You might say: the world slowly turned upside down for the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) between 2009 and 2012.
In 2009, PAWSD was still collecting an hugely unpopular “Water Resource Fee” from the few development projects taking place in Archuleta County during the Great Depression, and was still planning to build the hugely unpopular $357 million Dry Gulch Reservoir. By 2012, the Dry Gulch project had been (permanently?) mothballed by a new, fiscally-conservative PAWSD board, and the Water Resource Fee was being refunded to the folks who had paid it.
Of course, the world had, likewise, turned upside down for many Pagosa Springs residents. During that same period, Archuleta County experienced one of the highest rates of foreclosure filings in Colorado.
But for PAWSD, the real change had actually happened in 2002 — and no one had really noticed it. The two key water districts serving Archuleta County — PAWSD and the San Juan Water Conservancy District — may have noticed the change, but if they did, they never said a word about it. Nope, not a word.
In 2001, the PAWSD folks had treated about 750 million gallon of water, and had delivered about 520 million gallons to its customers. (The other 230 million gallons had gone missing, presumably through a seriously leaking pipeline system.)
Then, in 2002, Pagosa Springs and southwest Colorado experienced historically significant drought conditions, and we all cut back on our water use. That year, PAWSD treated only about 520 million gallons, and sold only about 360 million gallons.
That represented a drop of nearly 38 percent in the number of gallons sold.
That huge drop in 2002 is visible in the chart shown below. The chart was developed in 2012, by the volunteers of the PAWSD Water Supply Community Work Group. The yellow line represents “water treated.” The blue line represents “treated water sold.” The red line represents “treated water that mysteriously disappeared.” The years begin in 2001 (“1”) and end in 2011 (“11”).
As we can see, the yellow line — the amount of treated water produced — bounced up and down like a roller coaster between 2001 and 2011. But the amount of water actually used by the people of the PAWSD district produced a much less volatile blue line. Basically, the PAWSD customers cut their water demand in 2002 by about 37 percent — and never went back to their old water-wasting ways.
The Archuleta County population increased by about 14 percent between 2001 and 2011, but the demand for PAWSD water remained about the same. Which, when you think about it, suggests that each average household was using less water in 2011 than they were in 2002, during the drought.
While we were changing our water-wasting ways, PAWSD was also undergoing changes.
In 2001, at the height of water sales in the PAWSD district, our water district collected about $1.1 million in service charges while selling 510 million treated gallons.
In 2010, PAWSD collected about $2.8 million, on sales of 373 million treated gallons.
These numbers come from a spreadsheet provided to the Water Supply Community Work Group in 2011, which you can download here.
According to their 2018 budget, PAWSD collected about $3.5 million in service charges, from customers during 2017 — more that three times what they collected back in 2001. While collecting that generous bounty, PAWSD sold about 327 million gallons of treated water (according to page 5 of the 2018 Drought Management Plan, which you can download here.) That’s 12 percent less water than was sold in 2010.
Maybe it’s no wonder, that the number of gallons sold to a growing number of residents has stayed essentially flat since 2002. We can no longer afford the water that belongs to all of us.
As I look through PAWSD’s 2018 Drought Management Plan, I see no evidence of a similarly dark future for PAWSD customers as the result of our next drought. The Management Plan suggests that the huge price increases that will be instituted by PAWSD — if we ever reach Level 3 or Level 4 — will be merely temporary, and everything will revert back to normal once Mother Nature decides once again to send us the rain and snow to which we’ve become accustomed.
Can we trust that belief? That the price increases won’t become ‘permanent’?
As we saw back in Part Two, PAWSD has many valuable water rights, owned, in theory, by the residents of the district. If all of those diversion and storage rights were accessible year round, they would equal about 12 times the amount of water that PAWSD currently sells each year.
You might say that — in theory — we have no shortage of raw water.
But somewhere between Mother Nature’s gifts from the sky and your water tap, the cost of less water has become higher and higher. Part of that increased price is the result of a decision by a previous PAWSD board to put the district customers $9 million in debt for the purchase of the Dry Gulch reservoir site. Back in 2012, when I was writing about that “zombie reservoir project,” I asked one of the primary researchers from the Water Supply Community Work Group — Bruce Dryburgh — to provide a quote for my article. He responded via email.
“After 18 months of investigation and deliberation, the Water Supply Community Group voted unanimously to recommend to the Board of Directors of PAWSD that Dry Gulch be cancelled and that no more money be expended.
“The continued weak economy and lack of population growth in Archuleta County confirms that the Water Group made the correct decision. Dry Gulch was a bad decision then, and still is.”
Over the last few years, our population growth has picked up slightly, and some folks tell us that the economy has also ‘improved.’ There are many possible ways to calculate the health of a rural economy, and some are better than others. The number of tourist visits, is one way. The amount of taxes collected by the Town and County governments is another way. The unemployment rate is yet another indicator.
If we were to judge by the amount of money PAWSD makes, selling each gallon of water to us — the district customers — we might suggest that the economy is doing fabulously well.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.