Since 2004, Pagosa Partners Residential LLC has been providing Business Services, Nec from Sarasota [FL]. Pagosa Partners Residential LLC is incorporated in Florida. Pagosa Partners Residential LLC has estimated annual revenues of $210,000.00 and also employs an estimated 3 employees.
— Dun & Bradstreet website
I can’t recall seeing Pagosa Springs Planning Director James Dickhoff present a resolution in such a bright and cheery mood as the one he exuded at the Tuesday, March 1, meeting of the Town Council. And we can certainly forgive him for feeling that way. He was asking the Council to approve a $3 million grant application, allegedly for the purchase and subsequent development of a 35-acre parcel just east of downtown, for ‘affordable housing’. According to Mr. Dickhoff, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) office responsible for doling out $38 million for innovative affordable housing projects had been very encouraging about Pagosa’s chances of winning a $3 million award.
Following Mr. Dickhoff’s beaming presentation, the Council was happy to authorize the grant application, with the understanding that the Town would need to match the grant — if awarded — with $600,000 out of Town revenues.
The Town is currently awash in revenues, it seems.
According to my own calculations, a 35-acre parcel dedicated to affordable housing could accommodate about 770 dwelling units, if the entire parcel were zoned ‘R-22’. Mr. Dickhoff indicated, however, that he imagines a mix of housing types, so, maybe not so many dwellings. But certainly, “hundreds”, he said.
“In essence, we’ve been communicating with the property owner and just discussing the opportunity that might exist there. We’ve been working with… uh… so I should back up a little bit. Mountain Crossing is three 35-acre parcels. So, Mountain Crossing is a development that was moving forward to improve Mill Creek Road, is a separate property owner from the 35-acre parcel that we’re looking at, that’s east of that 70-acre holding…”
On the map below, the 70-acre Mountain Crossing holding that’s already gone through some approval processes with the Town government is shown in blue. The 35-acre parcel that Town staff has been discussing with its separate owner is shown in purple. We can see the Highway 160/84 intersection on the left, with the Tractor Supply store in the lower left, Buckskin Towing and Repair at top center, and the Strohecker asphalt plant in the barren, tan rectangle at the lower right.
The blue parcels are owned by Mountain Crossing LLC, located in Bend, Oregon. The purple parcel is owned by Pagosa Partners Residential LLC, located in Sarasota, Florida.
For a better understanding of the Mountain Crossing project, we can look at the map posted to the Mountain Crossing website, showing the plan for a subdivision with about 24 large parcels, which I presume are meant for commercial buildings.
Commercial parcels have been selling rather poorly in Pagosa Springs since at least 2006… as we can observe, for example, in the Aspen Village subdivision where the Walmart store is located. Of the 27 commercial lots in that centrally-located subdivision, only seven have been developed since 2006, which includes the tire store currently under construction. This, despite their proximity to a popular Walmart shopping facility.
This may help explain the difficulties faced by the Bend, Oregon group, when trying to market a commercial subdivision project like Mountain Crossing at the far end of town… though there may be other challenges as well. But some of our Town leaders have been yearning (desperately?) to see Mountain Crossing developed.
Mr. Dickhoff:
“We’ve been working with them because, obviously, the two developments need to consider shared infrastructure, and shared road access as well. So with that said, we had [Pagosa engineer] Mike Davis give us an rough estimate on running utilities to this 35-acre parcel, and he looked at a full-build-out scenario.
“What we are proposing is the 35-acre parcel as kind of a ‘palette’ that we can kind of control, for workforce housing development in the future. We can incorporate all different types of housing, for all income levels, right? We could be looking at cottages, duplexes, single-family, multi-family, condos, apartments, town homes, at different [Area Median Income] levels…
“The Town would generally be in control, but working with a lot of different partners…”
Mr. Davis’ engineering estimate for the infrastructure, said Mr. Dickhoff, came to about $3 million. The parcel is advertised with an asking price of $1.2 million. According to my pocket calculator, that comes to $4.2 million. Which suggests that the Town would do the project using a ‘phased’ approach.
What that approach looks like, has thus far been hidden from the taxpayers.
Following the upbeat presentation by Planning Director Dickhoff, the Town Council convened in closed-door executive session to further discuss the problems and promises suggested by this ambitious proposal. Following the executive session, no decision was announced, nor subsequently made, and the Council adjourned the meeting, and then opened a meeting of the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General improvement District, for which the Town Council serves as the board of directors.
The PSSGID meeting was a definite change of tone. The $7 million sewer pipeline that the Town built collaboratively with Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District a few years back, to pump the entire downtown supply of sewage seven miles uphill to the Vista Treatment Plant, has been burning up its pumps like they were going out of style.
Near the end of his depressing report, Town Public Works Director Martin Schmidt summarized the worrisome situation, where the Town has found itself repairing pumps repeatedly, to a point where, we were told, the pumps are no longer able to function at fully capacity.
“Now, remember, these pump stations are intended to have the capability of two separate trains, so you can fully pump with one train, and you have another train there is something goes wrong,” Mr. Schmidt explained.
“And because of the pump failures we’ve had, we’re down to one train at each of the lift stations. So that’s why staff is really starting to look at some of these redundant options…”
He didn’t actually mean, of course, that “staff is starting to look” at the redundant options. Staff has been looking at redundant options for a couple of years already. But things are now so serious that staff — and, by osmosis, the Town taxpayers — have no choice left but to spend tens of thousands of dollars on redundant pumps, even though the pumps wear out and replacement parts are sometimes weeks or months in arriving, due to supply chain issues.
The Town of Pagosa Springs sewage system, it seems, is totally at the mercy of (Chinese?) parts manufacturers. And that has put us, potentially, within hours of a nasty sewage spill.
One might find oneself wondering… at the idea of adding hundreds of new homes to such a sewer system…
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.