When I arrived at Town Hall at about 6:55pm on Tuesday, July 14, to witness the counting of the Ballot Measure A ballots, the four Town election judges — Traci Bishop, Heidi Martinez, Kathy Kulyk and Barbara Hendricks — were still eating the take-out dinner provided by Town Clerk April Hessman, and were gearing up to count the 347 ballots that had been received by Ms. Hessman’s office since the end of June — almost exactly one third of the 1,050 registered voters in the Town.
As ballot counting goes, it was about the simplest possible undertaking. One simple question, marked “YES’ or “NO.”
Did the voters want the following requirement added to the Pagosa Springs Home Rule Charter?
Any proposal by the Town Council or by the Pagosa Springs Urban Renewal Authority to use Tax Increment Financing (TIF) must first be approved by the Town electors whenever the total TIF revenues are expected to exceed $1 million ($1,000,000) over the life of the project.
The four election judges struggled a bit to get the total “YES” and “NO” votes to match up with the total number of ballots submitted. But in the end, the vote unofficial count was 257 “Yes” votes (in favor of the amendment) and 89 “No” votes. (One ballot was blank.)
Basically, a 3-to-1 margin.
We’ve seen similar margins in a few Archuleta County elections over the past decade, but some have been much closer. The vote to increase the County sales tax to fund a $20 million ‘justice center’ facility, for example — a proposal which would likely have increased County sale tax revenues by more that $48 million over a 15-year period — was defeated in 2018 by a narrower, 53% to 47% margin.
The Town vote tallied last night did not specifically address any particular project, although the only ‘Urban Renewal’ project presented thus far to the Town Council involves a proposed Springs Resort & Spa expansion on property owned by developer Jack Searle. Texas-based Springs Resort principal David Dronet was the driving force behind the creation of a new ‘Urban Renewal Authority” last fall, but I’ve not seen hide nor hair of Mr. Dronet since the arrival of the novel coronavirus in Archuleta County. The citizen petition that asked the Town Council to create an ‘Urban Renewal Authority’, however, was circulated by Mr. Searle.
You can read more about the URA creation process in this Daily Post article series.
Over the past few months, a small group of Pagosa Springs taxpayers have been campaigning to encourage the passage of Ballot Measure A, with the idea that any TIF-funded ‘urban renewal’ project worth its salt should be able to win the general approval of the Pagosa taxpayers.
The proposal put forward by Mr. Dronet and Mr. Searle — which proposed 25 years of tax refunds to the developers, worth an estimated $79.6 million — might not be such a project. Over the past 50 years, it’s been a general policy of both the Town government and the County government that a subdivision developer — a person who was chopping up a large parcel of land into tiny pieces and the selling the smaller parcels for exponentially more than the original purchase price — was required to built out roads and streets and water lines and electrical lines and sewer lines, that meet community standards, and to pay for these infrastructure improvements out of his own pocket.
But recently, Colorado developers — and developers in many other states — have been able to convince local and state governments to spend taxpayer revenues to fund infrastructure cost for the developer… and in many recent cases, the tool used by a city or town to funnel taxes into the developer’s pocket has been Colorado’s ‘Urban Renewal Law’. That law was written in 1958 to encourage redevelopment of neighborhoods blighted by “disease and crime.” But recently, many municipalities have been using the TIF funding mechanism and the eminent domain rules written in the Urban Renewal Law, to encourage so-called ‘economic development’ projects.
If we can assume a shared motivation behind the overwhelmingly positive vote, we might surmise that the residents of Pagosa Springs were basically unhappy with the Town Council decision to create a new government bureaucracy specifically to address a project proposed by Mr. Searle and Mr. Dronet. Nearly three-quarters of the voters who weighed in, want the right to approve any TIF projects worth over $1 million.
As former Mayor Ross Aragon stated very clearly in a recent Daily Post interview:
“These people — from what I can see — is they’re using taxpayers’ money. And I don’t like the fact that they went around the criteria.
“That property is not blighted. And one of the issues that comes up — I could never understand why the Council went with that. I feel they are standing on really shaky ground...”
“These people” would be Mr. Dronet and Mr. Searle. “The criteria” are claims — accepted by a slender majority of the Town Council in 2019 — that 27 acres of Mr. Searle’s vacant property should be classified as ‘dangerous urban blight’, plagued by ‘disease and crime’.
Our former Mayor:
“And as far as taxation, it’s getting terrible. A lot of ordinary folks are really complaining about it. And it’s because we have so many taxing districts. We’re overwhelmed with taxes, because we tipping over with bureaucracy. And that’s what happens when you’re top-heavy with bureaucracy.”
Although the Town Council’s 4-3 decision to declare Mr. Searle’s 27 vacant acres as “dangerous blight” was enthusiastically supported by Town Manager Andrea Phillips, Town Planning Director James Dickhoff, and then-Town Attorney Bob Cole… the Town voters — following the lead of former Mayor Ross Aragon — stated rather clearly on July 14 that they want the right to approve, or deny, any multi-million-dollar, 25-year tax subsidies that the new Urban Renewal Authority might wish to bestow upon wealthy developers.
I will be discussing the two problems the voters are most concerned about, later in this editorial series. But first we will be looking more closely at the government corruption that took place around another project proposed by developer Jack Searle.
River Rock Estates.
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.