Twelve years after an ugly divorce, our two local water districts are aiming to convene a joint subcommittee meeting, to discuss the development — or not — of a water reservoir proposed back in 2003.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors, but this editorial reflects only my own personal opinions and not necessarily the opinions of the PAWSD Board as a whole.
This is not the only instance of local governments, businesses, and non-profits working cooperatively in Pagosa Springs, and I’d like to touch on a few of those situations in this editorial series.
For example:
Last Saturday, the non-profit Pagosa Center for the Arts (PSCA) on Eagle Drive hosted a fundraising concert — “A Tribute to the Beatles” — to benefit our non-profit public charter school, Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS). The school has also been supported by grants through the Town of Pagosa Springs, through the Colorado Health Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Walton Foundation, and the Colorado League of Charter Schools… to mention a few of the school’s financial supporters.
The concert itself featured nineteen accomplished local musicians, who all donated their time and talents to the Beatles event. About 200 local citizens showed up to sing along, dance, and generally show their appreciation for the music… and support public education in our community. Several businesses chipped in to support the event.
This weekend, PSCA will be hosting another local non-profit, ‘School of Movement’, as they present their spring Burlesque show, “Millennial Mixtape”, opening tomorrow… show dates are May 2,3,4 and 9,10,11. You can purchase tickets at pagosacenter.org
I suppose it’s an easy thing for non-profits to work cooperatively, since they are all aiming for essentially the same thing: a more satisfying community for everyone.
We might think our local governments would have the same reason for working cooperatively. But historically, our Pagosa governments have often operated in separate ‘silos’ — sometimes even at cross purposes.
Those ‘cross purposes’ can give politics a bad name, even though we understand, deep down, that not everyone is going to share the same priorities. Some of us would like Pagosa Springs to remain the quaint small town it was when we arrived, or when we grew up here. Others would like Pagosa to become the next Aspen, Vail or Telluride.
Today, I am thinking about some instances where local governments, businesses, and non-profits are showing signs of cooperative effort, perhaps around issues that were previously divisive.
The Dry Gulch Reservoir, for instance.
Sometime within the next week or so, it sounds like a subcommittee recently formed by the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) will be sitting down at the conference table with a subcommittee recently formed by the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) to discuss a 660-acre property jointly owned by the two districts.
Many years ago — back in 2003 — PAWSD and SJWCD worked in a wonderfully cooperative manner.
Or… was it a tragically cooperative manner…?
In those days, the two separate districts — one that provided municipal drinking water (PAWSD) and one charged with developing water reservoirs (SJWCD) — shared the same offices, the same staff, the same law firm, and many of the same Board members. The two Boards also shared a desire to build a water reservoir in the Dry Gulch valley, just northeast of downtown Pagosa. The two Boards suspected that Pagosa would start running short of drinking water by the year 2020 unless a new reservoir could be constructed, thus hampering the endless population growth that would guarantee a more satisfying community for residents and visitors alike.
For some reason, most of the people outside the shared board room — the ordinary taxpayers and businesses — consistently refused to embrace the higher taxes and fees needed to pay for a reservoir estimated, in 2009, to cost $357 million.
Nevertheless, the two Boards (with shared Board members) figured out a method for paying $10 million for the Running Iron Ranch, without taxpayer approval. The purchase was supported by loans and grants provided by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The planned project was not supported, however, by the Colorado Supreme Court, which rejected the proposed reservoir size.
The ugly divorce mentioned above took place in 2012, when a newly elected PAWSD Board — reflecting broad dissatisfaction evident in the community — asked SJWCD to exit the shared offices (owned by PAWSD) and find their own law firm, and staff. PAWSD also removed the Dry Gulch project from its long-term capital plan.
The two districts remained, however, joint owners of the former Running Iron Ranch.
Since that time, the two districts have been moving in generally opposite directions with regard to the Dry Gulch project, with the San Juan Water Conservancy maintaining that Colorado has a well-established need for 11,000 acre feet of water that could be stored in a large Dry Gulch reservoir… while the current PAWSD Board has expressed the belief that, if this reservoir were ever needed, it would likely be 40 years from now… and that perhaps the Pagosa community would be best served by selling the property.
As we can imagine, these two different opinions — about the community’s need for a multi-million-dollar reservoir in the near future, and about the best use of the jointly-owned ranch property — have resulted in an sometimes-contentious relationship.
So I’m encouraged that each district has now formed its own Running Iron Ranch subcommittee, and that these two subcommittees might soon schedule a joint meeting, presumably to seek some common ground concerning the future of the Running Iron Ranch.
But that’s not the only example of cooperative effort unfolding in Pagosa Springs these days.