The sales tax information for August of 2018 has been released, with sales tax collections coming in at about 5.7 percent lower than August of last year.
— from the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN, Oct. 18
I was delighted by several comments delivered by Pagosa Springs Town Manager Andrea Phillips during her October 2 presentation of the Town’s draft 2019 budget — a budget that will be discussed further by the Town Council in the coming weeks.
Ms. Phillips was describing a 2019 budget that looks much like the Town’s 2018 budget, but with a few (perhaps significant) changes.
“We are going back to what Council has said you want to focus on, which is ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance.’ So that means street maintenance, parks maintenance, maintenance of buildings and equipment, etc.
“So we didn’t put a lot of trail projects and things like that into the budget, other than design and engineering so we can construct them in later years.
“As it is, without some of those trail projects that we’ve been discussing previously, we’re still planning to spend into reserves by $750,000. That still leaves us with a fund balance of $659,000 which is more than our TABOR Reserve and our three-month Operating Reserve, but it’s definitely spend down our reserves.
“Coming up in our budget work sessions, there will be some tough choice that we have to make.”
As a taxpayer and as a town resident, I approve of these comments coming from the Town Manager, in reference to the 2019 budget. Over the past 25 years, while living in downtown Pagosa, I’ve watched our numerous government entities expand and grow their facilities and infrastructure, with little heed to the fact that facilities and infrastructure must be maintained once they goes into service.
We learned earlier this year that the Archuleta School District (ASD) does not have a dedicated Facilities Maintenance budget, even though they have expansive facilities, playgrounds and playing fields to maintain. Within the past couple of years, ASD finally adopted a long-range maintenance plan for its fleet of school buses, but apparently does not yet have any such long-range plan for its actual buildings and other facilities.
Nor does the Archuleta County government have a long-range plan for facilities maintenance, as far as I know. The County’s overall plan seems to be, “Let the facilities go without proper maintenance, then abandon them, and then beg the taxpayers for a tax increase to build shiny new — and even larger — facilities.”
The Town government, meanwhile, has a ten-year ‘Capital Improvement Plan’ that includes a detailed schedule for facility maintenance as well as new construction. That plan appears as part of the proposed 2019 budget document — along with a new Pavement Management Plan.
You can download the Town’s Capital Improvement Plan here.
You can download the Town’s Pavement Management Plan here.
But let’s get back to some of the tough choices the Town Council will have to make.
Ms. Phillips:
“For the Hermosa Street portion of the River Walk Trail, we’re planning to continue the design and engineering, but pushing actual construction off into 2020 or later…
“Safe Routes to School, with the South 8th Street sidewalk connection — that’s not included in this budget because we don’t yet know what we’re doing with that…
“We’re focusing quite a bit on parks maintenance…
“For the Harman Hill phase [of the Town to Lakes Trail,] again that’s something that we’re proposing that we push off into a later year. We think it’s a critical project, but that segment alone is $1.7 million…
“And I think something to keep in mind with our capital budget. Once you subtract the debt incurred on the South 8th Street reconstruction project, plus the front end loader and the vac truck, the Visitor Center lease — once you take all that debt off of the top, and pay for the maintenance folks who are working in the different departments taking care of these assets, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of money for actual new projects.”
This kind of brutal honesty — about the effects of debt-funded facilities and infrastructure, and the maintenance required to keep them up — has been absent from nearly every government budget discussion I’ve covered over the past 14 years. To hear it at a public meeting in Town Hall was, to me, like a warm spring breeze after a long frigid winter.
With the decline of its ranching and timber industries since the 1960s, Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County were faced with the problem of economic survival, and the community leaders sought to address that problem by exploiting an obvious local resource: scenic beauty. We would follow in the footsteps of other Colorado mountain towns and become a premier recreational wonderland and tourist haven.
No, we wouldn’t necessarily have good-paying jobs, because the hospitality industry doesn’t generally pay well. But at least we’d have jobs. And heck, you could still buy a cute little house for less than $100,000.
Sure enough, the approach seemed to pan out. Archuleta County soon doubled its population, based on little more than scenic beauty and recreational opportunities. Property values also doubled.
Of course, it cost the Town government a pretty penny to help make this happen. According to published Town budgets, our Town government has spent a sizable amount of tax revenues on recreation and tourism over the past ten years. If you add up the money spent between 2006 and 2016 by the Town Recreation Department, Parks Department, Tourism Board and the Community Center, you will get a figure that totals approximately $20.4 million.
About $2 million per year, on average.
But the engines that once seemed to be driving economic prosperity — tourism and recreation — turned out to have a major defect, once the Great Recession hit. The community lost its ability to provide decent housing for its workforce.
Between 2006 and 2016 — while the Town was spending $2 million a year on tourism and recreation — they spent a total of about $39,500 on “affordable housing.” About $4,000 a year, if you average it out.
We found out this week that the sales tax collections in August were down $5.7 percent from the previous year — a decline of nearly $60,000. This might be a fluke, and mean nothing at all about the economy. Or it might be a very important indicator.
Like, time for a change of direction?