Greg Byrne looks to islanders to express their goals for the future of Bainbridge.

It took a drive through a thick, high-country fog to put Greg Byrne on a clear path.

“I couldn’t see far, just what was on the sides of the road,” he said. “What I saw was typical ‘big box’ developments and home designs that could have come from the last homebuilders conference. I could have been in Nebraska. I could have been anywhere.”

Then the mist cleared.

“I saw the mountains and I knew I was in Colorado,” he said.

The former planning director of a mid-sized Colorado city wanted to keep driving until he found a place where people valued unique neighborhoods, storefronts and homes as much as the distinct and unchangeable contours of the landscape.

“That’s why I came to Bainbridge,” he said.

Byrne now helms the City of Bainbridge Island’s Department of Planning and Community Development. He took over this month after a stop-gap stint served by Jim Harris while the city sought a replacement for Larry Frazier, who retired last summer.

“What I like about Bainbridge Island is the strong sense of place,” he said. “When you’re on Bainbridge, you know you’re not in some other spot. It’s unlike any other place. It’s unique. It’s not like Colorado, where there’s a loss of that.”

Despite the visionary experience that spurred him to move, Byrne says he comes to Bainbridge with no vision for the island’s future.

“You don’t hire a vision,” he said. “To me, a community gives expression to its own vision. My role as a planner is to bring a skill set (and) help integrate decisions on a whole variety of subjects – the environment, social structures, transportation, the economy.”

Byrne bested 33 applicants for the city’s top planning position. He came to Bainbridge from Fort Collins, Colo., where he served as that city’s executive director of community planning and environmental services for over 15 years.

There, he oversaw four city departments – advance planning, neighborhood and building services, current planning and natural resources – and a staff of about 90.

Byrne helped preserve 35,000 acres of open space in and around Fort Collins during his tenure as planning director. Conserving almost 55 square miles – two times the size of Bainbridge Island – is Byrne’s proudest achievement in the planning field.

But it wasn’t his idea. The notion to preserve vast stretches of rivers, wetlands, forest, prairie and agricultural lands was borne out of a community vision that Byrne helped translate into tangible policy and management structures.

Through state support and a dedicated portion of city sales tax, Fort Collins’ natural areas program employs about 35 full-time workers, including five parkland rangers.

Before his stint in Fort Collins, Byrne managed the Tucson office of Reynolds Metal Development Company from 1988-91, and previously managed the community development division for the city of Eugene, Ore.

He holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Oregon, and an undergraduate degree in political science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

He also served in the United States Air Force, earning the rank of captain during the Vietnam War.

“I was an intelligence officer when I left the Air Force,” he said. “There’s not a lot of calling for that civilian life. I thought, ‘What do I do?’ I was eligible for the G.I. Bill, so I decided to go back to school. Urban planning seemed like a pretty exciting field.”

The work of an urban planner wasn’t something Byrne dreamed of as a child.

“At that age, I was more interested in fishin’ than community development,” he said.

Yet Byrne, the son of a military man, tried out many fishing holes in a wide variety of communities. He got a taste of life in Texas, where he was born, central Alaska, Alabama, Maryland, New Mexico, Virginia and even Japan. He attended three different first grades and four high schools.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I took a class in college and I got really fascinated in the theory of how cities grow and develop – just the dynamics of it.”

Byrne is particularly fascinated with the urban growth experiment transpiring on Bainbridge.

“There’s a lot of pressures from growth, clearly,” he said. “But (Bainbridge) is dealing with it in sophisticated ways that are really on the cutting edge.”

Byrne highlighted city-led efforts to conserve shorelines, swap development incentives for environmental protections and increase downtown vitality.

“Downtowns are very special places for planners,” he said. “They’re the center of arts, culture, government. They’re transportation hubs and financial centers. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on there at a very intense level.”

Downtowns also need people living in them – not just using them.

“Having people downtown means they’ll care about downtown,” he said. “They’ll want it stable and they’ll fight for it.”

Byrne commended the efforts of the Winslow Tomorrow planning project, which he said is wading into “very fragile, very complex” issues, like parking.

“That one’s complex and causes a lot of friction, doesn’t it?” he said. “But sometimes having a parking problem is one of the best problems to have. I’ve seen cities that don’t have a parking problem. In Kansas and Texas I’ve seen downtowns where there’s no problem finding a place to park. It’s because there’s nothing going on.”

While Byrne espouses no vision for Bainbridge, the new south-end resident is clearly dreaming of a few practical dreams.

“Downtown neighborhoods need services like grocery stores, a dry cleaner and a good place to buy a hammer,” he said.

When informed Winslow recently lost its hardware store, Byrne flashed a wry smile.

“Doesn’t mean there can’t be another one.”