The Pagosa Springs Town Council will be meeting tonight at 5pm to consider several regular ‘bookkeeping’ items, as is typical of Town Council meetings.
Reports from staff. A summary of sales tax collections. Approval of liquor licenses.
The Council will also consider special treatment for a local corporation known as the Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership.
From the June 5 agenda:
The Town does not have a mechanism in its municipal code to waive building permit fees, development impact fees, and planning/land use fees for developments on Town owned property. For example, the Town has partnered with the Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership for the [growing domes] project on Town-owned property at Centennial Park. They are requesting fee waivers of certain fees, as this is a public-private partnership that benefits the Town and the community.
In addition, improvements on Town property in parks, trails, etc. should not be charged fees, as this adds to the overall cost of the project and costs taxpayers more. The code needs to be updated to provide this potential for waivers for intergovernmental and public-private partnerships on Town-owned property and to exempt the Town from paying fees on its own improvements…
The ordinance had a first reading last month. This will be a second reading of the ordinance.
Unfortunately, the ordinance might be in violation of Colorado state statutes. That happens occasionally with local governments, here and elsewhere — violations of state law.
I am not a fan of the Town’s ‘impact fees’ — special fees collected only from new commercial or residential developments, supposedly to help mitigate the ‘impacts’ of growth. According to my research into past Town finances, however, the Town has used the collected fees to address some of its poorly maintained streets. Another possible violation of Colorado law? From the Impact Fee section of the Colorado Revised Statutes:
No impact fee or other similar development charge shall be imposed to remedy any deficiency in capital facilities that exists without regard to the proposed development.
For example. The Town collected more than $400,000 in ‘impact fees’ from the Walmart Corporation, and then used the money to fix some downtown streets located 4 miles away from the new development.
But the other question relates to waiving impact fees for a private corporation — the GGP — under Colorado law. The Town’s impact fees were adopted to align with a study performed in 2006. That study states, pretty clearly:
Exemptions from the Fee
Impact Fee programs commonly provide that the Board of County Commissioners or the Town may waive any and all portions of the Fee if it can be determined that a proposed project will not impact any facility for which the Fee is collected. Exemption criteria should be established by the County and Town at the time of enactment of the fee ordinance(s) and/or resolution(s).
Ooops. The Town forgot to exempt “private structures on public land” (such as the GGP domes) when they wrote the original ordinance.
Examples of the types of development that may be fully or partially exempted from the Fee include additions to existing residential and nonresidential structures, construction of affordable housing, replacement of damaged or destroyed structures, public facilities, and agricultural storage facilities.
The privately-owned GGP domes don’t seem to fit any of the above criteria.
Hopefully our Daily Post readers understand that the editor is not philosophically opposed to ‘public-private partnerships’ per se. But the relationship between the GGP and the Town is somewhat complicated. The GGP has indeed been a ‘public-private partnership’ from the very beginning in 2009, when then-mayor Ross Aragon convinced the Town Council to donate the central portion of a riverside public park — Centennial Park — to this daringly innovative “geothermal greenhouse project.”
The Town also donated up to 100 gallons per minute of the Town’s precious geothermal water to the exclusive use of the GGP. The GGP then signed a lease suggesting that they would have their three proposed greenhouses fully operational within three years. You can download that lease here.
The group failed to meet that three-year deadline. The total project was estimated to cost $1.1 million — and three years after signing the lease agreement, the GGP hadn’t raised even one-tenth of that amount. But that didn’t cause the Town Council to hesitate, or question the wisdom of the project. Instead, the Town Council approved a new lease in 2012, giving the private group another three years to build their three greenhouses. Then, a year later, the Town donated $25,000 to the corporation. (…while GGP board member Ross Aragon was still sitting as Mayor, incidentally.) You can download the 2012 lease here.
The corporation then collected $75,000 in government subsidies from two water conservation boards.
In 2014, the GGP came before the Town Council to ask for additional favors. As part of their request, they showed the Council a 20-page “business plan” which contained almost no verifiable financial information concerning the cost of constructing and operating the project. (You can download the “business plan” here.) Despite the lack of financial information, the Council agreed to fund new restrooms at the still-vacant greenhouse site, at a cost of about $80,000.
(For comparison: When I first moved to Pagosa Springs in 1993, my first house cost $52,000. It included restrooms as part of the package.)
Following the Town’s investments into the project — and the investments by other Colorado government agencies — the GGP has now been able to install its second and third ‘geothermal greenhouse’ foundations, and the second greenhouse dome is in the process of installation. If you walk through Centennial Park in 2018, you will see some attractive landscaping going in.
But what, exactly, is the relationship between the private corporation known as the “Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership” and the taxpayers of Pagosa Springs? Or rather, what constitutes a “fair and equitable treatment” of private companies within our community — and also “fair and equitable treatment” of the taxpayers themselves?
We know the GGP has benefitted to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidies. But last September, Daily Post contributor Cynda Green attempted to walk through Centennial Park during one of our prized community events — the annual Colorfest Balloon Ascension — and found the (public?) park and the $80,000 restrooms fenced off to anyone not willing to pay an admission fee to the Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership.
You can read that story here.
Do we have a problem with “special treatment” here in our community?
Or… should we merely get rid of some illogical (and maybe oppressive) fees and taxes levied on development?