Andy Davis had called me on Sunday afternoon, to share what he’d heard from Archuleta County about the scheduled government-sponsored cleanup at 187 Bill’s Place in Aspen Springs. The County had told Mr. Davis that their hired contractor would be showing up at 8:30am the following day, Monday, October 29. Mr. Davis believed the contractor might be Hart Construction, and that one or more Archuleta County Sheriff’s deputies might also be in attendance on Monday morning — just to make sure everything went smoothly, I suppose.
I told Mr. Davis I’d like to come by the property and see how his cleanup was proceeding, and take some photos. He told me I was welcome to drop by. He said he expected to be mostly done with the property cleanup by Monday morning.
I’d taken some photos, back in September, of the piles of trash on the property. The trash had been left behind when former owner Warren Goodman deeded the property to Verna Davis, the mother of Andy Davis.
Twenty years worth of trash, by my estimate. And six dilapidated travel trailers.
And a Medicine Circle that Warren Goodman believed was helping to protect the planet from greedy corporations and politicians.
The property transfer to Ms. Verna Davis had taken place in mid-July, when the Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners — Steve Wadley, Ronnie Maez and Michael Whiting — were already in the midst of a legal process that apparently would have ended up with the County government cleaning up — and owning — Mr. Goodman’s property. At considerable cost to the community’s taxpayers.
The basic process, as explained by County Attorney Todd Starr at several BOCC meetings over the past year, might have gone like this (as I understand it):
1. The County government would claim, in a court of law, that Warren Goodman was in violation of the County’s 2008 Nuisance Ordinance, and that Mr. Goodman had no ability or intention to remove the trash and junk from 187 Bill’s Place.
2. The County would request the court’s permission to enter Mr. Goodman’s property and physically remove the trash and junk, using either County staff or a hired contractor. The estimated cost for this cleanup was about $23,000. The six travel trailers in which Mr. Goodman’s family had been living would be stored at the County Landfill for 30 days, to allow Mr. Goodman to move them to another location, should he so desire.
3. The County would then place a lien on the property’s title — a lien of perhaps $23,000 — and would demand payment. (I don’t fully understand liens, so this part is a bit fuzzy for me.) The court would then grant ownership of the property to the County government, and the County would sell the property to a private buyer. (Mr. Goodman’s next-door neighbors had already expressed their interest in purchasing the property, in a public meeting.) Since the real estate value of the now-sanitized property would likely be less than the amount of the lien, the County would lose money on the deal, but at least the trash and junk would be gone from the neighborhood.
The transfer of title from Mr. Goodman to Ms. Davis, and the decision by Ms. Davis to hire her son Andy to commence the trash removal, could have given the BOCC pause, and allowed them to consider ‘Plan B.’ But it seems that our current BOCC does not like to change a plan, once it’s been made.
As of Sunday afternoon, it sounded like the County was going to proceed with Plan A. Andy Davis was expecting a contractor to arrive at his gate on Monday morning at 8:30am, presumably accompanied by one or more Sheriff’s deputies.
When my partner Cynda Green and I arrived at the property on Monday morning, Mr. Davis told us he’d brought doughnuts for the deputies.
I wandered around the property — a beautiful spot, except for the remaining piles of as-yet-unprocessed trash — and took a few photos. Mr. Davis had made some headway, working basically alone with an antique front end loader, and had managed to remove three of the six dilapidated travel trailers.
Here’s a photo of Cynda standing where one of the trailers had once stood.
Here’s one of Andy Davis and neighbor Steve Keno supervising the burn pit on Monday morning.
Had Mr. Davis actually made significant progress? It might seem so. Here’s a photo of the property’s main trash pile, as it had looked on September 21.
And here’s how that same spot looked on Monday morning, October 21.
The property cleanup was obviously not fully completed. Speaking as someone with little experience cleaning up trashed properties, I would estimate that perhaps half of the trash and junk I witnessed on September 21 had been removed from the property — but much of the remaining trash was already sorted into piles.
For example, this pile of “recyclable” plastic trash. And a flatbed trailer filled with (possibly recyclable) metal junk.
Mr. Davis apologized for not having more of the cleanup done. He told us that someone had vandalized his front end loader — had stolen the spark plug wires, and put dirt in the gas tank — and he was waiting for parts, so he could get back to work.
8:30am came and went, and no County-funded contractor equipment made an appearance at 187 Bill’s Place. I returned to the property later in the afternoon, to find Andy Davis still at work, but again no sign of a government-funded cleanup.
As Mr. Davis had noted at a BOCC meeting a couple of weeks ago, he’s managed — on behalf of his mother, over the past three months — to get more of the trash removed from 187 Bill’s Place than the County government, backed by millions of dollars in resources and its vast legal authority, was able to get done in the past nine years.
Time for Plan B?