Brian Ahern made his first foray into local politics in 2008, running as the Democrat Party’s candidate against Green Party member Art Goodtimes, the incumbent two-term San Miguel County commissioner.

Ahern lost that contest, but he’s back on the political scene now in a bid for a seat on the Mountain Village Town Council.

“I come from a family of 12,” he says, “with four boys,” three of them Marines, having followed in the steps of their father.

“The only time I saw my father cry,” he says, “was when my one brother came home and announced he’d joined the Army.”

Ahern grew up in a family that emphasized public service – his father was an elected official on the Rock Island Town Council, and on the board of the town’s Blackhawk Community College – and he has carried on that tradition, serving on the Town of Telluride’s Open Space Commission back when it voted “to acquire the Valley Floor and the Kentucky Placer.” He now sits on the San Miguel County Planning Commission and on the San Miguel Basin Fair and Rodeo board, and considers himself an advocate for rural parts of the county.

This summer, for the first time, he reports, a banner advertising Norwood’s San Miguel County Basin Fair and Rodeo will hang across Telluride’s main street – evidence, Ahern says, of a long-overdue “bridging of the gap” between Telluride and Norwood.

“I grew up in a rural community, in East Moline [Ill.], home to John Deere [tractors],” he points out. “My grandparents had a farm; my heart is in agriculture. I want to see that it survives.

“We don’t want to get to the point in western Colorado where a lot of urban sprawl replaces agriculture,” he adds.

Locally, Ahern – at the time, a bartender at the now-defunct Roma – worked to establish the free Home Safe taxi service for people needing rides home from Telluride late nights, with the bulk of its ridership going “from Telluride to the Meadows,” where Ahern lives today, with his wife and young daughter, in Parker Ridge.

The Home Safe program came out of the Telluride Marshal’s Advisory Board, which Ahern co-founded, along with Maggie Eagleton (of Maggie’s Café) and Bob Beer (then running the Elks) in 2003, following a fatal car accident and the death of a young Russian worker who died from exposure while trying to walk home to the Meadows, both alcohol-related. The three raised $18,000 to revive the late-night taxi service (it was shut down in the 1990s), collecting $5,000 from each local government (the county and the towns of Telluride and Mountain Village), and another $3,000 from liquor-license holders to cover expenses.

“Coming from a family of 12, I obviously understand fiduciary responsibility,” says Ahern, who has, in his more than a decade in the Telluride region, lived all over the county (Placerville, Wilson Mesa, Telluride and the Ski Ranches), prior to his move to Mountain Village four years ago.

“It’s in its formative years,” he says of the town with a permanent-resident population of 1,453 he calls home. “It’s still in its adolescence – it’s a young community.” Ahern takes pride in his work as a subcontractor on the Mountain Village grocery and town hall buildings “from start to finish.

Ahern says he’s “excited” that the 15-Year Task Force is “working on a comprehensive plan” as Mountain Village moves into the future.

“I’ve seen the town’s transition, going from a vacant village to having people actually live here year-round,” he says. “It’s come a long way.”

If elected, Ahern says, he will work hard to keep local government get away from “funding infrastructure after the fact.

“There is a serious lack of funding” for town infrastructure and programs, he believes, and that’s something he hopes to change.

“I know if I say ‘finding new revenue sources,’ it sounds like raising taxes,” Ahern says, “but I think there is room in the budget to move things around. What you and I might think of as necessities are really luxuries.” He cites the Telluride-Mountain Village Owners Association-funded gondola as “a valuable asset to the region,” that possibly “should be funded by everyone in the region” he says, since the “entire region benefits from it,” but acknowledges any change in funding is a way off, given TMVOA’s contractual obligation to fund the alternative transportation system linking Telluride and the Mountain Village until 2027.

“I’m running,” Ahern says, “for the same that reason I joined the Marine Corps – to give back to my community.

“A lot of times, people say, development will pay its own way – but it ends up that it doesn’t pay its own way,” something he’d like to address, as a member of Mountain Village Town Council. For example, he says, “the road-and-bridge crews work hard – that’s where you see your tax dollars at work.” It’s essential, Ahern maintains, that the town maintain “fundamentals” for its citizens – that “when you turn on the faucet, there’s water; when there’s a fire, you can phone the fire department and know they’re on their way, you know the police are going to respond.

“That one of the biggest concerns, for taxpayers – to make sure they get the basics that they’re paying for.”