PHOTO ABOVE: An image included in the ‘Pagosa Views’ subdivision application to the Pagosa Springs Planning Commission, representing a “Possible Condominium Design”.
As I mentioned yesterday in Part One, I currently serve on the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) board, and the proposed ‘Pagosa Views’ subdivision will be on the agenda, asking to have their property included in the district for water service. Two other applications for inclusion are also on the agenda.
The meeting will additionally include a public hearing on financing for a proposed upgrade to the Snowball Water Treatment Plant — the plant that delivers treated drinking water to downtown Pagosa Springs and folks living out Highway 84.
“The purpose of the hearing will be to discuss the proposed Snowball Water Treatment Plant’s alternative designs, preferred design, proposed rate increases due to the project and environmental impacts of the project.”
The board will also discuss a new report on water supply and demand, written by Lakewood, CO-based Wilson Water Group, at the request of the San Juan Water Conservancy District. You can download that analysis here.
Two of these agenda items could have significant impacts on the community.
The ‘Pagosa Views’ subdivision could, by itself, increase the number of homes in Archuleta County by about 7%… and the number of homes in downtown Pagosa Springs by about 70%.
The Snowball Treatment Plant upgrade — currently estimated at around $38 million — will cause a substantial increase in PAWSD’s debt burden, and a long-term increase in your water bill.
From what I can tell, PAWSD has been considering this upgrade since at least 2009. It probably would have been cheaper to build, back then.
I’m not going to discuss my ‘opinions’ of these two important issues — specifically — this morning, although I’ve shared a bit of information about the ‘Pagosa Views’ project in occasional editorials over the past couple of months. Here, for example.
But I feel comfortable sharing a few ideas about subdivision growth in general.
When a property requests inclusion into the PAWSD district, the property owner is expected to make a financial contribution — in appreciation, you might say, for the millions of dollars that PAWSD ratepayers and taxpayers have invested into the system since the 1970s.
The inclusion fee is currently set at $4,752 per EU. Sort of a membership fee.
And ‘EU’ is an ‘Equivalent Unit’ representing the approximate water use of a single-family home. A business that uses more water than a single-family home — say, a restaurant, or a car wash — would be assessed at two or more ‘EUs’. Perhaps even a dozen EUs?
Because much of the water used by a typical single-family home goes into landscape irrigation, an apartment or condominium that shares landscaping might be assessed at less than one EU per dwelling, according to the current PAWSD rate schedule.
In their application for inclusion into the PAWSD district, the developers of ‘Pagosa Views’ are estimating their inclusion fees at about $3.1 million, based on the large number of dwellings being proposed.
650 dwellings x $4,752 = $3,088,800.
Some properties in Archuleta County purchase both water service and sewer service from PAWSD. Other properties receive only water service. ‘Pagosa Views’ is requesting only water service from PAWSD, and expects to purchase sewer service separately from the Town’s Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID).
Of course, PSSGID has a contract with PAWSD, to pump its sewage uphill to the Vista treatment plant, so in the end, PAWSD will presumably be treating the ‘Pagosa Views’ waste water. But PAWSD will collect no inclusion fees for this ‘second-hand’ waste water treatment.
That little issue might be brought up during the PAWSD board discussion tonight.
And it might also be brought up, again, when the Town Council and the PAWSD board sit down together for a joint meeting in early September, to discuss the future of waste water services in Archuleta County.
I spent much of last week researching and writing about ‘growth’ in an editorial series titled, ‘Theories of Growth, for the Non-Mathematician’. I often hear intelligent people, here in Pagosa Springs, propose that population growth and economic growth in Archuleta County is not only necessary, but that they are inevitable.
One well-documented result of that growth has been gentrification… a community that welcomes wealthier newcomers, and that has become gradually unaffordable for working individuals and families.
Many people who were raised here, or how have moved here over the past 50 years, have wished that we could have remained a small town. But those folks are not often elected or appointed to leadership positions.
One particular type of ‘growth’, that I didn’t discuss last week, is debt.
Here are a couple of quotes from Richard Heinberg, the author of the 2011 book, The End of Growth.
Today, global debt levels are higher than they were just prior to the 2008 financial crash. Our current financial environment has been called the “everything bubble.” The global debt-to-GDP ratio has grown to about 360 percent, a level economists in the past have called “untenable,” with debt ballooning especially in Japan, the US, and China. Countries have used debt to maintain adequate fossil fuel supplies and to prevent the collapse of their financial systems…
In short, leaders of government, finance, and industry seem to have borrowed their way to another decade of economic growth — which was mostly squandered in profit-taking rather than being spent preparing for the societal challenges that the inevitable and fast-approaching termination of growth will entail. It’s now widely acknowledged that the bailouts and debt sprees of the past decade overwhelmingly buoyed up billionaires, while, in terms of wealth and income, nearly everyone else was either treading water or sinking. More recently, a wild card (the pandemic) has thrown the global economy further into disarray, with billionaires again benefiting disproportionately…
That’s not the only major debt that PAWSD currently expects to create. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) has ordered PAWSD to upgrade its Vista sewer treatment facility, at a projected cost of perhaps $20 million.
Across town, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners have been on a spending spree, building out the new Fred Harman Law Enforcement Complex with borrowed money, and putting the County government millions of dollars in debt.
We can easily assume that the proposed ‘Pagosa Views’ project will be built with borrowed money. It’s my understanding that the proposed ‘Will Serve’ letter requested by the developers will help them borrow the money to purchase the vacant property near the elementary school.
If the developers need to borrow money simply to buy vacant property, I guess they don’t have enough money to actually build anything on it? So then… more debt?
And who will pay off these debts?
Our grandchildren? That’s a good joke on them.
Or maybe on us?