First and foremost, community is not a place, a building, or an organization… Community is both a feeling and a set of relationships among people….
— from the article ‘What is Community Anyway?’ by David M. Chavis & Kien Lee, May 2015 on SSIR.org
So I’ve been kicking this problem around, for the past week now: whether Pagosa Springs could become an authentic community.
Which is not the same thing as an authentic tourist destination.
Among the fourteen ‘hopes and dreams’ for the Year 2040, included in the Pagosa Springs Town Council’s published 2019-2020 ‘Goals and Objectives’ — the Town’s collected off-the-cuff expression of wishes for how our community would look and function twenty years in the future — was this specific item:
- Pagosa Springs Continues to be a Refreshingly Authentic and Healthy Small Mountain Town.
This wish obviously correlates with the official logo that appeared on the cover of the finished document.
We note that this official branding also wants us to “VISIT” Pagosa Springs.
Not to “Live in” Pagosa Springs… not to “Raise a Family in” Pagosa Springs… not to “Establish a Business in” Pagosa Springs… but rather, to “Visit” Pagosa Springs.
A fair number of people took that invitation to heart in 2020 and 2021. While the visitations to Disneyland, in California, fell from nearly 19 million attendees in 2019 to fewer than 4 million in 2020 — thanks a COVID shutdown — a fair number of the 15 million disappointed vacationers must have decided to drive to refreshingly authentic and health small towns like Pagosa Springs, because we were surprisingly (and even unpleasantly) well-visited during the summer and fall of 2020.
This, despite mandated mask-wearing and limited service from many of our local tourism-centered businesses.
The hordes arrived again during 2021 tourist season.
As I have always understood the concept of ‘community’, it implies a group of people who have developed a mutually supportive relationship. From the “What Is Community Anyway?” essay on the SSIR website, linked above.
Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other. They have an individual and collective sense that they can, as part of that community, influence their environments and each other.
That treasured feeling of community comes from shared experiences and a sense of — not necessarily the actual experience of — shared history. As a result, people know who is and isn’t part of their community. This feeling is fundamental to human existence.
Do we have those things in Pagosa Springs? A sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other?
And maybe there’s another aspect to a community, that the SSIR essay didn’t mention. A willingness to tolerate different points of view. Even, a willingness to seriously consider alternative perspectives from other community members, that may not align fully with our own personal experiences and preconceived notions.
I’ve shared the fourteen key long-term goals set by the Town Council and staff at the summer 2019 retreat, and while some of them might make Pagosa Springs feel more ‘authentic’ (as something other than a theme park), we might wonder why certain items were missing from the list… as we look ahead 20 years.
- Decent Wages that Align with the Skyrocketing Cost of Housing and Increasing Taxes and Utilities
- Residential Neighborhoods Protected from Unsupervised Mini-Motels (Vacation Rentals)
- Affordable Child Care Arrangements for Working Families
- A Functioning Communications System that Doesn’t Encourage Unhealthy Addictions to Technology
- Opportunities for Debt-free Post-Secondary Education in Archuleta County
- Reasons for Our Children and Grandchildren to Choose to Live Here, including…
- That Treasured Feeling of Community
We can easily understand why the community leaders in Pagosa Springs made a commitment to sell this small mountain town as a tourist destination, 30 years ago… after the main sawmill had closed and after the real estate market tanked during the 1980s Texas Oil Bust.
It was completely natural to look around Colorado and see mountain towns like Aspen and Telluride growing their wealth and property values by attracting thousands of visitors, and think, “I bet we could do that.”
I thought that, myself, back in 2005, when the Town election ballot included a proposal to create a municipal Lodgers Tax, to be used to bring more of those thousands of annual recreation seekers to Archuleta County. How could it hurt? To have people stay here for a few days and spend their money, and then leave?
It all seemed so harmless. And easy.
Long ago, someone much more intelligent than me formulated the First Law of Holes. “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
(I have no idea who formulated that law, but I’m grateful for their effort, whoever they were.)
The Town Council, in 2019, had included this item, as well, among their fourteen dreams for the future:
- A Thriving Economy (not solely tourism based).
The implication of this wish, if I am interpreting it correctly, is that Pagosa economy would be thriving, 20 years from now, but flow of money would come not only from tourism but also from other (unidentified) economic projects.
Which in turn implies that the slow destruction of ‘community values’ that almost inevitably takes place, when a town becomes in a tourist destination, will continue?
Did the Council understand that we can actually stop digging?