The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners heard from a group of Aspen Springs residents at their morning Work Session on Tuesday morning.
The first person to address the BOCC, regarding the high cost of building a home in Aspen Springs was Mark Disbrow, pastor at Amazing Grace Community Church. Pastor Disbrow had addressed the BOCC at other times over the past couple of years, on the topic of affordable housing — something that has essentially been outlawed by the County government, with the help of various state regulatory agencies. Or so it might seem.
Pastor Disbrow: “My proposal for you to consider, it’s very specific, and I think it answers many of the concerns that usually come up in this discussion. So to but it shortly and succinctly, if you would create a policy that would allow building permit fees to be waived for small, modest homes 1127 square feet or smaller…”
Commissioner Michael Whiting: “Why 1127 square feet? That’s really specific.”
Pastor Disbrow: “If you look at the County’s building permit fee chart, that hits a $100,000 value.”
We could certainly ask Commissioner Whiting a similar question. Why does the County assign a value of $100,000 to any house measuring 1127 square feet? But of course, government is allowed to make these kinds of rather arbitrary valuations, for the sake of fairness and efficiency.
What Pastor Disbrow was suggesting to the BOCC on Tuesday is that our community desperately needs more affordable housing, and for many families and individuals, a $100,000 loan is the most they can reasonably expect to qualify for, in terms of a home mortgage.
When I visited the Jim Smith Realty website this morning, the Pagosa Multiple Listing Service lists two dwellings for sale and priced at $100,000 or less. That’s out of 308 homes, condos and mobile homes currently on the market. Two homes.
The MLS lists 62 homes priced over $1 million.
According to Pastor Disbrow, Archuleta County’s building permit fee for a $100,000 house is $993. Before you can begin to (legally) build a very modest home in Archuleta County, you must pay the County $993. If the BOCC could modify their regulations, and waive those fees for folks trying to build an affordable house, it would make the process just slightly more affordable for a struggling family. And the process would not require tracking of deed restrictions, or other administrative headaches.
The BOCC, on Tuesday, had concerns about this proposal. Like, what if it were a wealthy person building a $100,000 house? We’d be giving a government subsidy to a wealthy person. Wouldn’t that be a problem? Pastor Disbrow smiled and noted that wealthy people don’t typically build $100,000 homes, here in America, so the problem doesn’t really exist.
In the end, the BOCC sounded like they were going to continue considering the proposal, at some future date. But we didn’t get around to discussing the elephant in the room. Septic systems.
Granted, it might be helpful to waive a $993 building permit fee for a person trying to afford a $100,000 house. But that same person has many other fees to pay, if they are building in, say, the Pagosa Lakes area, where Property Owner Association fees and requirements and Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) fees and regulations may add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new home.
The most affordable parcels of land are, generally, in the more remote neighborhoods in the county, such as Aspen Springs. And it might be affordable to build on those parcels, if you weren’t required, by San Juan Basin Public Health, to install a septic system. Where a County building permit fee might run you $993, an engineered and properly permitted septic system, as required by San Juan Basin Public Health can easily add $20,000 to the cost of your home in Aspen Springs.
Over the past few decades, the treatment of human waste has become progressively more complicated… and more expensive… thanks to evolving state and local regulations.
Has it really become “better?” Or has it merely become more complicated… and expensive?
Here in downtown Pagosa Springs, where I live, homes are currently required to hook up to the municipal sewer system. The operation of that system costs each home nearly $40 a month, just for the treatment process. Nearly $500 a year. I hear the Town plans to increase those fees. But there are also other costs. I’ve seen one estimate that each person uses about 25 gallons of water per day just to flush toilets, and we have to pay for that water.
Then there are the environmental costs, downstream.
From WaterEncyclopedia.com:
Nutrient-enriched runoff from… the midwestern United States is the primary cause of the well-known Gulf of Mexico “Dead Zone.” Half of the US farms are located in the Mississippi River Basin, whose entire drainage basin empties into the gulf. Much of the nitrogen reaching the gulf is from agricultural fertilizers, with lesser amounts from residential fertilizers and other sources. The water of the 20,000-kilometer (7,728-square-mile) Dead Zone, extending from the mouth of the Mississippi River Basin to beyond the Texas border, has so little oxygen that essentially no marine life exists.
This human-generated pollution is causing ‘eutrophication’ of the costal waters surrounding developed counties around the globe. The ‘development’ in those ‘developed countries’ includes flushing toilets, and wastewater that now carries tons of excreted (and untreated) pharmaceutical drugs, and other wastes, into our oceans.
Potentially, billions of flushing toilets. Just to be clear, the greatest damage to our planet’s water — rivers, lakes, oceans — is being caused by fertilizer-tainted runoff and by industrial wastes pumped into our rivers. But our flush toilets are not helping the situation.
If human-accelerated eutrophication is not reversed, the entire coastal ecosystem ultimately may be changed… Further, nutrient enrichment and the associated eutrophication in coastal waters is implicated in some harmful algal blooms, in which certain species of algae produce biotoxins (natural poisons) that can be transferred through the food web, potentially harming higher-order consumers such as marine mammals and humans…
Your flushing toilet might be part of a huge and growing environmental disaster. But it’s my understanding that the Colorado State Plumbing Board requires every home built in Colorado to have a flushing toilet. Whether you want one or not.
Out in Aspen Springs — where folks live without a central water system — the requirement to have a flushing toilet means that you must install a septic system. Then we have the problem of providing 25 gallons of water per person, per day, just to flush the toilet.
Historically, Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County has been home to people living simply, and without a lot of money. The economy was never based on mining and mineral extraction — the type of industry that generated, here in Colorado, wealthy communities and streets lined with fine, brick buildings and mansions with elegant yards.
Historically, outhouses were the solution to the problem of human waste in Archuleta County. Did those outhouses actually cause water quality problems, and threats to human health? I wonder, because — as my friend implied, in the email we shared yesterday in Part Seven — an outhouse does not involve 25 gallons of tainted water per person, per day, entering the environment.
For a little community like Pagosa Springs, that would be 12 million gallons of tainted water per year.