Timnath town trustee takes seat on the sidelines

By Dan MacArthur
Fossil Creek Current

Tim Gaines was ready for a break after serving 22 years on the Timnath Town Board.

The fun was gone, he was weary of the grind and discouraged by what he believed to be the town's shift toward catering to developers. So, without fanfare, he resigned shortly before the last trustee election.

His sudden action shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the resident iconoclast's blunt and plainspoken manner. Some might instead call it caustic and confrontational. Gaines said that would be incorrect, although he doesn't object to others defining him as they will.

Gaines, 51, characterizes himself as a seeker of the slippery stuff called facts. As a competitive high school and college debater, Gaines said his intention is to employ research-based facts to stimulate productive discussions. "Arguing is fun," he said, comparing it to jousting.

Gaines has done a lot of jousting and seen a lot of changes in Timnath during his more than two decades on the board of trustees.

In the beginning, "there was a lot of stuff going on, but it was small stuff, personal kind of stuff," Gaines said, recalling nights of attempting to locate barking dogs.

But the stakes got a lot higher in the late 1990s when in his third term as mayor Gaines found himself representing the town in talks with Craig Harrison, Byron Collins and Jerry McMorris. They had hundreds of acres surrounding the town that they planned to develop. He said they wanted to know whether they could work with the town or without it.

"I don't think we really needed them, but they had some things we wanted," Gaines said. "So as a politician I had to cut the best deal for my constituents."

Gaines believes the town did get a pretty good deal that at least gave it some of the benefits that mattered to him. "I really wanted sewers and good roads," he said. "The infrastructure stuff has to be right."

A trail builder, emergency medical technician trainer and volunteer ski patrolman, the outdoors has called out to the Denver native ever since he got the driver's license enabling him to escape the city. After earning degrees in economics and finance, Gaines and his wife, Sherry, came to Fort Collins. He continued working as a computer operator while she landed a job at Hewlett Packard.

One day, Gaines said, his wife announced that she found a house to buy. He went with her to take a look, and they promptly bought it. "I had little awareness of Timnath," he said. "It was just a wide spot in the road."

That soon changed, however. Sherry became town clerk and a neighbor persuaded Gaines to run for the town board in 1982. "He drug me into it. Of course, I was drunk when he asked," Gaines recalled. He's served on the board continuously since then, except for a two-year hiatus after failing to submit his candidacy petition on time.

Gaines doesn't rule out returning when he's ready to joust again. But for now he's content to sit on the sidelines and let others deal with barking dogs.