A few days after the January 28 work session with CBRE real estate consultants from Denver, the Pagosa Springs Town Council held its ‘first Tuesday of the month’ regular meeting — also via Zoom.
Additional affordable housing solutions might be one of the results that comes from the collaboration with the CBRE experts. Looking at the situation through an historical lens, however, it seems more likely that the Town will spend our money — in the near future — on more parks, trails, open space, and river access. Over the past decade, the Town has spent millions of dollars on promoting tourism and on the provision of recreational amenities and activities… and mere pennies, by comparison, on helping to resolve the affordable housing crisis.
Last week, the public was invited to an ‘open house’ at the Ross Aragon Community Center to discuss 27 acres of vacant Town-owned property just south of our existing Yamaguchi Park. The now-vacant property previously served as the site of the Town’s sewer treatment facility, prior to the construction of a (somewhat controversial, and occasionally problematic) sewer pipeline. The large vacant parcel has been designated by the Town as “Yamaguchi South” and it would appear that the entire 27 acres is destined to become yet another Town-owned recreation amenity.
Four years ago, the Archuelta County Affordable Housing Workgroup had identified that parcel as an ideal location for some future affordable housing. The Town Planning Commission had likewise discussed the suitability of the site for affordable housing. It appears those ideas have been summarily dismissed by Town staff and the Town Council.
It’s not an easy task to change the direction of a municipal government, accustomed to spending millions of dollars each year on tourism, parks, and recreation, and relatively little on helping out with a serious, well-documented community crisis.
On the subject of community priorities and challenges, we quoted Town Manager Andrea Phillips in a 2018 Daily Post editorial, discussing the then-proposed 2019 Town budget:
“We are going back to what Council has said you want to focus on, which is ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance.’ So that means street maintenance, parks maintenance, maintenance of buildings and equipment, etc.
“So we didn’t put a lot of trail projects and things like that into the budget, other than design and engineering so we can construct them in later years…
“For the Hermosa Street portion of the River Walk Trail, we’re planning to continue the design and engineering, but pushing actual construction off into 2020 or later… Safe Routes to School, with the South 8th Street sidewalk connection — that’s not included in this budget because we don’t yet know what we’re doing with that…
“We’re focusing quite a bit on parks maintenance…
“For the Harman Hill phase [of the Town to Lakes Trail,] again that’s something that we’re proposing that we push off into a later year. We think it’s a critical project, but that segment alone is $1.7 million…
“And I think something to keep in mind with our capital budget. Once you subtract the debt incurred on the South 8th Street reconstruction project, plus the front end loader and the vac truck, the Visitor Center lease — once you take all that debt off of the top, and pay for the maintenance folks who are working in the different departments taking care of these assets, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of money for actual new projects…”
That level of honesty — about the effects of debt-funded facilities and infrastructure, and the maintenance required to keep them up — had been absent from nearly every government budget discussion I had covered over the previous 14 years. To hear it discussed at a public meeting in Town Hall was, to me, like a warm spring breeze after a long frigid winter.
During the many months following that presentation, however, the Town has pretty much gone back to its old profligate ways.
Some of our readers may have participated in the recent “Yamaguchi South” open house, to learn about and comment on a proposed (multi-million-dollar?) park just down the street from the Town’s brand new multi-million-dollar maintenance shop.
Following the decline of the ranching and timber industries, Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County were faced with the problem of economic survival, and the community leaders sought to address that problem by exploiting another obvious local resource: scenic beauty. We could follow in the footsteps of other Colorado mountain towns and become a premier recreational wonderland and tourist haven. That was the plan.
No, we wouldn’t necessarily have good-paying jobs, because the hospitality industry doesn’t generally pay well. But at least we’d have jobs. And heck, back in the 1980s, you could still buy a sweet little house for less than $100,000.
This approach, at first, appeared to be panning out. Archuleta County doubled its population, based on little more than scenic beauty and recreational opportunities. Property values also doubled. (Wages did not double, however.)
It cost the Town government a pretty penny to help make this happen. According to published Town budgets, our Town government has spent a sizable amount of tax revenues on recreation and tourism. If you add up the money spent between 2006 and 2016 by the Town Recreation Department, Parks Department, Tourism Board, and the Community Center, for example, you will get a figure that totals approximately $20.4 million.
About $2 million per year, if you average it out. According to the Town’s 2021 budget, they expect to spend about $3.6 million on tourism, recreation, and recreation facility maintenance, this year alone.
The engines that once seemed to be driving economic prosperity — tourism and recreation — turned out to have one major defect, however. The community lost its ability to provide decent housing for its workforce.
Between 2006 and 2016 — while the Town was spending an average of $2 million a year on tourism and recreation — they spent a total of about $39,500 on “affordable housing.” About $4,000 a year, if you average it out.
Those priorities might finally be changing, now, in the third decade of the 21st century. The Town Council might be ready to realize that we already have enough low-paying tourism industry jobs… and enough parks… and enough recreational activities… and that we’re actually in the midst of a serious crisis as regards one of the absolute necessities of human life: shelter.
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.