We’re all unsatisfied.
I mean, pretty much every one of us. But about different things.
Some of us want newer and bigger government buildings, so we can tear down the old buildings, or leave them abandoned, or ‘repurpose’ them. Some of us want more government revenue. There’s never enough money.
Some of us want our governments that operate efficiently, within their means, without asking for tax increases.
Some of us just want to be left alone… and for everybody to get along.
Archuleta School District (ASD) held a special School Board meeting last night, to consider three important issues. The first agenda item was quickly dispensed with, when the Board agreed to share a portion of any future “Mill Levy Override” with locally-authorized charter schools. (We have one locally-authorized charter school at the moment: Pagosa Peak Open School.)
The next two agenda items gave the Board pause, to carefully consider the implications of their actions.
Twenty local volunteers — a ‘tax increase advisory task force’ — met last Monday to devise recommendations for the Board. The volunteer group recommended that the District ask the voters, this coming November, for a “Mill Levy Override” to fund higher teacher salaries, school resource officers, and full-day Kindergarten for all families. If approved by the voters, the increase mill levy would raise about $1.7 million a year.
Some details are yet to be worked out. (Would administrators also get salary increases, for example? Would custodians and bus drivers share in the bounty?) But we can feel confident, at this point, that the total ask will be close to $1.7 million per year.
The task force also provided input on a separate ASD proposal, to seek a $50 million bond for a new elementary school and for renovations to the high school and middle school. The volunteer advisors voted to fund only a new elementary school — for which we’ve heard cost estimates of about $33 million, plus debt service — and to put the other school renovations off into the future.
Half of the task force wanted the School Board to pursue the elementary school bond issue this November. The other half wanted the District to wait until November 2019.
The four School Board members present last night agreed to wait until 2019 (at least) before asking for a ‘new elementary school’ bond. So it appears that the Mill Levy Override will be the sole tax increase request coming from ASD this November.
On Tuesday, we’d heard that the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners will also be asking for millions of dollars in new taxes in November. Not for sure, but probably. The County will need about $3 million per year in additional taxes (according to my pocket calculator) in order to build a new Sheriff’s Office and County Jail similar to the one proposed (and defeated) last November.
So about $4.7 million per year in new taxes, between the two government proposals. That comes to about $390 per year for every man, woman and child in Archuleta County. (You will probably not hear that number quoted by our local governments.)
We’re all unsatisfied. Pretty much every one of us.
As we discussed yesterday in Part One, the Pagosa Springs Town Council spent about an hour in a special work session on Tuesday afternoon, discussing vacant properties owned by the Town government. The vacant, publicly-owned parcels include the Lagoons site and the Trujillo Road site, as discussed in Part One. Good sites for affordable housing, perhaps? Good sites for a brand new Town maintenance shop?
Other properties discussed on Tuesday by the Town Council included the 2-acre South Pagosa Park property (about half of which is currently used as a municipal park…
Could the undeveloped, southern half of this park property be used for housing? There are three ‘affordable housing’ developments within half a block of this parcel. Do we want to congregate our ‘affordable housing’ in one particular area of downtown? Are there covenants in place that require this parcel to remain a ‘park’?
Another downtown property is Bell Tower Park, which is about 0.25 acres facing on Highway 160 in the middle of downtown…
The Bell Tower Park is adjacent to parcel previously occupied by the Old Adobe, which burned down in 2016. (The Adobe building still existed in the image above.) Adding another quarter acre to the 3/4 acre Adobe site might make some project more attractive to a prospective developer.
Once upon a time, it was assumed that people could live near the places where they were employed and where services were located nearby. When I moved to downtown Pagosa in 1993, I was pleased to find housing within easy walking distance of three school buildings, dentist offices, grocery shopping, government services, clothing stores, variety stores, churches. Since that time, the general trend has been to tear down or convert residential homes in the downtown area, and encourage commercial construction.
Businesses typically locate close to their customers, when possible. Or at least, that’s the way things worked, once upon a time. (Obvious, Amazon operates on a different model.)
But how about this Bell Tower property? A quarter-acre site in the heart of our downtown that accommodates… a public bathroom, and a bell that never rings? Is there possibly a ‘better use’ for this parcel? Like, for example, residential rental housing?
Then we have a 2-acre North 4th Street property, which the Town purchased in 2004 expressly for affordable housing.
The Town paid $43,000 for the parcel, which is mostly a very steep hillside and (in my humble opinion) probably unsuitable for low-cost housing due to its terrain issues. But at least someone made $43,000 selling it to us.
We also have this Town-owned parcel:
The Town maintenance shop, used by the Streets Department and the Parks Department — and a couple of other Town departments — occupies the east half of this 2-acre parcel. That is to say, the Town shop currently occupies about one acre of land.
When the Town hired the architecture firm of Reynolds Ash & Associates to quantify the need for a new Town shop, the firm pulled out their measuring tape and notebook and proposed that what the Town actually needed was a $9 million facility that would occupy up to five acres.
To put that parcel size into perspective, a five-acre parcel in the R22 zone of downtown Pagosa Springs could legally contain 110 affordable housing units.
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.