Shakeups in Eagle races for mayor, Town Council as candidates suspend campaigns
Jason Cole, who was running for mayor, throws his support behind Bryan Woods
Nate Peterson/Vail Daily
Crowded races in Eagle for the mayor’s seat and four Town Council seats came into sharper focus late Thursday and early Friday after two candidates suspended their campaigns.
Jason Cole, who was running for mayor, announced via Facebook that he was suspending his campaign and throwing his full support behind Bryan Woods. The race to succeed outgoing Mayor Scott Turnipseed is now down to two candidates: Woods, a current Town Council member, and longtime resident Tom Olden.
Timothy Haley, a commercial banker who was running for council after he said he was approached by numerous people in the community, also suspended his campaign via a Facebook announcement late Thursday night. He said he is backing Woods for mayor and a slate of Town Council candidates who share his stance on smart growth: Gina McCrackin, Casey Glowacki, Geoff Grimmer, Scott Schreiner and Mark Bergman.
Grimmer is an incumbent council member seeking another term, while McCrackin, Glowacki, Schreiner and Bergman are first-time candidates. The other Town Council candidates in the race are Brian Kunkel, Robert Dagostino, Tania Jordet, Scott Davison and Todd Morrison.
Olden didn’t respond to an email seeking comment about Cole’s decision to drop out of the race. Dagostino and Olden ran as write-in candidates in the 2023 council race but failed to win seats.
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“For those of you that were supporting me, know that this decision was calculated and not made in haste,” Haley wrote on Facebook. “There is a strong ‘No Growth’ at all cost ticket running for the open seats. They are well organized and they are not joking around about their intent to gut the Town’s budget. They are running a party line vote and were running against a group of nonpartisan members of the community. Simply (sic) game-theory and basic math show that a concentrated vote would win the election easily.”
Cole said his decision to suspend his campaign came down to numbers.
“From the beginning, we knew that three candidates, Bryan and I had a similar vision, and then you had Tom with a bit of a different one,” he said. “Really, it does come down to the numbers. And I always knew once the candidates were announced that there was a fear or concern of splitting a vote.”
Cole said several of his supporters urged him to stay in the race, but with ballots already out, the clock was ticking.
“I got into this for a lot of reasons, and the title wasn’t one of them,” said Cole, who is phasing out of his role as CEO of Slifer, Smith and Frampton. “It was never about getting the title of mayor. It was about continuing to push Eagle forward. We’ve got issues, obviously. And it really came down to community sustainability for me. I mean, everyone’s got their issues, but it’s the three pillars. It’s economic, it’s environmental, and it’s social. And that’s what we need to keep driving. And ultimately, I said it in the debate: Keep Eagle Eagle is not a strategy. It’s just not.”
Olden, who has lived in Eagle for 24 years and runs a timber harvesting contracting business, said at a candidate forum on Thursday, Oct. 9, that he wants to help local businesses succeed, but that’s he’s not a fan of growth just for growth’s sake.
“I understand what it takes to run a business, and I also understand what type of community I want to live in,” he said. “Eagle is a very unique community. It’s not duplicatable in very many places in this country, let alone the world. So, what we have here, we need to protect. And it isn’t just to grow for the sake of growth. That’s the thought process of a cancer cell. But if we’re going to do smart growth, we need to maintain our businesses first and foremost.”
Olden also advocated for turning Eagle’s town hall into a boutique hotel.
“Since it’s been built, businesses have left,” he said. “To have businesses like bars thrive, restaurants, you have to have visitors that come to town that have money that they want to spend … As my wife pointed out in 2012, this is critical tax-generating real estate. Why wouldn’t you put a non-tax-producing building right in the commercial district?”
Cole said he wants to see Eagle thrive, which is why he ran on the motto of “Make Eagle Happen.”
He said he knows all too well what happens when towns look backward, not forward.
“I grew up in a small town in Kansas, saw that happen, and that town is half the size it once was,” he said.
Woods, at the candidate forum, said he wanted to see continuity on the council and to be a facilitator for all the ideas that will come from a new-look council.
“The mayor is going to have a very important job with potentially five new faces on that council that haven’t done this before,” he said. “Most of them haven’t served on planning and zoning. Or any other government entities. They’re going to have to be taught. How does government work? What is an enterprise fund? Who is that guy in public works who I call?”
