Baby, if I made you mad,
Something that I might have said?
Please forget the past,
The future looks bright ahead…
— ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ as sung by Elvis Presley
It’s tempting to forget the past, and look ahead to a brighter future. I suppose that’s especially common in the halls of government.
We’ve been talking (in Parts One and Two) about a group of graduate students from the University of Colorado, Boulder, who presented some ideas to a joint meeting of the Town Council and Board of County Commissioners. These young researchers had visited various communities in and around Colorado, having been tasked with developing some useful ideas about how tourist towns like Pagosa Springs can grow their economies.
Those of us who’ve been around for a few years know that Pagosa Springs has been trying to grow its economy for quite a while now, with and without the help of students from CU Boulder, and the Colorado School of Mines, and Fort Lewis College, and various other consulting agencies. We’ve also seen our local governments and our Chamber of Commerce apply their expertise to growing the economy.
Here, once again, is the recommendation we heard from the CU students, near the end of their presentation on December 18 (as previously mentioned in Part Two):
“In the case of the Grand Junction economic partnership, there are faces on a website. There’s a phone number. There’s an email address, where you can reach out and talk to someone, a real live human, about relocating to their community.
“So one of our recommendations is to create a permanent, salaried position here in Pagosa Springs, that their sole purpose is an outward lens. To really be that outward-looking face to bring in new businesses from either the Front Range or from out of state, what have you — but to be completely looking outward.
“Additionally, to create partnerships across City-County lines, across jurisdictions. You know, between the Community Development Corporation and the Tourism Office, and kind of creating these synergies where there’s a unified vision and a unified front.”
Additionally, we should focus on ‘what is already here.’
I’m repeating this advice, because I find it to be somewhat humorous. The Town government, in collaboration with the County government, created exactly this type of “permanent, salaried position here in Pagosa Springs” back in 2010. The creation of this “permanent, salaried position” involved quite a bit of political maneuvering, and also the creation of a new, government-sponsored 501c3 non-profit to be known as the ‘Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation.’
The board of the newly created ‘CDC’ consisted of a few government and community leaders, who proceeded to hire a self-proclaimed economic development expert named Steve Vassallo. He was to be the “outward-looking face” for the community.
The Town and County then proceeded to pour more than $500,000 to the CDC.
What did we get for all that money? Not much. As I recall, the only thing Mr. Vassallo did during his tenure as our expert economic development director — besides organizing the dismally disappointing “Great Golden Retriever Round-up” — was to create a great deal of controversy and division in the community, while wasting quantities of taxpayer revenues.
After Mr. Vassallo departed, the Town and County continued funding the CDC, and hired a new executive director: Rich Lindblad. I attended numerous public presentations by Mr. Lindblad during his tenure, and was left with the distinct impression that the CDC was simply continuing to waste taxpayer money on a strangely expensive but essentially worthless activity known as “Economic Development.”
Here’s a quote from a 2012 article in the Daily Post:
I have enjoyed a couple of recent articles written by reporter Jim McQuiggin for the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN, that have raised questions about why we — the taxpayers — are funding this “economic development” organization to the tune of more than $100,000 per year. In his most recent piece, McQuiggin summarized the normal functions of a “Community Development Corporation,” in the way such organizations typically exist in almost any city outside of Pagosa Springs.
Typically — McQuiggin writes — Community Development Corporations “are formed by residents, small business owners, congregations and other local stakeholders to revitalize a low- or moderate-income community, typically with the goal of establishing affordable housing and creating jobs for community residents. Jobs are often created through small or micro business lending or commercial development projects. As such, CDCs prefer to partner with those organizations rather than administer projects through direct participation as board members.
The Pagosa CDC was formed, not by local residents and business owners, but by a handful of government leaders with big economic ambitions.
The SUN article specifically questioned the wisdom of allowing then-Mayor Ross Aragon, then-Town Manager David Mitchem, and then-County Commissioner Clifford Lucero to sit on a “non-governmental board” spending taxpayer funds that they had voted to allocate to themselves.
One issue that McQuiggin did not address in his thoughtful article series was the fact that the newly-appointed CDC executive director, Rich Lindblad, had no experience and no background training in “community development” or “economic development.” Mr. Lindblad, whom I’d known for several years, was a self-taught “business counselor” who worked for most of his professional life as a project manager at AT&T.
At the CDC meetings I attended, it became clear that Mr. Lindblad saw his role as the CDC’s executive director basically as a simple continuation of his previous role as a “business mentor” with the Small Business Development Center in Durango — except at a much higher salary.
The combination of government control of the CDC board, and the hiring of an executive director with no background in “community development” meant that the Archuleta County taxpayers were funding an organization unlikely to fulfill its original purpose: the creation of a healthier community.
When I wrote about this situation back in early 2012 (was it really only 7 years ago?) I had hopes that some courageous candidates would come forward and run for the seats on the Town Council and on the CDC board. Candidates courageous enough to ask the hard questions, publicly — courageous enough to stand up to then-Mayor Ross Aragon and his supporters and say, “No more government waste.”
That did, in fact, take place — and we now have some independent, thoughtful voices on both boards.
But is it possible that the BOCC and the Town Council have forgotten about the past?
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.