A heavy fog drifted along Pall Mall as Edgar left the War Office. He followed a pair of torch-boys through the mist so thick that the children, swathed in heavy rags, seemed disembodied from the hands that held the dancing lights.
“Do you want a cab, sir?” one of the boys asked.
“Yes, to Fitzroy Square, please,” he said, but then changed his mind. “Take me to the Embankment.”
— from ‘The Piano Tuner’, a novel by Daniel Mason
The second chapter in Daniel Mason’s 2002 best-selling novel, The Piano Tuner, begins with the hero, Edgar Drake, walking through a neighborhood in London in 1886; London, being a city noted for its occasional heavy fog.
I had never before come across the term “torch-boys”. The more common term, apparently, is “link-boys” — children who carried burning torches to light the way for pedestrians, usually at night, before the arrival of street lamps. But also, perhaps, during a heavy fog?
A torch-boy typically earned a farthing — a quarter of a penny — for his service to a customer. We don’t have farthings, here in Pagosa Springs, but we still have pennies. And as a famous man once wrote, a penny saved is a penny earned.
Or, if you can’t seem to be financially responsible, you can ask the voters to increase their sales tax burden.
Pagosa Springs is not often subject to heavy fog. Unless we are talking about the heavy fog that sometimes surrounds government decisions.
The photo shown above, of the joint meeting between two local government boards — the Pagosa Springs Town Council and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners — does not hint at the fog present in the room on Tuesday evening. The fog was not physical; but more like an intellectual fog.
Perhaps I can serve as a torch-boy, to help guide our Daily Post readers through the foggy tax-increase terrain.
At the Tuesday meeting, some draft language of a ballot measure for the November election was distributed, by County Manager Derek Woodman, to the three County commissioners (Warren Brown, Ronnie Maez, Alvin Schaaf) and to six of the seven Town Council members (Maddie Bergon, Gary Williams, Matt DeGuise, Brooks Lindner, Jeff Posey, Mayor Shari Pierce). According to Mr. Woodman, this was the first time any of the board members — on either board — had seen the proposed resolution…
…which wasn’t exactly a proposed resolution, but rather an incomplete draft of a proposed resolution. But it needed to be approved within the next few days.
A proposed $6.5 million tax increase? Without any chance for honest public discussion?
The public audience in attendance at the meeting was not allowed to see the document, and County Attorney Todd Weaver expressly told the elected officials not to share the document with the public.
It was, he said, a “work document”.
To accommodate the County commissioners’ desire to meet a September 9 deadline — the deadline to get the tax increase on the November ballot — the Town Council has scheduled a last-minute meeting at noon today, September 1, at Town Hall, to discuss a document that does not appear in the agenda packet.
There’s other information in the agenda packet, of course. A Power Point summary of the recent Magellan Strategies survey, conducted earlier this month. Also, a long list of projects that the Town could use their extra $3.26 million dollars for.
No information, unfortunately, about what the money would actually be used for. (More salary increases?) Nor does the packet include any information about how this tax increase might affect struggling families and retired couples in Archuleta County.
According to a 2017 government-funded Archuleta County housing study, we had about 6,199 full-time households in Archuleta County in 2016. (You can download that study here.)
By my calculations, a $6.5 million dollar tax increase is roughly equivalent to about $1,000 per year, per Archuleta County household.
Even if tourists pay about 30% of the tax, as was implied at a previous Town/County joint meeting, that still comes to $700 of new tax, per household, per year. But I have yet to see any actual documentation to support the “30% paid by tourists” claim that was included in the recent Magellan Strategies survey.
By my own calculations based on County sales tax data, tourists typically pay — in a normal year — about 18% of the sales tax. If my calculations are accurate, then the average Pagosa household will pay more than $800 per year, when saddled with an additional 1.5% sales tax increase.
During economically-stressful periods, when the tourists tend to stay home, even more of the sales tax would be paid by local families. (When those local families are also economically stressed.)
It’s obvious to me — and even to certain of our elected officials — that this whole thing is being rushed through, at the last minute, without a chance for anyone to thoroughly understand the implications.
Does that remind anyone of how the Archuleta County government has typically operated in the past?
Does it help explain why only 27% of the respondents to the recent Magellan survey said they believe the Archuleta County government is fiscally responsible?
Only 4% “Strongly Agreed” that “Archuleta County is fiscally responsible and spends taxpayer money wisely”.
Why would only 4% of the people surveyed feel confident that our County government is fiscally responsible? Part of the answer might be on display in this chart, which was included in the Archuleta County 2021 Budget Presentation.
Traditionally, the BOCC has assigned about 15% of its property tax revenues to “R&B”.
“Road & Bridge”. The fund dedicated to road maintenance.
In 2015, the BOCC made a pretty dramatic change, in an effort to do a better job of repairing the community’s failing road system. The BOCC increased the “R&B” allocation from 15% to 25%.
Then, in 2019, the commissioners were facing a major problem. They had put the taxpayers millions of dollars in debt to build a new, very large, ‘state of the art’ jail. But they had no revenue stream to pay for the new jail.
This was the same jail that the taxpayers had rejected at the polls. Twice.
But the commissioner built the (oversized) jail anyway.
The BOCC (Ronnie Maez, Alvin Schaaf and Steve Wadley) decided they could pay for the new jail out of their existing revenues. And while they were at it, they would also build a new courthouse. And remodel the Sheriff’s Office. Without any new revenue.
Simple as pie. They would just take money out of the Road & Bridge budget.
Are we surprised that the BOCC (Warren Brown, Ronnie Maez and Alvin Schaaf) are now considering a $6.5 million sales tax increase? If you can’t get the money one way… try, try again.