Zane Laubhan announced that he is running for Gilpin County Commissioner for District One in the November 2024 election. Laubhan said he is running for commissioner because he enjoys helping
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Zane Laubhan announced that he is running for Gilpin County Commissioner for District One in the November 2024 election. Laubhan said he is running for commissioner because he enjoys helping people, and serving the county and its citizens.
Laubhan moved to Gilpin County in 2000 to become the Director of Gilpin Ambulance, where he managed the organization’s paramedics and EMTs and the ambulance budget for 13 years. He says that his people skills and financial management skills transfer directly to the work he wants to accomplish as Commissioner for Gilpin County.
He was appointed County Coroner in 2006 and has won every election since, running unopposed every time. His responsibilities include investigating the manner of a death and helping people understand the intricacies of death. He has been involved in investigations and similar work from Los Angeles to London.
If he wins the commissioner election in 2024, he will step down as coroner. Laubhan says his Chief Deputy Coroner, Harriet Hamilton, is actually more qualified than he is. Hamilton is a critical care nurse at Denver Health, and he said that Hamilton could easily take over the position. After 18 years of handling deaths in Gilpin, often friends and acquaintances, he said the job has worn him down.
While Laubhan is a registered Democrat, he said he is fiscally very conservative. His top three goals for the County are good governance, financial stewardship, and responding to the citizens.
“Just as we do in our daily lives, balancing income with expenses so as not to incur debt beyond our means is vital,” he said.
He said he is tired of hearing that the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and grants are “free money.” “They are not,” he said, “They come out of someone’s taxes. It doesn’t mean we should be spending it without treating it as a budget item and having an allocation process with a full plan of expenditures and a public hearing on those allocations.” He said that filling budget shortfalls created during the pandemic were specified in the local government guidance of the bill, and so the applied budget process should be recognized.
He also said that hiring people is a management responsibility he would have a say in. “This is not a big county. We have a business analyst and a grant writer on staff now. Can you show me there has been improvement since these hires? What’s the return?” The County should use benchmarking, he said, to find out if what they did worked. “When you hire people, you expect a return on that investment.”
“The County should be efficient and effective,” he said, “and it doesn’t mean managing every nuance. A budget gets approved, and the department head then manages with their approved budget. We can do that and still live within our means.”
Laubhan added that he would like to keep the county rural, while seeing measured growth where it is appropriate. Partnering with Black Hawk and Central City to expand opportunities for growth and building a more diverse economy are ways he said that could happen. He also said he would like to see even more economic growth in Rollinsville.
Having a clinic here in the county is a resource for the community and a benefit for those in need of local health care, he said. He supports Clinica Family Health being here.
Addressing the cost of housing in the county, Laubhan said that “real estate pricing is a component of free market forces, and not within the function of legislative intervention. If there is a solution beyond this, I am not aware of what that is.”
He said he recognizes that many people ask county commissioners about education funding. “People in education say they need more funding for education, but what is the goal?” he asked. “How much does it cost per pupil to educate them? What is the amount per pupil that would be considered successful in providing good public education? It stops with the school boards,” he said. “When are we going to have enough?”
The Gilpin RE-1 voters have previously voted on school funding, with what Zane perceives as a message of “operate within the financial constraints of current taxes, excluding the Education Enhancement funds supported by the City of Black Hawk.”
As to school district boundaries, he correctly said that they can only be adjusted by all the voters in both of the counties’ school districts.
Laubhan was born in Denver and grew up in Steamboat Springs. When he was 13, the family moved to Lakewood. He graduated from Lakewood High School.
He holds a degree in environmental public health from Colorado State University and has been a first responder since he was 18. He is one of the longest licensed paramedics in the state.
His roots in Gilpin County started with his grandfather, who bought and sold mining claims in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
He moved to Central City in 2000 and bought an historic home on Casey Street with his husband, former Central City Mayor and Commissioner Ron Engels. They originally had a five-year plan for restoring the home, but that was more than 20 years ago. They are still working on the home.
As his final comment on his run, he added that “As Commissioner, I would listen to people to find out what they need.”