Photo: The Drift cabins on South 5th Street, downtown Pagosa Springs.
During her interview in front of the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, as a candidate for a board seat, local business owner Rosanne Dufour made an interesting comment. She bought a struggling pizza restaurant called “DSP” located in the City Market shopping center, and built it into a very successful business, as Rosie’s Pizzeria. Successful in terms of excellent online reviews, and an expanding staff, and high quality food and service.
But part of the story was painful, apparently.
Ms. Dufour serves on a Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation committee focused on addressing the local housing crisis.
“As an employer, when I bought what was DSP, I had 8 part-time employees, and when I sold it I had 38 full-time employees.
“And the pain of workforce housing became, basically, too much to bear. You know, it’s like, training people day in and day out, for them just to say, ‘I can’t live in my car any longer.’
“It became just too burdensome — and it was one of the reasons I did sell the business. So that issue is super important to me, and we really need to make a strong connection with tourism, because it doesn’t matter how many people you can bring here — if you don’t have the services and the quality that they are looking for here, they’re never coming back.”
Of the nine candidates for the vacant Tourism Board seats on Tuesday, Ms. Dufour was the only one who suggested that a well-housed workforce is essential to a functioning tourism industry.
As mentioned in Part Two, the five incumbent members of the Tourism Board selected Ms. Dufour as an “at large” member of their group, while the other three new members elected to the board represented particular industries.
Sarah Mashue, selected to represent the lodging industry, has been — with her husband Kris — successfully hosting tourists in her vacation rentals for several years. She and Kris, own the construction company Cedar Creek Homes, and have spent the past year building a compact group of motel cabins overlooking the San Juan River, near the geothermal greenhouses in Centennial Park, with a view of the new hotel under construction at the Springs Resort.
The complex is called ‘The Drift’.
The units face a common courtyard equipped with a gas grill, but each unit has its own private entrance.
This motel project reflects what seems to be a new (or maybe very old) idea in the lodging industry. Instead of a single large building with multiple (smallish) motel rooms, the new trend suggests that many tourist families prefer to rent a separate house or cabin unit with a kitchen and maybe a couple of bedrooms.
This same trend is reflected in a newly-built collection of separate dome-shaped cabins at the east end of downtown: Pagosa River Domes, now renting out at about $175 a night.
Annie DeMille, one of the owners of the Pagosa River Domes, applied as a candidate to join the Tourism Board, but was not selected. But like the rest of the candidates who were not selected, she offered to stay in communication with the Board and volunteer, as needed, to help enhance the Board’s work.
Meanwhile, the Springs Resort might be catering to a different clientele, with their new 78-room hotel, currently under construction.
The finished hotel will reportedly feature a 15,000-square-foot spa with 12 spa treatment rooms, and a 1,700-square-foot restaurant.
Generally speaking, the Pagosa tourism industry appears to be alive and well, in terms of investments in new lodging options.
In terms of paying a living wage, and in terms of available housing, not so much.
Another candidate who was not picked to serve on the Tourism Board: Julian Caler. Mr. Caler served as the chair of the Tourism Board for about four years, until he was required to resign under a new agreement between the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners and the Pagosa Springs Town Council.
During his interview on Tuesday, he noted that his construction business “is mainly in Durango” but that he intends to build some workforce housing here in Pagosa. He also talked about his opposition to seeing the Tourism Board support affordable housing projects.
“The Tourism Board has great core values. I have nothing to complain about that. I think we need to put audit systems into pay. We have supply and demand. That’s the only equation we need to ask ourselves. We need to bring people to Pagosa, all the time, no matter what.
“We need to make sure that every dollar is being allocated properly to get the most people here.
“And I’m not saying [Tourism Director Jennie Green] has done anything bad. She’s done great. She’s done great work. But I do believe there are more efficient marketing strategies that we could, you know, implement in our system, to get more tourists. I’m not one to believe in this ‘sustainable tourism’ thing.
“Supply and demand. We bring the tourists; people will figure it out. Right? We might be overrun at the restaurants; we might run out of Chimichangas at Chavolo’s. But Chavolo’s is going to grow, so that they can sustain the tourism. It’s supply and demand.
“I definitely think that we need to just push, push, push. Full bore.
“And I was definitely not onboard to allocating money for low-income housing, or workforce housing. That was not our mission; that was not our thing. I was not onboard with that. So I would put my foot down, on stuff like that. I want to make sure our money is allocated to tourism, and solely to tourism.”
As noted, Mr. Caler was not appointed to a vacant seat. And for that, I am thankful.
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.