Dave Schillaci has watched the Town of Mountain Village from multiple vantage points. “I worked for Telski for 15 years,” says this 20-year veteran of the Telluride region. “I started off as a cook,” and had worked his way up to assistant director of food and beverages before he left the job in 2004. He went on to work for the Town of Mountain Village for the next two-and-a-half years “doing property maintenance and coordinating event setups.” He has worked at Telluride Mountain Market since August 2006, and has been on the homeowners board at Fairway Four since 2005.

Schillaci (no, he’s not related to Telluride Town Clerk MJ Schillaci; “everybody asks me that,” he says patiently) is now on the 15 Year Planning Task Force, where, he says, “right now, we’ve just been trying to figure out what the community wants.”

Top on his list: “We need to find a way to grow an economy that’s hopefully more year-round and more sustainable,” he says. Good planning is high on his list of priorities, as well. “We don’t want to turn into Vail, where they just put a building wherever people want.

Schillaci is well-aware of the town’s budget shortfall – “and the current economy isn’t helping,” he says. Keeping businesses alive and thriving is high priority, as well. “How can we, in the short-term, make sure the businesses” in the town’s core “are surviving and thriving,” and what can be done to “get through this tough economy.”

To that end, Schillaci divides problems ahead into short- and long-term.

Long-term thinking leads to affordable housing, and, he says, “if you don’t have the economy, then who cares about affordable housing?”

As to last year’s communications breakdown between the Mountain Village and the Telluride-Mountain Village Owners Association, he says: The TMVOA board “had a kneejerk reaction to what was happening – they didn’t like the way things were going, and they pulled away from the town.”

Since the demise of the controversial, center-of-town rec center, which the town supported but the TMVOA did not, he says: “Hey, a little bit of separation here,” regarding “who should be doing what.”

Nor is he Telluride Ski and Golf Co.-basher. “Just because something comes out of Dave Riley’s mouth doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it,” he says of Telski CFO Dave Riley. “Dave has done some good things for the ski area,” he says, by opening up runs on what once was backcountry, in part. “It’s good to see someone finally running the company who understands the ski area – and who has something to do with skiing.”

A skier and climber himself, Schillaci says he’s worried that last year, skier days were down by more than ten percent.

As to Riley’s latest big plan – an 8,000-seat amphitheater on Misty Maiden: “My gut reaction is that’s a good idea.” But, he adds, “people need to hear both sides of it.

“I don’t think it would necessarily take away from Bluegrass,” he says of the upcoming Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which brings in audiences of 10,000 and more. He would like to see Mountain Village participate more in that festival, as well as others. “During the summer festivals,” he observes, where do people park? They park in Mountain Village,” and take the gondola to town. “I don’t think it’s wrong for Mountain Village to want some of the money; it takes some of the impacts” of the Telluride-oriented festivals already, he observes. “In the long-term, it would be better for the Town of Telluride and Town of Mountain Village to coordinate” efforts to attracts visitors to the area.

Schillaci has praise for the current council. “We have a pretty good council; I’m definitely not here to bash any particular councilmember,” he says. Since moving to Mountain Village in 1994 (he lived in the day lodge, prior to the building of Big Billie’s), “I’ve seen lots of change, good and bad.

“I’ve always been a very opinionated person,” says Schillaci, adding that, if he is elected to council, “it would be to represent the average Joe Schmo.

“Not ‘Joe the Plumber,’” he hastens to add, referring to the character who surfaced as part of the McCain/Palin campaign’s rhetoric during the last presidential election. “I’d like to see a little more attention paid to the Meadows area, because a very large majority of full-time residents live down there.” A few tweaks could make it “a nicer place to live, with more sense of community” – tweaks along the lines of “building a bridge across Prospect Creek” to end the sense of division in the Meadows caused by the road running through it.

“When I first came to Telluride in 1989,” Schillaci remembers, “the lowest wage in the area was $5.25 an hour, plus a 75 cents-per-hour bonus” at the end of the season. He recalls a friend, working as a housekeeper in a hotel, whose low-paying job was tied to her housing, forcing her to turn down a job that paid nearly twice her salary because it meant she would lose her room, a sublet in a block of rooms her employer leased from the town. “The town,” he says, was in effect “subsidizing her employer to keep wages down.”

As Mountain Village approaches “60 to 70 percent build-out,” Schillaci’s awareness is mounting that “the town, to a large degree, was not preplanned.” Rather, Telski “had to sell off portions of real estate to fund its daily operations.”

One result is a dearth of affordable housing for Mountain Village workers. Schillaci hopes to see that change. “Ultimately,” he says, a key planning goal should be to have “the majority of people working in Mountain Village living here.”

“First the Mountain Village needs to try to keep employee housing units until it can build or sublet housing closer to town – “or better yet,” he says, build more employee housing “within the Mountain Village.”