The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners will be meeting this morning, Thursday, November 8, to discuss the County budget for 2019. It’s not a small budget, although I expect to hear some grouching and grumbling from the commissioners about their failure to win a sales tax increase — again in 2018 — with the same jail plan that lost at the polls last year.
When you’re running a government agency, you can never have enough money. Even a $33 million budget is not enough.
It’s perhaps fortunate for the BOCC that their hard-working Finance Department, led by Finance Director Larry Walton, laid out the preliminary budget last month based on the assumption that the “Justice System” tax increase would in fact fail at the polls, and that the BOCC would have to figure out a way to build a new jail with existing revenues, plus whatever grants and “certificates of participation” they might be able to finagle.
One of the ideas everyone seemed to take for granted, during Mr. Walton’s budget presentation last month, was that — once the sales tax increase was rejected — the big, expensive facility designed by the architect team of Brad Ash and Bob Johnson would need to be downsized, to fit into the County’s $33 million annual budget.
How small? That’s the question. Maybe smaller, even, than the 9,000 square foot jail that the BOCC and Sheriff abandoned in 2015, following a roof leak?
And can we find an architect willing to design such a small facility?
I bet we can.
On Tuesday evening, we listened to an fascinating presentation at Town Hall, during the Town Council’s regular meeting, that it might have some bearing on the questions we just posed.
The Town government has taken on some ambitious capital improvement projects over the past 25 years, including the paving of the downtown’s previously gravel streets, the construction of a new Town Hall and a new Community Center, the development of Yamaguchi Park, the extension of the downtown River Walk, the installation of three pedestrian bridges across the San Juan River, and a start on one of the more “pie in the sky” projects ever conceived in Pagosa: the Town to Lakes Trail.
That’s not a complete list, but you get the idea.
Over the same 25 years, private investors and property owners have built almost nothing in the downtown area. Yes, we’ve seen some remodeling, but I think I can count on one hand the number of significantly sized new buildings. Mostly, downtown looks pretty much the way it looked in 1993.
One of the Town government facilities that still looks the way it looked 25 years ago is the Town Shop — the headquarters of the Street Department.
In fact, the Town Shop looks pretty much how it looked 40 years ago, when Pagosa Springs was struggling economically, and losing population following the closing of the San Juan Lumber Company sawmill — once the largest employer in the county.
Now that the Pagosa Springs economy has revived somewhat, following a rough stretch during the Great Recession, the Town government has been considering the idea of a new, modern maintenance facility. But where? And how much can we spend?
The Town Council began discussing a new facility in the summer of 2017, about the time they hired Andrea Phillips as the new Town Manager. Ms. Phillips has thus far proven to be parsimonious about excessive government spending — a quality rarely found in the halls of Archuleta County governments. The approach she and her staff have taken, regarding the proposed Town Maintenance Facility, is perhaps an illustration of her frugal attitude.
A year ago, while Greg Schulte was serving as Town Manager, the Town hired local architect Brad Ash to develop a “program” for the design of a new facility. We will here note that Mr. Ash is the same architect who helped the BOCC develop a program and plans for a $19.2 million County justice facility — the one rejected by the voters this week.
When Mr. Ash made his presentation to the Town Council last summer, the new Town Maintenance Facility would occupy up to five acres and would cost in the neighborhood of $9 million.
Thankfully, the Town subsequently hired Andrea Phillips as their new Manager. Ms. Phillips then hired local architect Courtney King to completely re-think and re-imagine the maintenance facility.
It’s not inexpensive to build new government facilities, or any type of building, in 2018, and we will be talking about the reasons why in this editorial series. We can start with the fact that the Town of Pagosa Springs, in its quest for a new shop facility, provided the Town Council with 388 pages of engineering documents, geotechnical studies, space-needs programming, and architect drawings from two separate architecture firms.
Those documents presumably came at a cost to the taxpayers.
But we did see progress made. As noted, the cost estimates provided to the Town last year for the new facility, by architect Brad Ash, were in the neighborhood of $9 million. That facility design would have required about 5 acres of land, to allow for future expansion.
The cost estimate from architect Courtney King, as discussed on Tuesday, was closer to $4.6 million, and the facility —even allowing for future expansion — could be built on the existing Town Shop property, a much smaller, 2-acre site.
This cost savings of nearly $4.5 million was achieved partly by making the facility smaller, and expecting employees to share office spaces, parking, and perhaps even bathrooms.
We’ll look at those cost-saving details a bit more tomorrow in Part Two.