Having read all of Bill Hudson’s eight-part narrative about the proposed water reservoir at the site of the former Running Iron Ranch, I make the following observations:
First, it appears to me the ‘studies’ allegedly justifying the original purchase of the property for the future reservoir were part of an elaborate plan to pull off a simple old fashioned American hustle. Some local private landowners sold to the public for more than they’d have gotten for it from a private purchaser. Selling land to the government at an inflated price is a long-standing American tradition going back to post-revolutionary war land speculators.
Second, that hustle having succeeded, we now are now witnessing an example of another tried and true American tradition, to wit: When government realizes it made a mistake, justify it by spending more money making another one.
The thinking works like this, “Damn, that future-reservoir land purchase we made sure seems to have turned out to be a boondoggle. What we need to do now is go ahead and build the reservoir to prove we were right all along. After all, it’s not our good money we’d be throwing after bad — it’s the government’s money! ”
That thinking is reminiscent of a clip from a daytime talk show I once saw (the Phil Donohue show, I think it was) in which the topic was how the taxpayers got stuck paying for a mistake made by a private enterprise.
A man stood up in the audience and said, “Why should the taxpayers have to pay for that. The government should have to!” To which the audience applauded.
Many years ago when Archuleta County finances were taken over by the State, the Pagosa Springs Sun published a letter to the editor I’d submitted in response to their detailed chronology of how the County came to be effectively bankrupt.
My observation at that time, from the perspective of an absentee Archuleta landowner, was that it didn’t appear anyone working in the County finance office knew how to balance a checkbook.
Proceeding with the reservoir project affords another explanation for the county’s bankruptcy — lack of common sense.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.