I currently serve on a couple of volunteer government boards here in Pagosa Springs: the San Juan Water Conservancy District board, and the Pagosa Peak Open School board. And interestingly enough, both boards consist — at the moment — of four men and two women, with one vacant seat waiting to be filled.
I’m basically satisfied with the way these two boards operate, but I’d love to see one or more women apply for the vacant seats. (We will again mention that the Archuleta School District also has a vacancy on its School Board, and is accepting applications.)
Based on my limited experience observing and writing about government boards, the most functional boards include a mix of men and women. Generally speaking, the men tend to care most about cars and trucks, and building stuff, and putting people in jail. The women tend to care more about families and housing, and the overall functioning of the community.
One of my duties as a Pagosa Peak Open School board member is to serve on the Finance Committee. That committee consists of three women and three men and is charged with advising the Board on financial matters. The six of us come to the job with varied backgrounds and interests, and the discussions are sometimes lively.
The charter school staff, as a whole, is likewise a blended mix of men and women, and I imagine the discussions at the weekly staff meeting must be at least as lively.
One of the key issues facing Pagosa Peak — at the moment — is the problem of the school facility. We currently lease the bottom floor of the Parelli Building, a building that was designed specifically to support an international horsemanship training program developed by Pat Parelli. The School has been able to convert rooms, originally design to help market media products, into rooms used for the education of children, Kindergarten through 5th grade.
Along the way — and with plenty of volunteer help and donations from local businesses and governments — we’ve also converted the surrounding landscaped (and non-landscaped) property into playgrounds and a school garden.
Over the past two years, the Parelli Natural Horsemanship staff has mostly relocated to other facilities, and the building is currently on the market. So the Board is scrambling, you might say, to assemble enough financing to purchase the entire building — which is large enough to house a full K-12 charter school, should the community desire such a thing.
This past Wednesday, our Finance Committee discussion about real estate financing took a momentary detour into the more general realm of government facilities, and in particular, into the need for a County Jail. One of our Finance Committee members, Mark Weiler, shared a brief overview of how the Board of County Commissioners could easily finance the construction of a jail facility from existing revenues, without raising taxes and without bankrupting the County.
Mr. Weiler has presented this plan, on several separate occasions, to the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners.
As noted yesterday in Part Three, our existing BOCC has been talking a great deal about “Certificates of Participation” and “lease-purchase arrangements” as tools for funding a new County Jail. We understand that lease-purchase arrangements are often more expensive, to the taxpayers, than other financing arrangements. We understand that dependence upon COPs would require the BOCC to extract money from existing County department budgets to meet annual lease payments.
We also understand — although the BOCC has never talked about the issue in any public meeting that I’ve attended — that building a $12 million 54-bed jail will produce a cheaply-built 54-bed jail, compared with a $12 million 34-bed jail. When you make your building smaller, on the same budget, you can afford better quality. And one of the problems with our existing (but abandoned) County jail is that it was cheaply built in the first place — and then, was never properly maintained. (I mean, who wants to spend money maintaining a cheaply-built facility?)
The County Jail is an important community issue, at the moment. But a related issue is the composition of the Board of County Commissioners itself.
It’s been about a decade since a woman has served on the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners, the three-person board that makes some of the most important political decisions in our community. We will note that the Commissioners are relatively well paid — about $75,000 a year plus benefits — considering that their job description requires nothing more than attendance at maybe six meetings a month.
Historically, serving as a County Commissioner was a part-time job, and everyone considered it a part-time job. But as Colorado grew from a rural, mining-and ranching region into a tourism mecca and commercial-educational-manufacturing-oil-and-gas-industry powerhouse, the value of real estate spiraled upwards, and so did the tax-funded budgets available to our Board of County Commissioners.
More money naturally led to larger staffing budgets. The work once handled by three part-time commissioners was now assigned to full-time professionals with full-time salaries and benefits. Administrators. Directors. Planners. Inspectors. Executive Assistants. The list goes on.
But the basic structure of the BOCC was never updated. We still have three politicians, making decisions about a $34 million budget affecting more than 150 employees and a community of 13,500 residents. A board of three people means that it takes only two individual votes to make a decision.
Potentially, two men can cause enormous problems for the community.
A few block away in Town Hall, the Pagosa Springs Town government has also grown by leaps and bounds, as the tax revenues and fees have spiraled up and up. But the structure for ultimate decision-making is somewhat more sensible. Top-level decisions at the Town are made by a volunteer board of seven people. (Yes, they get a small stipend, but nothing compared to what our County Commissioners are pulling in.) Currently, the Town Council consists of five men and two women, and in my humble opinion, it’s one of the most functional government boards in the community.
Historically, the Town Council was not always this functional. We happen to have a chair — Mayor Don Volger — who values thorough Council discussions of difficult issues, rather than valuing his own personal agenda. The communication level among the Council members, and between the Town and its constituents, has never been better. (In my humble opinion.) Okay, it’s still not perfect. But it’s never been better.
The problems with the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners — such as how they could fail two years on a row with the same tax increase measure on the ballot — has something to do with the particular men sitting on the board. But it also has to do with the simple fact that we have only three commissioners, who — due to Colorado Open Meetings Law — cannot meet with one another to hammer out ideas and compromises, except at open public meetings.
The scariest part, to me, is that two individual votes can put all of Archuleta County deeply in debt for a 54-bed jail — via “Certificates of Participation” — just weeks after the voters have rejected the debt for a 54-bed jail.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.