The Pagosa Springs Town Council met for a day-long retreat this past Saturday at the Eco-Luxe Hotel, to discuss the numerous and sometimes expensive projects they might decide to tackle over the next couple of years. The lively discussion was facilitated by consultant Yvonne Wilcox, who made use of maybe 200 yellow, handwritten Post-It notes to keep the conversation moving in the right direction.
The process was observed by a couple of media reporters: Pagosa Springs SUN reporter Randi Pierce and myself — and also, at one point, by Daily Post columnist Cynda Green.
Other than those three members of the larger community, the Council’s discussion proceeded without any public exposure, or public input. I find that fact worth mentioning, considering that much of the Council’s conversation focused on ways to get the public more involved in Town decisions.
For example: Should we be doing more public opinion surveys, on a variety of subjects?
That question implies that public opinion surveys are a valuable tool for public engagement. But… are they really?
The Town government recently conducted a public opinion survey around the subject of “Parks & Recreation.” The survey is now concluded and the results have been tabulated.
The Town of Pagosa Springs was originally platted back in 1883 — much to the displeasure, it seems, of the local Indian tribes who had lived in the area for centuries — and the original plat map shows a couple of large parks, to be developed near the Great Pagosa Hot Springs. So we know that the community was destined to have a Parks Department nearly a decade before the Town government was actually incorporated in 1891.
Human beings have been playing games, and “recreating,” since time immemorial, but recreation has not always been funded by the taxpayers. Regulations requiring American cities and towns to develop and maintain recreational amenities and activities seem to have begun arriving in the early 1900s, starting most notably perhaps with the 1908 “Massachusetts Playground Law,” requiring every city of 10,000 to maintain one playground and one additional for every 20,000 population. Ohio passed a law the same year giving School Boards power to establish and maintain Summer or Vacation Schools — and playgrounds. In 1911, Minnesota passed a law authorizing cities of over 50,000 residents to issue and sell bonds to pay for children’s playgrounds.
All of which has led up to the Town of Pagosa Springs 2018 Survey. The Town was clearly giving the larger public a chance to indicate the directions in which we would like government expansion to proceed, with an eye to “more recreational amenities”.
I might mention in passing that I obtained a copy of the Survey from a member of the Pagosa Pickleball Club, one of the more active and well-organized recreational clubs in Archuleta County. If you have never played pickleball, and you have time on your hands, you might want to give it a try.
It appears that the Pickleball Club made a concerted effort to have their members fill out this Town survey, and we might assume that at least some of them eagerly checked the boxes indicating the need for more taxpayer-funded pickleball courts.
Many of our Daily Post readers may have participated in the recent “Public Opinion Survey” mailed out to voters by the Archuleta School District (ASD). We offered a very brief overview of those survey questions in a previous editorial.
We didn’t discuss, however, why and how the School District conducted that survey, other than to mention that the responses could be mailed or delivered by hand to the ASD administration office. The basic ideas behind the survey questions were developed in a closed-door task force meeting, facilitated by Superintendent Linda Reed. (When asked why the ideas were developed in a closed-door meeting, Ms. Reed explained that she wanted the task force volunteers to be able to speak freely without undue exposure to media reporters or the general public.)
The task force survey ideas were then forwarded to the investment bankers at George K. Baum, who have been working with the School District, advising them on the best ways to get tax increases approved by the voters. (I’m not clear, at this point, whether the consultants at George K. Baum are billing the taxpayers for these helpful services, or whether the investment bankers are also working as volunteers.)
The George K. Baum organization (“Investment Bankers Since 1928”) has participated in other Pagosa Springs tax increase efforts, presumably in hopes that those tax increases will involve large amounts of bonded debt, and that an organization like George K. Baum could then step up and sell the necessary bonds to its clients, in a helpful manner and for a small fee.
We’re going to share some of the results from that ASD survey effort, knowing that one of the main goals in conducting this survey was to take the community’s temperature on the question of increased taxes for School District operations. The investment consultants wanted to help ASD gain a better understanding of how Archuleta County voters viewed the idea of education-directed tax increases.
The last time ASD talked the voters into a tax increase, in 1996, the project was a new high school facility on vacant property at the south end of town. That new facility was built around a couple of central concepts, it seems to me. One concept was that every high school graduate should go to college. The new Pagosa Springs High School was constructed without the inclusion of a vocational education component, even though a large percentage of graduates — a majority, in fact — would never go on to earn a college degree.
The other concept, obvious in the design of the new school, was that high school athletics was much more important than vocational education.
How has that worked out for the majority of graduates? Maybe not so well?