Mountain Village Mayor Bob Delves doesn’t beat around the bush.

“I think I’ve been an effective mayor,” says Delves, who was voted into that top job by fellow councilmembers two years ago, when term limits kept former Mayor Rube Fellicelli from running again.

“I think we have managed a lot of change pretty well.”

During Delves’s two years at the helm, he says: “We have made progress in Mountain Village on key themes.” He cites “customer service from our government, and fiscal responsibility” as two particular points of progress.

Key to good customer service, he says, “is a strong staff – and now, we’ve got a strong staff,” he says, with “probably a 50 percent turnover in leadership” since he came onboard.

On Delves’s watch, the seven-member town council has grappled with issues that range from embarking upon the development of a new master plan to calling for a moratorium on open-space rezoning to establishing the state-mandated Mountain Village 15 Year Plan Task Force whose members are, by all accounts, carefully and thoroughly educating themselves about the varying needs of Mountain Village inhabitants – commercial and residential, deed-restricted, free-market and second-homeowners alike as they work their way to a final answer to the question of just what this 14-year-old home-rule municipality wants to be when it grows up.

But at the top of his agenda, at least “in the short term,” Delves says, “it has to be financial,” especially in the face of today’s faltering global economy.

“We are financially challenged,” he acknowledges, “and we have to figure out how to continue to deliver a quality product when we have a third less money coming in.

“That’s our most immediate problem,” he says, although he goes on to point out: “It’s an opportunity, too.”

For Delves, a veteran of the software business (he has worked in every sphere “from software development to implementation to sales, outsourcing and consulting”), being mayor “is not about politics” so much as it is “about problem-solving.”

On the long-term front, Delves and the current council are focused on building affordable housing where employees – of the town, its hotels and restaurants, and the ski area – can live. In the town itself, he says, “We have a lot of land that’s already zoned for housing, but we don’t own it,” says Delves, who has contemplated developing employee housing everywhere from the western reaches of San Miguel County to within the boundaries of Mountain Village,

“We’ve got to figure out a way to get that land” – roughly 1,000 acres, “potentially the size of the Meadows” into the employee-housing mix.

In Delves’s opinion, the mayoralty “is not about politics” so much as it is “about problem-solving. Fortunately,” he says of the current council, “we don’t get very political,” going so far as say that current meetings feature “a good debate,” and estimating that “90 percent of our votes are probably unanimous.” And that’s what governance should be, in his opinion: “Patient listening, letting the facts come out and collaborative problem-solving.”

In an effort to achieve economic stability, Delves says, the only workable solution is to bring in “people with money in their wallets that they want to leave with us.”

That’s a new way of looking at tourism, and he cites an episode during a community meeting by way of example.

“Before we started work on the comprehensive plan,” he says, “a woman stood up and said, ‘You need a Chinese restaurant, an Italian restaurant and a Prada store.’”

Delves came back with a quip swiftly: “‘No,’ he remembers telling her. “‘You need people who want to eat Chinese and Italian food – and pay for it.’” It was an illuminating moment, he remembers. “We need consumers more than anything – that’s what drives our economy – having people who come here from somewhere else and spend money with us.”

He’s sanguine about the chaos that reared its head early in his mayoralty, when it seemed that the Mountain Village Town Council and Telluride-Mountain Village Owners Association would never make peace, after voters split evenly (293-293) regarding a center-of-town recreation center, resulting in the center’s demise. “It got weird,” Delves acknowledges, of relations between the two entities at the time, partly because of “the status quo of both boards, which worked closely together, with a common staff,” and, in hindsight, he opines, “got ripped apart probably too fast, and without a plan.

“The result,” he adds, is that “chaos filled a void.” That void. However, has “now been filled, the chaos is gone and we’ve got a strong staff.”

Strides are being made as well to redress a misstep in the long-ago planning process for the town’s pedestrians-only core. “What we got wrong,” he says, a quarter-century after the then-radical initial plans were drawn up, is that “we didn’t make it convenient to get to the pedestrian village in the core, and we’re working on that.”

Rather than building a village, and keeping cars a gondola-ride away, he says, “you should dig down two layers,” create adequate parking space, “and cover it back up, building your town on top of it.”

He cites the 120-car parking garage built by the Capella, that opened this spring in the center of the Town of Mountain Village core, as delivering a much-needed amendment to the not-quite-thoroughly-realized parking solution.

And it’s with an eye to the future, Delves says, that he’s running. “I think we need some continuity” on the council, “and that’s the biggest reason why I’m doing this again.

“We have started a lot of things on this council, and I think I need to come back and see them through, hopefully as mayor.”