Sky-Hi News Candidate Q&A Question 5: County Budget Priorities

Sky-Hi News called me the other day for a raw, unedited interview to give voters an authentic and direct look into my views and my intentions as County Commissioner. I will be posting one question a day for easier reading.

You can read about the format and production of Sky-Hi’s 2026 Election Q&A here.

Question 5:

If Grand County faced a significant budget shortfall next year, what three services would you protect first, and what spending would you be willing to reduce, delay or eliminate?

I think top of mind, and this is kind of the core of the purpose of government, is health and human services. So that is our emergency services, and I would extend that to our roads, making sure that we have proper resources to navigate both the day-to-day situations that we could all face in emergencies, so police, fire, EMS, as well as greater disasters. So making sure our roads are maintained, and that specific roads are maintained for appropriate egress. 

Going through evacuation during East Troublesome, we evacuated on 34 and then 40, and those are state-maintained roads that they’re paved, and it was a very smooth evacuation. And I live close to the highway; I certainly know a lot of people who don’t live close to highways. In the case of an evacuation, they would have to navigate dirt roads and back roads and roads that might not have been maintained recently enough in the cycle, and so prioritizing that would be most important to me: emergency roads, and then probably health. So making sure that we still have those resources to support those of us who live here at that most basic level. 

Cutting funds, I don’t know if I would be interested so much as just slashing departments as much as reducing budgets and encouraging the departments to look to the outside for funding. There are a lot of state and federal grants, and even private grants that are made available regularly to municipal governments and small governments like ours to help support that. And you know, I come from the nonprofit world. I’m pretty well versed in what those resources look like and how they can be navigated. Grants are not meant to be sustaining funding, but they’re meant to prop up or support specific projects.

You can read the full interview here: https://www.skyhinews.com/news/qa-say-hello-to-jeremy-krones-running-for-county-commissioner-district-3/