In my experience, eating a single-scoop ice cream cone can be quite satisfying.
Eating a half gallon of ice cream at one sitting, can also feel satisfying, but in a different way.
When I moved to Pagosa three decades ago, I hoped the community would develop as a single-scoop, on a sugar cone.
Many people here, however, were looking for the full half gallon. Yesterday in Part Three, we touched briefly on discussions by the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, who — after expressing their concern for Pagosa workers who are getting evicted as residential homes are purchased and converted into STRs (Short-Term Rentals) — declined to definitely earmark any of their $1.2 million budget to assist with housing.
The Board’s budget, spent to subsidize the tourism industry, has more than doubled over the past 8 years, thanks largely to those same STRs.
A full gallon of ice cream? And no interest in sharing?
As mentioned yesterday in Part Three, various and sundry organizations have played a role in that development process, or have attempted to play a role. We’ve often seen our our limited community resources exploited successfully… or, on occasion, wasted.
One of the organizations designed to help the community ‘develop’ is the Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation, a 501c3 non-profit created by the Town of Pagosa Springs and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners back in 2010.
Any tax-exempt non-profit organization theoretically “belongs” to the community it serves, but some non-profits and co-ops specifically allow “memberships” from the general public, allowing community residents to pay an annual fee for the privilege of attending organizational events and voting on organizational issues. The Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation became just such a membership organization, but rather than set a moderate membership fee of… say, $50… the PSCDC set their membership fee at $250, an amount that they believed would eventually produce a significant income stream and allow the corporation to wean itself from the tax-funded teat.
From the PSCDC website:
The PSCDC is offering three types of membership: Supporter Level ($250), Partner Level ($500), and Investor Level ($1000).
Unfortunately, setting a the membership dues at these kinds of levels practically guarantees that community members with moderate incomes will never become members.
The only accounting I was able to locate for PSCDC is from 2019. It shows $6,170 coming from membership dues, donated by perhaps twenty dues-paying members. Local, state, and federal taxpayers apparently footed the rest of the 2019 budget of $242,000.
There would appear to be, after 11 years of government subsidies, little chance that the business community is going to step up and provide the primary funding stream for PSCDC. The taxpayer subsidies are even more dominant this year and next, thanks in part to the federal ARP funding provided to Archuleta County and the Town of Pagosa Springs.
At the time the PSCDC was first created, in 2010, the biggest problem — it seemed — was falling property values and rising housing foreclosures, resulting from deflated housing bubble and global financial meltdown. Two of the organizations concerned about the downward economic spiral were the Town and County governments. The Town was seeing a decline in sales tax collections after years of steady growth; the County was experiencing not only the sales tax decline, but also falling property valuations, resulting in dwindling property tax revenues. Both governments ended up laying off employees.
Some related problems: a nosedrive in the real estate and construction industries… loss of income at Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) when the steady income from new customers vanished… a decline in school enrollment and subsequent loss of per pupil revenues… long-time businesses struggling to stay afloat.
It was a mess. A seriously melting ice cream cone.
The attempted solution was to hire a charlatan ‘economic development’ expert from Mississippi, put him in charge of the new Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation, and pay him an outrageous salary — resulting in, as it turned out, a waste of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. You can read that sad story here, a depressing tale of poor decisions and conflicts of interest.
But the main point here is that our community leaders, feeling slightly desperate, threw all their energy into two key solutions:
1. Attracting a Walmart Store; and
2. Promoting tourism like there was no tomorrow.
As the Great Depression ran its course, and the Pagosa economy began to grow once more, we did get a Walmart. And tourism? Well, a lot of us ended up realizing that an economy built upon tourism was ultimately a pretty bad idea, if we wanted to preserve the refreshingly authentic town we all moved here to enjoy.
Our community leaders did not come to the same conclusion, however. At the direction of government and business leaders, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been poured into subsidizing the tourism and broadband industries.
When the real problem was right there under our noses. No places to live, that we could afford.
As was mentioned back in Part One “community development” — in most places — means “community development”.
Here again is the definition of “community development” from the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals:
Definition: Community development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participatory democracy, sustainable development, rights, equality, economic opportunity and social justice, through the organization, education and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings.
Because certain community leaders believed — in 2010, during the Great Recession — that the most important aspects of our community were “jobs” and “tax receipts”… we created a ‘community development corporation’ focused mainly on ‘growth’, at any cost… instead of on empowerment of the community, development that was truly sustainable, and making sure our existing workforce was properly taken care of.
We could shift gears, if we wanted to. The Town Council, for example, will be discussing their 2022 budget tonight at 5pm at Town Hall, the key document that will define the actions of the Town government for the next 12 months. (Crucial months?) The public is invited to listen, in person or via Zoom. You can view the agenda here.
I don’t know about our Daily Post readers, but I had hoped that Pagosa Springs would remain the type of place where we’d be satisfied with a single scoop of ice cream.
But when governments keep throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at tourism promotion and ‘economic development’, instead of focusing directly on the lives of the local residents, things can start to feel… unsatisfying.