press releases. Hold the powerful accountable. Celebrate the beauty around us and spotlight the people trying to make this a better world.

Our journalism is free to read for those who can’t afford to pay. We ask readers to support our work at whatever level they choose and to share our work with family, friends and colleagues. Our paying members provide most of our financial support, with the rest coming from philanthropy and sponsors.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in four years, and I’m absolutely thrilled at the response not only from readers, but from journalists around the country who have been inspired in part by our success, just as we’ve been inspired by the Texas Tribune and others who came before us. Many have reached out seeking advice and tips as they contemplate creating their own news outlets. We’re happy to help.

The Poynter Institute, which studies, champions and supports journalism, says more than 70 local newsrooms launched in the United States in 2020 and 2021. More than 50 local newsletters started publishing in that time.

It’s difficult to see proud legacy newspapers in decline. But there is new energy and excitement all around us. Journalists, readers and philanthropists are talking about how news matters, how we all suffer when quality journalism goes away. I see growing support for new forms of journalism as we realize how important the profession is to our lives.

That’s cause for us all to be optimistic.

Larry Ryckman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the editor and co-founder of the Colorado Sun in Denver.

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