Photo: The Master Plan Advisory Committee meeting at the Pagosa Springs Middle School library, January 27, 2025.
From what I hear around town, the citizenry of Pagosa Springs have become unusually interested in the pending changes to our community, and to the cost of living in this isolated mountain town.
Which is not to suggest that we’ve become a ‘direct democracy’ or ‘participatory democracy’… as discussed by Daily Post columnist Gary Beatty in his recent op-ed, ‘Speaking of Pigs and Democracy’.
A direct democracy, or pure democracy, is a situation where the people govern directly, by gathering and voting on laws and policies. It requires a wide participation of citizens in politics. Athenian democracy, or classical democracy, refers to a direct democracy developed in ancient times in the Greek city-state of Athens. That system worked pretty well, until it didn’t.
A popular democracy is a type of direct democracy based on referendums and other devices for the empowerment of the popular will. Here in Colorado, the taxpayers have the ability to propose ballot measures that can make changes the state’s laws and even to the Colorado Constitution. Voters within the municipality known as the Town of Pagosa Springs have similar rights to make legal changes within the town limits.
The lion’s share of our community lives outside the town limits, in the unincorporated county. The Archuleta County government has never allowed the citizens to place initiatives or referendums on the ballot.
What we have in the U.S., at the state level and national level, is mainly a representative democracy. We elect state and federal representatives to formulate the laws, and we elect a chief executive — a governor or president — to carry out the laws made by the legislature. Our courts are charged with making sure the laws made by the legislature are constitutional and that the chief executive is carrying out the laws in the correct manner.
A liberal democracy is a representative democracy with rule of law, protection for individual liberties and rights, and limitations on the power of the elected representatives. It’s the type of democracy defined in our state and national constitutions.
An illiberal democracy is a representative democracy with weak or no limits on the power of the elected representatives to rule as they please, with little regard for established laws. This is the type of democracy that the Trump administration has implemented since taking office.
As I suggested, the Pagosa Springs community has become a bit more politically active in recent months, with ordinary folks actively discussing the legal and financial condition of our country and our town. One of the drivers of this increased interest is the increasing cost of living. Pagosa Springs has become southwest Colorado’s most expensive community, in terms of the cost of living, according to the Region 9 Economic Development District.
This is a fairly recent development. When we moved to Pagosa with our family in 1993, Clarissa and I could survive comfortably on one-third of the income we had been earning in Alaska.
The main reason for Pagosa’s difficult economic situation, according to Region 9, is the lack of affordable housing. We don’t have a lack of housing per se, but a lack of ‘affordable housing’. In fact, we have much more housing than we need for our permanent population. But close to half of our housing stock is owned by part-time residents or has been converted into STRs — Short-Term Rentals, vacation rentals.
The COVID crisis greatly increased the number of property purchases by non-residents, and the removal of housing from local availability. It also drove up the cost of new home construction, and the price of existing homes.
In the midst of this situation, we have our representative democracy: boards of elected representatives charged with making reasonable decisions with our limited resources, in the service of the permanent population of voters.
It seems, to some of us, that almost every single government board in Archuleta County is planning expensive capital projects, to be funded by the taxpayers.
This coming Monday, April 21, at 5:15pm the Master Plan Advisory Committee will meet in the Middle School Library to discuss a potential $125 million plan to abandon existing school buildings — the Pagosa Springs Elementary School and the Pagosa Springs Middle School — and implement increased property taxes to pay for new buildings.
A potential plan. To be very clear, no final decisions have been made.
Disclosure: I’m one of the volunteers serving on the Master Plan Advisory Committee, but this editorial series reflects only my own opinions and not necessarily the opinions of any other Committee members.
In a previous Daily Post editorial, I shared a map showing the new schools in Colorado (the red ‘pins’) built mostly using Lease-Purchase financing. (The orange and green districts.). Colorado’s BEST program (“Building Excellent Schools Today”) made extensive use of Lease-Purchase financing in 2014, to help school districts build excellent schools today. Lease-Purchase arrangements are similar to Certificates of Participation (COPs) in that they do not require voter approval.
From my reading of the most recent BEST legislation, school districts are no longer allowed to use Lease-Purchase financing, if they want to win a BEST grant. Perhaps our legislators have now acknowledged the unpleasant amount of financial stress created on governments when they use Lease-Purchase arrangements and Certificates of Participation — and how much less stress comes from actually getting actual voter approval for government capital projects.
Journalist Garret Fevinger wrote a lengthy and accurate article in the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN newspaper last February, after attending the first meeting of Archuleta School District’s Master Plan Advisory Committee. He quoted one of the consultants leading the meeting discussion, Shannon Bingham, who filled the committee in on certain demographic and educational changes taking place in America, and here in Pagosa Springs. Mr. Bingham owns Boulder-based Western Demographics.
From the SUN article:
[Mr. Bingham] continued, “This community has always done an incredibly good job of maintaining its affordability. Affordability is part of the vocabulary of all the planners that affect this community.” And while that fluency has “helped us hang on to having a certain amount of children in the community,” according to Bingham’s count, “in general we have lost kids,” he said. “If we don’t continue to build affordable housing, we will continue to lose kids.”
This an interesting comment from an expert demographer, considering we have become the least affordable community in southwest Colorado.