Image: Screenshot from the PAWSD website.
Last night, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District — PAWSD — released the unofficial results of the district Board election, which was held via mail ballot, with a final day of in-person voting on May 6.
Alex Boehmer: 604
Eugene Tautges: 513
Bruce Jones Jr.: 494
Carl Young: 467
Christa Chaggra: 422
The tally will be confirmed during the canvassing process next week, and the elected Board members will be sworn in, at the Thursday, May 22 Board meeting. Canvassing is the process by which officials verify, process, and count every single ballot before including them in the final election result. State laws ensure security, specifying everything from who participates in the canvass, to when it starts and ends, what information it contains, and what is open to the public.
This tally seems to indicate a rather modest level of customer participation in the election, considering that PAWSD maintains about 6,330 customer connections in the water district and about 3,622 in the sewer district.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the PAWSD Board, but this editorial reflects only my own personal opinions and not necessarily those of the PAWSD Board or staff.
I’ve been serving with the incumbents, Alex Boehmer and Gene Tautges, since their appointments to the Board, and although we may have disagreed at times, the debates have been respectful and thoughtful, and we share a lot of the same values and concerns. In particular, we have been in general agreement around the wisdom of selling the Running Iron Ranch, purchased in 2008 for a planned, oversized reservoir that I believe to be unnecessary, and far too expensive for a little mountain town like Pagosa Springs.
Selling the Ranch would relieve the PAWSD customers of a $12 million-plus debt burden.
I look forward to getting to know BJ Jones as a fellow Board member, and finding out where he stands on the important water district issues such as the Running Iron Ranch sale.
I have appreciated some aspects of the campaign conducted by candidate Carl Young. He was willing to ask hard questions about PAWSD on his campaign website — pawsd.info — and even though he sometimes had his facts wrong, I believe it’s essential for us taxpayers to ask the hard questions if we want to keep our local governments accountable and transparent.
In a message sent to his email list yesterday, Mr. Young announced the election results.
Incumbents and Bruce Jones Elected
Thanks to all who supported my campaign. It was a good effort, but I came up two dozen votes short.
The people have spoken, and they like the status quo.
My congratulations to incumbent board members Tautges and Boehmer, and to former PLPOA president Bruce Jones Jr.
Although Mr. Young might propose that the election results reflect a desire by the voters to preserve the status quo — as evidenced, one might think, by the election of the two incumbents who were running — I would tend to disagree.
I’ve been intimately involved in a number of political campaigns in Pagosa Springs, and it’s my belief that every voter has personal reasons for the way they cast their votes. In some cases, an election is a popularity contest. Which candidates is most familiar? We often feel more secure voting for someone we know, who may not share our exact same beliefs and values, rather than for a stranger who professes to believe the way we believe.
In other cases, there’s a special concern or issue driving our decision. Many people are concerned, this year, about fire hydrant testing, and the two incumbents in this election were integral in getting a PAWSD testing program underway this spring.
I doubt this election was about preserving the status quo. Yes, we all “like” the status quo. Until we don’t.
Donald Trump promised us that, if he was elected, the status quo would be an endangered species. Everything was going to change. For the better, of course. The voters took him at his word and sent him back to White House,
100 days into his administration, President Trump has dismantled seemingly every federal government department, and pulverized our foreign alliances and trade agreements.
The latest polls indicate that slightly less than half the population (45% ?) approves of the President’s bulldozer approach to government.
But this demolition process has created a new version of the ‘status quo’ in which nothing is the way it used to be. It seems, whenever we try and dismantle the status quo, it quickly adapts itself to the new situation. It’s like a virus that keeps evolving by making a new variant of itself.
I foresee PAWSD continuing to evolve, regardless of who sits on the Board.
But hopefully, not like a virus.