Image: The 1960 Triumph TR3
I’m thinking about a story I heard from my friend Steve Smith years ago. Steve grew up in a mostly Catholic neighborhood in Seattle, meaning — among other things — a neighborhood with lots of kids. The husband of a nearby family worked as a professor at the University of Washington, bringing home the bacon for his wife and seven children.
One day, the husband came home with a new family car. A Triumph TR3.
Not exactly a family car. Especially if you have seven children.
According to Steve, the wife eventually bought a small Studebaker station wagon. But the family rarely went anywhere as an entire household. Certainly not in the TR3.
How is the Town of Pagosa Springs’ household doing lately? Going places, without us?
To prepare for this editorial series, I had emailed Pagosa Springs Town Manager David Harris and Town Clerk and Finance Director April Hessman with a question. The Town Council establishes an annual budget, based on the amount of revenues they expect to bring in, and setting priorities for how to spend that money over the coming 12 months. In practice, the budget tends to be ‘conservative’ and the Town typically brings in more revenue than what’s included in the budget, so the Town Council often spends money outside their budget allocations.
Often.
On unexpected emergencies, for example. And on frivolous items. (But I might be the only person who considers them frivolous.)
The Council has rather seriously into their reserve savings accounts this year. How seriously? That was my question to Mr. Harris and Ms. Hessman. In response to my email, I received the following information from Ms. Hessman:
Bill,
There have been a few amendments to the budget, using reserves.
General fund reserves $1,205,542 for dump and water truck purchase, Goodman Hwy 84 property purchase, and Echo IT contract increase.
Capital fund reserves $236,390 for 1st Street pedestrian bridge deposit and design increase, and geothermal rehabilitation grant match.
Sanitation fund reserves $185,000 for Vista plant engineering costs to PAWSD
Have a nice day.
We see here three different funds:
General. Capital. Sanitation. Overspent — relative to the approved 2024 budget — by $1.6 million.
The Town has other funds, but these are the ones mentioned by Ms, Hessman. Presumably, the purchase of a dump truck/ water truck is not a frivolous purchase. Ditto, expenditures on rehabilitation of the geothermal heating system, and engineering for state-required sewer treatment improvements.
But forgive me if I describe the $850,000 purchase of the Goodman Property as frivolous. A majority of the Town Council voted for this purchase without having a clearly stated purpose for buying the 12-acre parcel at the east end of town.
At the first reading of the ordinance authorizing the purchase, Mayor Shari Pierce referred to a previous effort by certain Council members to purchase a vacant property adjacent to the San Juan Motel, without having any clearly defined municipal use for the property, and against staff advice. That $1.2 million purchase had failed to get a majority vote.
Now, another expensive property purchase was on the table, again at the east end of town and again without any clearly defined purpose.
Mayor Pierce:
“I know I’m going to be out-voted, but I just can’t let this go without saying, this is a lot like the $1.2 million riverfront property, where staff looked at the budget and told us they wouldn’t recommend spending more than $500,000 out of the budget, and we were now looking at spending significantly more than that.
“When we approved our budget for this year, we already acknowledged that we were going to be unbalanced in our budget by $138,000.
“This proposal was not part of that. So we’re getting close to $1 million out-of-balance in our budget for this year. I just don’t think that’s a good way to do business.
“We heard in our last Sanitation District meeting, that the engineering for the Vista Treatment Plant upgrades is going to be $900,000, and we voted to cover our share of that. But then [Council member Leonard Martinez] asked what the total cost of the upgrades would be, and we were told, $4 to $5 million. We’re on the hook for 25% of that cost. And we have to look at where that money would come from…”
She noted that the $850,000 purchase price for the Goodman property would be only the beginning. Any use of the property — as a trailhead, or parking lot, or housing development — would incur additional costs.
Her arguments did not, however, sway the Council. The ‘first reading’ was approved by a 4-2 vote.
At the second reading, long-time town resident Eddie Archuleta had a few thoughts to share with the Council.
Mr. Archuleta seemed to be speaking directly to Mayor Pierce, who had voted against the purchase at the first reading of Ordinance 1004, on April 2.
“Really, and you made this comment when you were running for Mayor, that you wanted to take care of the local people first. That [purchase] is a bad mistake. You take 5th Street, 6th Street; I been telling the Town… that you need to put a sidewalk from the Subway to up to the low income housing. You’d be surprised how close it’s been, for a kid to get run over on that road…”
Indeed, many of the residential streets in downtown still have no sidewalks… nor curbs… nor gutters. Mr. Archuleta also noted the poor condition of many downtown streets.
“Loma Street is horrible… But yet, you go down to the Pickeball Courts; you spent a bunch of money down there; you paved it and put in curb and gutter. A bunch of rich bastards who don’t need it, when we have other stuff that we need first.”
How to best use the money we have? That’s something we’ll never agree on, even among the town residents who serve on the Pagosa Springs Town Council…
But who is the Town Council trying to serve?