From a story by reporter Rhiannon Bergman in the Montrose Press, April 2023:
Right in the middle of the campus, said Bell, are plans for a mixed-use development that will have commercial spaces as well as residential. He also said there are hopes for a small grocery market on campus.
That’s not all — more growth is anticipated at Colorado Outdoors.
“We are also working on adding more restaurants, and we are optimistic we’ll have more announcements on those, too,” said David.
In May of 2022, David stated private investment was exceeding $65 million. He also said private investment for active projects is approaching $116 million.
In terms of MURA’s investment, in May of last year the entity had spent more than $11.7 million on projects within Colorado Outdoors. MURA also had taken around $13 million in promissory notes from the City of Montrose. Bell said those numbers remain accurate, because there were no new promissory notes this past year.
Since MURA is a 25-year project, full payment of the notes is not due to the city until 2042.
The Colorado Outdoors development in Montrose, Colorado, in a previously vacant 150-acre parcel along the Uncompadre River, kicked off about five years ago with the ground-breaking for Mayfly Outdoors manufacturing facility, which manufactures fly fishing equipment. Most recently, the development is seeing the construction of a new ‘Fairfield by Marriott’ hotel located on the north end of campus.
In February, Chris Lamont, vice president of Lamont Companies (the developer for the hotel) claimed the modular construction model used could build the four floors and 90 rooms of the Fairfield in just one week.
I’m quoting from the Montrose Press, because the same development partnership responsible for acquiring millions of dollars in tax subsidies in Montrose — Colorado Outdoors LLC — made a presentation to the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners on May 21, proposing to provide a parcel and possibly a building near the Pagosa Springs Medical Center… knowing that the BOCC wants to build or lease a new administration building, since they’ve sold their historical downtown Courthouse and must soon find a home for at least three important County departments.
The “David” mentioned in the Montrose Press quote above is David Dragoo, president of Mayfly Outdoors, and partner in the ambitious Montrose development project with Doug Dragoo. (The two men are possibly related.)
Doug Dragoo sat down with the Archuleta BOCC earlier this month to propose a location near the Pagosa Springs Medical Center for a new County administration building. as part of a 100-acre development project across the highway from the City Market shopping center. Mr. Dragoo’s company has not actually purchased the 100-acre parcel yet, but has lots of ideas about what could be located there.
High-end homes, workforce housing, hotels, government buildings. A mix of residential and commercial.
Here’s a photo of Doug Dragoo making a sales pitch to the BOCC on May 21. In the photo we see commissioners Warren Brown and Veronica Medina, newly-hired interim County Manager Jack Harper, Mr. Dragoo (in the dark sweater), and EXIT Realty broker Shelley Low (back to the camera). Commissioner Ronnie Maez, in a pink polo shirt, is partly hidden.
But maybe we can to look back at some history? This whole thing might be more complicated than it seems on the surface.
Back in the early 1990s, the suburban development four miles west of Pagosa Springs and known as Fairfield Communities Inc. — a combined residential and time-share project in the area now better known as Pagosa Lakes — filed for bankruptcy. It was a messy bankruptcy, because the Pagosa Lakes Property Owners Association (PLPOA) represented the actual residential properties within the planned Fairfield development, but many of the “recreational amenities” and “recreational greenbelts” were owned by FCI.
If you’re interested in history, you can read about the bankruptcy case, Pagosa Lakes Property v. Fairfield Pagosa, here.
Be that as it may, something else was happening around the same time.
A petition was being circulated to create a new municipality in Pagosa Lakes. If approved by the residents of Pagosa Lakes, this would be a separate town from the nearby town of Pagosa Springs.
The municipal leadership in Pagosa Springs apparently didn’t like this idea, and they came up with a scheme to annex all of the commercial property in the proposed new town, along Highway 160, which would — if it could be accomplished — deprive the proposed municipality of nearly all its sales tax revenue.
The resulting annexations created a “Town of Pagosa Springs” that included residential homes in the downtown area to the east, and almost exclusively commercial properties in the “uptown” area to the west. The colors represent the various types of land use allowed in each Town zoning district. The non-colored areas lie outside the Town in the unincorporated county.
This scheme left the Archuleta County government — rather than the Town government — responsible for the extensive suburban road system of Pagosa Lakes, an arrangement which many Pagosa Lakes property owners have found less than satisfactory.
In the map above, you can see the 100-acre property — discussed by Doug Dragoo and realtor Shelley Low at the May 21 BOCC work session — as an orange-and-red area at the far east end of the Town boundaries. An existing residential neighborhood is shown in yellow, immediately south of Mr. Dragoo’s proposed development.
All of this is to clarify that, although Mr. Dragoo might like to sell a parcel (or a new building) in his proposed development to the BOCC, the parcels in question are governed by the Town government.
So let’s hear what Mr. Dragoo is thinking of doing with these parcels, if he manages to purchase them.
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.