Photo: Pictured from left to right: Mike Torres, Derek Woodman, Ronnie Maez, Veronica Medina, Brad Ash, Warren Brown, Kevin Bruce, Lavonne Rababah, and Travis Lefever Credit Ashley Springer, Archuleta County.
On the morning of April 15, Archuleta County Commissioners Veronica Medina, Ronnie Maez and Warren Brown, County Manager Derek Woodman, County Transportation Coordinator Kevin Bruce, Mountain Express Transit (MET) Dispatcher Lavonne Rababah, County Public Works Director Mike Torres, Principal Architect Brad Ash of Reynolds Ash + Associates, and bid awardee Buildings by Design (BBD) Managing Member Travis Lefever, lined up with shovels in hand to break ground on a project five years in the making, the Archuleta County Transit Facility.
The facility is funded by multiple grant awards which began in 2019 through Colorado State Senate Bill 267, and federal grant 5339, the Bus and Bus Facilities Grant Program, leading to the acquisition of $4.5 million with a local match of $622,000. The facility will house the County’s main bus terminal, a lobby, and administrative offices. It will be ADA accessible, have ticketing purchase options, and has the potential to connect the proposed Town to Lakes Trail project.
“Archuleta County and Mountain Express Transit have been working towards this day since 2019 so it’s exciting to see us finally break ground,” said Transportation Coordinator Kevin Bruce. “The addition of the facility supports multimodal transportation within Pagosa Springs, Archuleta County and Southwest Colorado, giving users more connections and more choices.”
The new facility located at Harman Park will eventually allow riders to connect to routes outside the County.
“We see a bright future where we are able to expand services to areas like Aspen Springs and support a greater connectivity to Durango and Grand Junction with the Bustang Outrider,” Bruce added. The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) Bustang Outrider is a rural connection bus with the potential to take riders from Pagosa Springs to Grand Junction daily.
“Equally as exciting is that the MET will receive a new bus in June of 2025, an all-electric paratransit vehicle by the first of the year, and three low-emissions propane vehicles which should arrive close to the facility’s completion date of April 2025,” Bruce added.
“We expect the project to take between 10 and 12 months,” said BBD Vice President Merle Grauer. “The building is expected to take 10 months with the other two being mostly landscape related which will be weather permitting.”
BBD looks for community engagement opportunities and plans to contract locally as much as possible. “The team you see working today is from Animas Excavating out of Bayfield,” Grauer continued. “We like to keep everything as local as possible so if there are future issues, you aren’t looking to someone in Colorado Springs who could be five days out.”
BBD will locally source concrete work through Mastercraft Concrete Contracting based in Pagosa Springs.
For current MET bus schedule information, please visit archuletacounty.org/MET or call 970-264-2250.