Stan Vanderwerf has served for 28 years in the higher reaches of the Air Force command and has founded two businesses in the past four years alone. Most would be more than happy to rest on their laurels at this point, but Vanderwerf has other plans. He wants to become the next county commissioner of District 3 in El Paso County.
Vanderwerf, 55, has only lived in Colorado Springs since 2011, but it is the longest time he has lived anywhere after a nomadic childhood following his Presbyterian Minister father to different churches and constantly being deployed to different locations for the Air Force.
In the Air Force, Vanderwerf never operated aircraft, but helped run things behind the scenes. “I was running programs, running budgets, and doing policy development work” he explained, “This means overseeing things like research and development facilities, as well as offices in charge of sustaining the Air Force’s older equipment.”
During his time at the Air Force, he also served as chief of operations at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), where he and his team would review every national disaster plan and assess its effectiveness. Eventually, Vanderwerf worked his way to becoming a colonel and running a public budget of $1 billion a year.
District 3 of El Paso County, which stretches north to south from The Air Force Academy to parts of Fort Carson, and west to east from Manitou Springs to most of downtown Colorado Springs, was previously under the control of Republican Sallie Clark for the last 12 years. In fact, no Democrat has sat on the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) for nearly 50 years. Vanderwerf hopes to keep it that way.
Vanderwerf has outraised his opponent, Democrat Electra Johnson, by more than $38,000 and Republican voters in District 3 outnumber Democratic voters 3 to 2.
Vanderwerf’s seemingly comfortable chances have not made him complacent: he has a lot of ideas to help fuel economic development in Colorado Springs. One such idea he is particularly proud of is helping to establish a beer brewing school in Colorado Springs.
“We have, in Colorado, a $1.7 billion craft beer industry. It’s huge. We have the highest craft beer consumption per capita of any state,” he said, “but we don’t have a school within 500 miles of Colorado.” Vanderwerf, as he explained it, has talked to people in the craft brewing, finance and political world and they all are “very enthused about the idea.”
Vanderwerf claimed to have about 25 more similar ideas like this that he thinks can spur economic development in Colorado Springs, though he was not quite ready to reveal all 25.
Besides economic development, Vanderwerf is devoted to tackling the issues of road repair and replacement, fire and flood mitigation, natural and man-made disaster prevention and response, as well as vagrancy and homelessness. To confront the last problem he supported The Springs Rescue Mission’s new $14 million dollar shelter currently under construction, and declared that he would do what he can as county commissioner to make this expensive project run as smoothly as possible.
Vanderwerf seems to be an ambitious candidate, but one idea that is not on his agenda is raising taxes. “I believe county taxes do not need to be raised,” he told Westside Pioneer during a Q&A session. “[El Paso] county has developed an innovative spirit that can be tapped further to find efficiencies.”
One example of a common efficiency Vanderwerf sees in the county budget is overlapping responsibilities between the county and the city. “We don’t need both the county and the city contracting services like snow plowing,” he said. “If we can divide responsibilities like this, there is the possibility of striking a better deal.”
Vanderwerf is optimistic about the future of Colorado Springs. “Right now, we have people in Colorado Springs visiting other cities to see how they’re doing things and to see if we can be successful like them. In 10 years, people will be coming here to see what a successful city looks like.”