This was not the first offer, by a private party, to purchase the 25,000-square-foot Archuleta County Courthouse and Detention Center, which has been largely vacant these past six or seven years, since being abandoned by two of its previous occupants in 2015: the Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office and Colorado’s Sixth Judicial District.
Not the first offer, but certainly one of the more unusual ones.
The new purchase offer — such as it was — came from Ronnie and Terry Urbanczyk, a wealthy couple from San Antonio, Texas who have been buying up Archuleta County properties over the past couple of years.
Mr. Urbanczyk has been the owner and CEO of Urban Concrete Contractors since the early 1980s.
The Courthouse basic offer looked like this:
Owner/Developer proposes to acquire the Archuleta County Courthouse building based on the terms and conditions outlined below. Under the terms of this proposal, Owner/Developer will:
- Enter into a purchase contract for the Building and pay the County $250,000 up front in cash for the right to acquire the Building.
- The County will be allowed to continue to occupy their space in the building at no cost (County to pay operating expenses).
- Owner/Developer shall have an exclusive right to lease the space that is not occupied by the County.
- Owner/Developer shall have the exclusive right to complete a build-to-suit building for the County at a location and upon terms mutually acceptable to the parties.
- Owner/Developer shall pay the County a move-in bonus of $50,000 upon the commencement of occupancy in the new location.
The lease agreement with the County shall be for a term not to exceed 5 years. The County will agree to waive all fees and charges associated with the current building and the new building (permit fees, etc).
We will be analyzing why this proposal is somewhat unusual, in a moment.
As far as I know, plans to abandon the downtown County Courthouse date back to the late 1990s, when the Board of County Commissioners began negotiating to purchase five acres of vacant land on Hot Springs Boulevard — a half-completed street that had previously been known as Light Plant Road, but which had become designated, in the minds of certain community leaders, as the new commercial and residential hub for the Town of Pagosa Springs, while a spectacular spurt of population growth seemed destined to utterly change the community in many ways.
The five acres on Hot Springs Boulevard included deed restrictions that prohibited a County jail or Sheriff’s Office, but apparently that limitation was unimportant in the minds of the BOCC. The jail and Sheriff’s Office could presumably be located elsewhere. Preferably, where they wouldn’t be noticed, I suppose.
Another political development taking place during the late 1990s centered on concerns that Pagosa’s ‘historical’ downtown buildings might be demolished during the coming decades, to make room for a more ‘modern’ downtown. Community leaders were able to promote the creation of a downtown Historic Preservation District that would presumably protect the architectural character of the central business district — though not necessarily its economic character. In fact, the economic center of Pagosa Springs was in the process of moving four miles to the west, adjacent to the much-more-populated Pagosa Lakes area.
In its first iteration, the Historic Preservation District included the Archuleta County Courthouse — constructed prior to 1928 — but some back-room negotiations resulted in a decision to eliminate the largest ‘historical’ building in the downtown core from the District. This decision took place very close to the time when a very wealthy developer from California — David Brown — was making a proposal to purchase the Courthouse, with the apparent intention of tearing it down and creating a massive (and modern) hotel complex on the site. Mr. Brown had already purchased the one-acre property just west of the Courthouse and had demolished all the buildings on it. (These were not ‘historically’ important buildings, however. Only economically important.)
For reasons that are not entirely clear — especially considering the political maneuvering to remove the Courthouse from the Historic Preservation District — the BOCC rejected Mr. Brown’s offer to purchase the historical government building.
The sale of the Courthouse became even more problematic in 2010, when the BOCC borrowed $5 million for deferred maintenance on certain county roads and used the County Courthouse as collateral. The County is still making payments on that loan, and that little financial problem has thrown something of a monkey wrench into sales negotiations. It would appear that the County still owes about $850,000 on that 2010 loan.
There’s also the fact that three County departments still operate within the mostly-vacant Courthouse.
Archuleta County now owns property in Harman Park where, theoretically, a new facility could be constructed to serve the Assessor, Treasurer and County Clerk — the three departments still operating out of the Courthouse… but the BOCC has put the County in debt up to its eyeballs building the Fred Harman Law Enforcement Complex (jail, courthouse and Sheriff’s Office)… so where the money would come from, for yet another facility, is unclear.
Also adding to the complications: repeated claims by the County that the Courthouse is inherently unsafe, structurally and environmentally — which claims have generated assumptions that the building itself has no value and must be demolished, and the property put to a different use.
In recent months, the BOCC has seen offers from Springs Resort representative David Dronet, and separately from Texas businessmen David Loeser and James Scholl. Both of those offers have suggested that the historical building would be demolished.
Which brings us to the offer by Ronnie and Terry Urbanczyk, as presented to the BOCC on Tuesday, January 18, and the details that make this new offer rather unusual.
Mr. Urbanczyk began his presentation this way:
“I’d like to thank y’all for seeing me… It’s nice to be able to sit down with y’all, all together…
“I’ve been spending a lot of time in the county over the past few months. My wife and I have bought several pieces of property, and when we heard about the Courthouse, we got kind of excited about the opportunity to do something with it…
“So, we bought the property right lot next to it — the parking lot next to it. I had a friend of ours come out; he’s a structural engineer; we had him look at [the Courthouse]. Wanted to get his opinion before we got excited… and we felt comfortable that we could secure the structure, and make it a viable structure. And Terry and I decided it would be kind of neat to make it into a hotel… and the area next to it, a nice place to meet for corporate events. And stuff like that…”
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.