EDITORIAL: Can Rural America Be Saved? Part Five

Read Part One

This coming Tuesday evening, the Pagosa Springs Town Council will host their regular meeting at the Ross Aragon Community Center, rather than at Town Hall, to accommodate a large audience. The meeting will focus on one agenda item: a petition signed by several Town residents claiming that our downtown is in need of an Urban Renewal Authority. 49 people signed the petition, and 29 of those signatures were found to be valid. I had a chance to look over the petitions, and I wonder how many of the signers have the slightest idea what an Urban Renewal Authority actually is or what harm it can actually do to a small town.

I wrote a fifteen-part, 45-page editorial about corporate welfare last month — “Are Tax Breaks Making Colorado Broke?” — and I still can’t claim to understand what the creation of an Urban Renewal Authority might do to a rural community town like Pagosa Springs over the next 100 years or so.

That’s one of the joys and frustrations of living in rural America. There are no experts here; we all have to make it up as we go along. The nearest experts are far away, in places like Colorado Springs and Denver, or even farther away. New York. Los Angeles. Dallas. Washington DC.

When you live in a place without experts, it’s easy to get fooled when someone walks into town, talking like an expert. That’s one of the problems with the Urban Renewal Authority discussion. A smart guy from Texas showed up last summer, talking like he knew what was best for Pagosa Springs, and proposing that the Town government grant him up to $79 million in tax rebates to fix our broken downtown. The rebates would come in the form of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) which, as he explained, wouldn’t cost the existing businesses or residents a dime; the “Increment” would be totally created by an expansion of the Springs Resort and hundreds of new structures. Homes. Restaurants. Stores. Greenhouses. Vacation rentals.

The profits from all this new development would go back into someone’s pockets (we’re not sure whose pockets, exactly) along with up to $79 million in tax rebates. And all of this money, going into someone’s pockets, would finally turn downtown Pagosa Springs into the thriving business district we’ve always known it could be, but which it never quite became.

As a result of millions of TIF dollars going back into the developers’ pockets, the vitality would spill out over the entire community, and everyone would benefit. Everyone.

Or so we are being told by the experts from far away places. We will find out, on Tuesday, if the Town Council has bought their story.

Luckily for our community, we have a Mayor — Don Volger — who believes in allowing vigorous discussion of controversial topics before asking his fellow Council members to vote. That allowance for give-and-take discussion typically extends to the audience at public meetings, and on Tuesday, part of the meeting will be dedicated to hearing from the public on the topic of “Urban Renewal Authorities.” (I might recommend the above-mentioned fifteen-part Daily Post editorial as an introduction to corporate welfare and its ongoing effects on rural Colorado.)

The urge to allocate special privileges to certain people, and disregard others, is a natural human impulse. It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or a small rural town — there will always be people approaching the government, asking for a handout of taxpayer funds for this or that project, or for a waiver of this or that fee, or some other kind of special treatment. The requests are typically justified by promises of economic improvement, and of course, higher tax revenues in the future.

In a city like Denver with an annual municipal budget of $1.5 billion, you’d probably not even notice it, if some developer were granted $79 million in tax subsidies spread out over 25 years. That’s an average of only $3 million per year… mere pocket change to the Denver City Council.

The situation is slightly different in a rural community like Pagosa Springs, where the entire General Fund budget is only about $3.7 million per year. Out in rural America, $3 million per year in tax reimbursements to a developer starts to seem like real money.

But we don’t know, yet, if the Town Council can resist a promise of economic vitality, in a culture where money is the ultimate measure of success.

I mentioned yesterday in Part Four that, over the past 20 years or so, we’ve often heard local leaders complain that Pagosa Springs lacks a ‘shared vision’ for our collective future. We’ve heard the claim that, if only we could all agree on the same path forward, if only we would all grab a paddle and stroke in the same direction, we’d be transformed from a slightly dysfunctional “drive-through” town into a place where everyone was healthy, wealthy, and wise.

I will go out on a limb and suggest that, in fact, our Pagosa Springs leadership has been paddling frantically in the same direction for the past 20 years, and as a result, the boat is now seriously taking on water. The “same direction” has been consistently towards a lopsided, tourism economy, plagued with low-paying jobs and overpriced housing and once-friendly neighborhoods turning into motel districts.

It’s budget season once again for our local governments, and the Town of Pagosa Springs is currently considering a draft budget that would spend about $3.3 million on parks, recreation, and tourism.

The same draft budget currently earmarks less than $30,000 for affordable housing.

Did we mention that the Springs Resort expansion, asking for up to $79 million in tax reimbursements, would provide zero affordable housing — as currently proposed?

While providing hundreds of low-paying jobs.

Yes, it’s a tricky question. How do we save rural America?

I will go out on a limb and suggest that $79 million in proposed tax breaks for an expansion of the Springs Resort would lead us, eventually, into tourism-driven whitewater rapids that our governments will be unable to navigate.

Bill Hudson

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.