Dossie Overfield

Heading into 2022, the Park County Commission has a new leader. Commissioner Dossie Overfield, who joined the board in 2019, has been chosen by her peers to chair the board over the coming year.

After the board breezed through its agenda for the Jan. 4 meeting, outgoing Commission Chairman Lee Livingston quipped that Overfield “should have been chair years ago” — also inserting a joke on their agenda that her appointment was “for life.”

In fact, Overfield is only committing to the role for a year, during which time she’ll run the commission’s meetings, set the agenda and serve as figurehead for the board.

Overfield sees issues related to land use as the biggest challenge on the horizon. New developments like subdivisions and a revision of the county’s land use plan “are going to take quite a bit of our time” in 2022, she predicted.

“There’s development and growth, and then there’s some maintaining our current way of life as we enjoy it,” Overfield said. “Those are the two things we have to meld through this land use plan and get everybody’s input on how to best do that.”

“I think we’re at a turning point with the growth that’s been happening, that we’ve got to make some decisions on how we want to do that, or it’s gonna be too late,” she said.

Putting together the county’s annual budget is another big task. Overfield said federal funds “have certainly helped” the county’s financial situation, particularly where the dollars have been or will be able to be spent on IT equipment, maintenance problems and the sewage lagoons used by rural waste haulers.

“There’s a lot of strings attached,” Overfield said of the federal money, “so we have to be extremely careful that we’ll use it in the allowable manner — and to the best use of the dollars for our residents.”

Commissioner Joe Tilden thanked Livingston for his service as chairman in 2021 adding that, “It has not been easy.”

Livingston said he had thought that 2020 was the tough one, “but this one [2021] wasn’t all that fun.”

“But it wasn’t that bad and [we] had a good team behind us, behind me to make it work,” he said. “And I’m glad to turn the reins over.”

Commissioner Scott Mangold, who joined the board last year, was elected as vice chairman, meaning he’ll fill in as the commission’s leader whenever Overfield is absent.

While commissioners held their elections last week, they’d informally made the decision sometime earlier, with hints dropped at the Dec. 21 meeting that Overfield would be the board’s next chair.