I attended a public presentation on Wednesday evening, put on by local non-profit housing organization Pagosa Housing Partners (PHP). The organization has begun recruiting homeowners who have vacant bedrooms and who might be willing to make one or more bedrooms available to a member of our community’s work force, on a short- or long-term basis, to help with our growing housing crisis.
I will be writing more about this program in a future Daily Post article, but suffice it to say that the government-subsidized “economic development” that’s taken place over the past 30 years in Archuleta County has been a mixed blessing. Yes, we’ve seen population growth. Yes, we have more jobs here than we had three decades ago. Yes, you can sell your real estate for a much, much higher price in 2019 than you paid in 1989. But for many residents, the economic situation here has become less friendly and more challenging.
Maybe our roads are actually in better shape, now, than they were in, 30 years ago. I can’t say… I’ve been here only 25 years. But for at least the past 20 years, the Archuleta County government has been complaining that they don’t have enough money to properly maintain all the subdivision roads the Board of County Commissioners approved and adopted since Pagosa Springs really started growing, back in the early 1980s.
In that sense, Archuleta County is in the same boat as the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). Too many roads, not enough money and manpower to maintain them.
While researching this editorial series, I came across Highways to the Sky, a 2002 publication that describes the development of Colorado’s highway system over the past century. From that publication:
For more than a century, road builders and highway engineers have transformed the physical and social landscape of Colorado. Those designers and builders overcame the challenges of building a cost-effective highway system in a sparsely populated, climatically varied region with one of the world’s largest mountain ranges looming as an obstacle. Responding to the demands of resident drivers and incoming visitors, state and federal highway authorities transformed a network of trails into uniform and safe roads, and in some cases built modern highways over terrain deemed impassible by previous generations of travelers.
The earliest roads and highways improved travel and communications throughout the state and helped bring cohesion to the state’s economy. In the late 19th century, the improved travel arteries helped foster the state’s mining and agricultural industries. In the 20th century, an ever-expanding network of automobile roads fostered the rise and dominance of the tourism and recreation industries in Colorado…
This past year, CDOT attempted to maintain, repair and plow over 23,000 total lane miles of highway across the state of Colorado, with a maintenance budget of about $900 million. CDOT’s total 2018-2019 budget is about $1.6 billion, but that includes debt service; new and expansion projects; and multi-modal activities; the amount spent on ‘maintenance’ appears to be closer to $900 million. If that’s an accurate number, then CDOT will spend about $40,000 per lane mile on annual maintenance this year.
Few, if any, of CDOT’s highways are gravel roads; they are exclusively paved highways — asphalt or concrete. Both of those paving products have seen their price increase significantly over the past couple of decades. Paved roads are getting more expensive to build, and more expensive to maintain. Currently, CDOT is first to admit that they are not properly maintaining all the state highways built over the past century.
If Archuleta County were spending $40,000 per lane mile on its 40-some miles of paved roads — and not including the 300 miles of gravel County roads — our annual Road and Bridge Budget would be around $3.2 million just for the paved roads.
But we would then be failing to keep up, just as CDOT is failing to keep up.
At a BOCC work session last September, we heard from the residents from the Meadows subdivision, reminding us that Ordinance 17-2016 prohibits heavy trucks from using Cascade Avenue to access CR 500 (Trujillo Road). We also heard from the residents of Timber Ridge Ranch, complaining that the prohibition of heavy trucks (ie. garbage trucks) on Cascade was causing those same trucks to choose Bristlecone Drive as their route to the County Landfill on Trujillo Road (CR 500). The heavy trucks, we heard, were causing damage to the pavement, and were traveling at high speeds around dangerous curves.
We heard that the Timber Ridge Metro District cannot afford to maintain the pavement on Bristlecone if the entire community is going to continue using that road as a major arterial accessing Trujillo Road.
We heard that the Sheriff’s Office is failing to enforce speed limits on Bristlecone Drive.
Those problems — and especially, the potential of damage to the asphalt pavement — caused County Public Works Director Bob Perry to apply his knowledge of engineering and road maintenance to the situation. Mr. Perry’s recommendation, last September, was published in a letter to the BOCC:
Close Bristlecone Drive to heavy truck traffic, and thus limit the damage to the expensive, Metro-District-maintained pavement.
Oddly enough, the Timber Ridge Homeowners Association is attempting to do precisely that, by defining a 1,400-foot stretch of Bristlecone as ‘Private Road – No Trespassing’. And the Board of County Commissioners have now taken them to court over the attempt.
Of course, closing Bristlecone to garbage trucks will likely send the trucks to Cascade, where they are already prohibited. (But where that prohibition might not be enforced by our Sheriff’s Office?)
Or else, it would send the trucks downtown, to South 8th Street — a paved street recently reconstructed by the Town government at a cost of $2 million.
When government leaders in our community began spending our taxes to promote population growth in Archuleta County, they really had no idea what they were doing. They forgot that more people would mean more garbage… and that there were only three routes leading to our (soon-to-be-full) County Landfill… and that none of those routes were truly suited to heavy truck traffic.
I was working with a realtor friend of mine several years ago, studying water supply issues in Archuleta County, and my friend calculated that only about half the platted parcels in our numerous residential subdivisions have been built upon. This implies that, without adding a single new subdivision, the population of Archuleta County could potentially double in the near future. Which would double the number of vehicles, using our already bad roads.
And I suppose it would double the number of garbage trucks.
Maybe we ain’t seen nothing yet.
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.