The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners, housed in their modest quarters at 398 Lewis Street, will begin looking at draft versions of the 2020 Archuleta County budget over the next few weeks, and it might appear to the casual observer that they are feeling flush with cash.
Rejecting the wisdom of the voters as expressed at the polls last year, Commissioners Ronnie Maez, Steve Wadley and Alvin Schaaf sunk the community’s taxpayers about $14 million in debt to begin building an oversized Fred Harman III detention center in Harman Park. The payments on that loan will be in the range of $900,000 per year. For 25 years.
But they were just getting started. Last month, the three free-wheeling commissioners agreed to purchase the old Harman Museum, located adjacent to the detention center site, for $600,000, with the idea of converting it into a Sheriff’s Office. We have not been told, yet, what that conversion is going to cost the taxpayers.
Then at the joint Town-County work session last week, we heard that our opulent commissioners now have plans to build a new $1.2 million office for the County Department of Human Services.
As it turned out, this news about a new DHS facility was rather distressing to the Pagosa Springs Town Council, because a huge chunk of the $1.2 million is going to come out of the County Road & Bridge budget — the same fund from which our commissioners are diverting much of the $900,000 to pay the annual Detention Center loan payments. The Town Council had found this news depressing because the County is required, under Colorado law, to share 50% of whatever the commissioners allocate to Road & Bridge from their General Fund, with their local municipality. Their local municipality is the Town of Pagosa Springs.
Here is the graph provided to the Town Council on Tuesday, showing how much money the County was sharing with the Town over the past 11 years, and the amount the County is proposing to share in 2020:
As we see, this year — 2019 — our three well-heeled commissioners had allocated about $125,000 to help the Town government with its street maintenance program.
For 2020, it would appear the Town’s Road & Bridge allocation will be reduced to a mere $22,000.
From this week’s Town Council agenda packet:
Each year, the County determines how much of its property tax revenues will go to Road and Bridge Fund to be spent on road maintenance. Prior to 2015, the portion of property tax revenues that were went to the Road and Bridge Fund was 15% annually. In 2015, based on complaints from county residents about the poor condition of the county roads, the Commissioners increased the allocation to 25%, which equated to roughly 4.55 mills. Per the requirements of state statute, the County must share 50% of the revenue from the allocation for the portion that is within the Town’s corporate boundaries with the Town… The Town uses these funds for street maintenance, culvert/drainage repairs, sidewalk repairs and replacements, street lights, and other important projects. A reduction of this size will be a significant impact to the Town in 2020 and perhaps beyond.
For 2020, the County staff are proposing to Commissioners during the budget formulation process that the allocation to the County’s Road and Bridge Fund be decreased from 25% to 5%. This therefore decreases the Town’s distribution dramatically as well. In discussions with County staff, the purpose of the reduction was explained in that the County is paying for an annual lease purchase payment for the new detention center for the next 25 years… and a commitment of $1.2 million for new Department of Human Services Offices. Although DHS is a county department/function, their offices have been located in the northern wing of Town Hall for the past 18 years. The County’s plan is to build new DHS offices across from Town Hall in cooperation with the new LIHTC housing project that [Archuleta County Housing Authority] is applying for…
This explanation suggests that not only will the Town lose $100,000 in road maintenance funding in 2020… the County will also reduce its own road spending by at least the same amount. So we will presumably see $200,000 less in community-wide road maintenance this coming year. And the following year? And for the next 25 years?
Of course, a reduction of $200,000 from the County Road & Bridge budget does not cover $900,000 in annual Detention Center loan payments, nor the $600,000 Harman Museum purchase, nor a $1.2 million expenditure for a new Department of Human Services building. It will be an interesting research project to discover where all these millions of dollars are coming from.
Meanwhile, the existing County Courthouse, centrally located in the heart of historic downtown Pagosa, sits mostly vacant and abandoned.
It’s also been interesting to hear the three commissioners weigh in, with considerable enthusiasm, on the idea of giving away $79 million in tax revenues to a couple of developers who’ve proposed an “Urban Renewal” project on some vacant property that has nothing to “renew” on it. A decision, made this year, would provide massive tax money subsidies — sales taxes, property taxes, and lodging taxes, extracted from every tax-funded government agency in the community — for the next 25 years, long after our current commissioners have left office.
Here’s Commissioner Steve Wadley, speaking at the September 3 BOCC work session: “I’m not going to be here when you guys talk to [Springs Resort principal] David Dronet on Tuesday, but I’ve sat down with him and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at his [Urban Renewal Authority] proposal, and I think this is one of the best that’s happened to this community in a long time…”
Commissioner Ronnie Maez: “Yeah, I’ve sat down with [County Administrator Scott Wall and Town Manager Andrea Phillips] and I initially had some questions about, you know, the sales taxes and everything, but after I got more details and more explanation, it just seems like it’s going to be a win-win situation for the community, if this can get going and everybody can get on board with it.
“As long as there’s not any person’s misinterpretation, or opinion, or misinformation put out — if everyone can get the right information — then I think this project will benefit the community, as well as getting more housing into play, too.”
Commissioner Wadley: “It’s gonna bring a lot of money to this place…”
For some odd reason, this conversation reminded me of a short YouTube video clip I’d come across.