Outgoing Steamboat Springs City Councilor Joella West had grown used to long nights at Centennial Hall, the stack of meeting packets and the draining late-night hours of council meetings when the most complex questions were sometimes still on the table. 

She had not, however, prepared herself for what happened on Tuesday night, when colleagues and community members lined up to publicly thank her and outgoing Councilor Dakotah McGinlay for their years of service.

“I was really touched by that,” said West, who lost in this month’s election for the at-large seat to challenger Dave Barnes. “While you’re doing your job, you can’t focus on what people think of you, or how they perceive you … to come out of it four years later and hear the things that were said, that was lovely. It made me feel good about how I spent my time there.”

The tributes marked the end of a single term that coincided with some of the most contentious and consequential debates in recent city history: short-term rental regulations, a new funding deal with Steamboat Ski & Resort Corp. for Steamboat Springs Transit and an all-hands-on-deck effort to keep the Casey’s Pond senior living center from closure, among others. 

Speakers repeatedly praised West’s steadiness and legal acumen, with Councilor Gail Garey calling her “a tireless advocate for preserving the historic places and landscapes that define this community.”

Councilor Amy Dickson referred to West as a friend and thanked her for the “wisdom, clarity and humor” she brought to the dais. Dickson described West as “one of the most level-headed and inquisitive people” she had worked with. 

Former Council President Robin Crossan drew a comparison to another former member known for speaking rarely but decisively. 

“We used to say that Kathi Meyer would not say anything, she just sat there. And all of a sudden, when Kathi spoke, we listened,” Crossan said. “And Joella (West), same with you. You’d figure it all out and just have that sentence, and we’d be like, ‘Yeah, we can do it that way.'”

Former City Manager Gary Suiter summed her up in three words: thoughtful, prepared, steady. 

“You brought objectivity and steadiness to the council dais, something that every governing board can use and needs,” he said.

West’s husband, Larry Klingman, jokingly asked why voters couldn’t have just kept her on council. 

“She said at the very beginning, ‘I’ve been a lawyer in Hollywood for many years, so this is going to be really easy for me.’ It wasn’t,” he said. “I congratulate our new council people, and I hope you’re able to devote as much time and as much effort as Joella did.”

For West, that effort often came with a cost.

“The hardest part was, frankly, the lateness of the meetings, how many meetings ran so much too long, and the difficulty of being a worthwhile member of council when you’re already into hour five or hour six,” she said. “You don’t make good decisions when you’ve been in the room for five hours.”

When asked about the most gratifying moments of her tenure, West pointed first to the STR regulations that were front-and-center throughout much of her first term — a policy she and Garey campaigned on four years ago.

“Obviously, the short term rental issue was one of the two big issues that council ran on four years ago,” West said. “It wasn’t just affordable housing, it was also controlling what STRs were doing to the community … it was hard, and in the end, we made some people angry, and it was still one of the most important things that we did on council.”

Another defining accomplishment, she said, didn’t appear anywhere in council’s strategic plan. It arrived as an emergency: the potential loss of Casey’s Pond and what that would mean for local seniors and their families.

“You don’t run for council saying you’re going to save lives. And in life, you don’t very often ever get a chance to save lives,” she added. “So if I never did anything else in four years, that was the thing that mattered most.”

As she passes the torch to Barnes, West is not interested in telling the new council to rewrite its priorities. Asked about unfinished business, she opted not to mention any specific issue or policy, but instead urged continuity. 

“I would not ask them to shift or change their goals,” she said. “I would ask them to stay the course, and I certainly hope that this council will agree that those are still the valid goals for this city council … it becomes fiscal sustainability, it becomes housing, it becomes transit.”

Her advice to her successor and his colleagues is less about policy than temperament. West knows what it feels like to walk into office with a clear platform, only to find that some ideas never gain momentum.

“You have told the people of your community, ‘These are the things that I am going to work on accomplishing,’ and every once in a while, you just have no traction,” she said, noting this as potentially the hardest aspect of being a councilor. “You do not have enough interest on the part of council to do what you think is really important and you want, and you need to be able to be a gracious loser and move on.”

In the near term, West expects to stay engaged, but selectively. 

“I’m going to be very intentional about the areas that I choose to try to work on, try to have an effect on,” she said. “It’s hard to tell City Council what to do, and I am absolutely not going to do that.”

There will be exceptions. She fully expects to show up when the Marshall House project comes before council for variances, a cause she describes as personal. She also has a lingering interest in Steamboat’s perennial parking issues.

“I understand what we need to do as a city about the current parking situation,” she said, “and I don’t know if that will change with this council or not, but that’s something that I would very much like to work on, and I haven’t figured out how.”

If she does come to speak, she said, it will be because she has “useful information or a useful way of thinking” to bring, not just three minutes of opinion. Council, in her view, doesn’t need more noise.

West gave final remarks following Garey and Dickson’s comments on Tuesday.

“Keep coming, keep watching, keep talking, and every so often, I’ll be one of you, because I’ll be around,” she said. “The work’s not done … you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”