Don Volger, the outgoing mayor of the Town of Pagosa Springs, typically directs the Town Council and the audience — at the start of each regular Council meeting — to observe a moment of silence, during which we are urged to pray, meditate, cogitate, or otherwise direct our attention to the problem of ‘just getting along’ with our fellow citizens.
Not the easiest thing to do. I mean, it’s an easy problem to meditate on… or pray about… but to actually “just get along”… with people who, in your opinion, may have made, or might be about to make, the wrong decision?
Not an easy thing. Egos get in the way, of course. Differences of opinion arise. People in positions of authority can feel their authority challenged. Toes can get stepped on.
I would not be surprised if the Mayor urges us to do some prayer or meditation at the start of tonight’s regular Council meeting — tonight, Thursday, November 18 — considering, particularly, three items that appear on tonight’s agenda.
Three mildly controversial items. We are all in agreement that Pagosa Springs is experiencing a serious housing crisis. We don’t always agree about exactly how to address the problem. The details, I mean. Where the devil is.
VII. NEW BUSINESS
1. Ordinance 964, First Reading, Submitting to Town Voters Ballot Issue 1: Redirection of Lodging Tax Expenditures
2. Ordinance 965, First Reading, Submitting to Town Voters Ballot Issue 2: Excise Tax on Short Term Rentals
3. Recommendation for Award for Workforce Housing Development Project
All three of these mildly controversial items (or terribly controversial, depending on your perspective on the housing crisis, and vacation rentals, and such) are important to me, personally, as a local activist who has been urging the Council, lo, these past five or six years, to vigorously address all three of these particular issues.
And now, at last, they are being seriously discussed. All three issues are related to Town efforts to aggressively address the shortage of workforce housing, which has been caused, at least in part, by the ongoing conversion of residential homes into STRs — Short-Term Rentals. (Disclosure: I also serve on the Board for Pagosa Housing Partners, an all-volunteer 501c3 non-profit which has been active in encouraging these discussions.)
Perhaps all those prayers and meditations are finally paying off? Item Number 3, for example.
“3. Recommendation of Award for Workforce Housing Development Project”
From the Council packet:
The Town issued a Request for Proposal for Workforce Housing Development Services on September 1st, seeking public-private partnerships to develop up to 64 units on three vacant, town-owned sites. Two sites were purchased over the last year for this purpose, and the third proposed site is the existing open field at the northwest corner of S. 8th Street and Apache St.
Last spring, Town Manager Andrea Phillips and her staff had published an RFP (Request for Proposals) to build a 12-16 unit apartment on a Town-owned parcel at the corner of Apache and South 5th Streets, near Yamaguchi Park. The terms offered by the Town were, in my opinion, quite generous, but no companies responded to the RFP.
Ms. Phillips and her staff went back to the drawing board, and sweetened the deal with two additional Town-owned parcels. By the October 1 deadline, the Town had received three responses to the new RFP.
Three proposals were received to the revised RFP (in alphabetical order): America West Housing Solutions, Pagosa Housing Partners, and Servitas. A review committee comprised of Council member Mat deGraaf, Council member Shari Pierce, the Town Manager, Town Clerk/Finance Director and Town Planning Director, reviewed and individually scored the proposals according to the criteria established in the RFP. The Town Attorney did not score the proposals, but sat in on the interviews and provided legal advice. All three firms/teams were interviewed on October 28-29. Based on several factors, including prior experience, proposed program, etc. the committee unanimously recommends that the Town award the [project] to the Servitas team.
…The Servitas team includes several firms, encompassing all aspects of the project, from development/design, to financing, construction and management… For the Pagosa Springs project, they have teamed up with FCI Construction, Strand (architects/engineering), Davis Engineering (civil engineering), and CitiGroup (financing). Their proposal, presentation and answers to follow up questions are attached.
Attached, that is, to the Town Council agenda packet. A 165-page sales pitch for an exciting $20 million project, that might serve Pagosa’s working class, if it can in fact be rented at reasonable rates. Here’s how one of the apartment buildings might look:
The initial proposal from the Servitas team proposes 60 units spread over the three Town-owned parcels, almost all of which would be relatively tiny, 450-square-foot apartments, to be constructed and ready for lease by fall 2023. The exact layout of the units, mix of rents/incomes, etc. is open to negotiation. Two financing options are provided in the proposal, and also need to be negotiated.
Except that the proposal, as it was included in the Council packet, was not entirely legible. Servitas had instructed the Town staff to redact — completely black out — two dozen pages of the proposal. Here’s how three of the redacted pages look:
It’s my understanding that the two Council members — Shari Pierce and Mat deGraaf — had the pleasure of viewing all 165 pages of the Servitas proposal, when they were scoring the three submissions. But it appears that the other five members of the Town Council are expected to make a $20 million decision, without being able to read more than 20 pages of the proposal…?
Certainly, the general public has been prevented from reading the entire proposal.
(The PHP proposal, also included in the Council packet, was shared without being redacted.)
Which raises a question (in my mind, at least) about government transparency. Our elected and appointed government officials — who serve the taxpayers, but who occasionally forget, and do things behind closed doors — are required under Colorado law to operate transparently, except in certain special circumstances. Two of the Colorado laws that enforce government transparency are the Colorado Open Records Act, and the Colorado Open Meetings Law.
The Colorado Open Records Act, also known as CORA, demands that our governments make documents available to the public upon request. (I have in fact made such a request of the Town government, to view a non-redacted version of the Servitas proposal. As of this morning, Thursday November 18, I have not been provided one.)
The Colorado Open Meetings Law, meanwhile, demands that all public commissions, boards and advisory bodies publicly announce their meetings at least 24 hours in advance, and that they hold those meetings in open public session… except in certain special circumstances.
It would appear that the Town’s advisory committee that scored the three RFP responses may have violated the Colorado Open Meetings Law, by failing to properly notice their meetings and by holding their meetings behind closed doors.
As I said, all of this is mildly controversial.