Photo: Archuleta County Road & Bridge Manager Eric McRae and Public Works Director Mike Torres share some deep thoughts with the Board of County Commissioner, June 10, 2025.
The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) — Veronica Medina, Warren Brown and John Ranson — heard a report on Tuesday morning, June 10, from County Road & Bridge Manager Eric McRae and Public Works Director Mike Torres.
I’m not sure what the BOCC thought of the presentation, but to me it felt a bit like deja vu. Same story, different day.
That said, the story was certainly interesting to listen to. Again.
Here’s the beginning of Mr. McRae’s discussion, delivered with a big stack of printed documents sitting on the table in front of him. Judging by the height of the documents stack, it looked like it could feasibly produce a Russian novel.
“Over the course of the last nine of ten months, we have discovered quite a few [BOCC] resolutions, some dating back quite a ways. The discoveries add to the puzzle.”
The puzzle, being, why does Archuleta County Road & Bridge Department struggle to maintain the county-wide roads?
“So I’d like to share these discoveries with you guys today. And we’re not finished with the discoveries. We’re open to more documents to hit the table.
“This is where we are, as of now. We’ve reached out to the Assessor. Our engineer has worked tirelessly, trying to find every document we can.
“We’ve searched from 1976 through 2006. So that’s where we’re at now…”
Commission chair Veronica Medina urged Mr. McRae to speak loudly, “because there’s a lot of people interested in this topic.”
Mr. McRae: “Yes, I know this topic affects our entire community. It usually starts with a phone call from a resident, asking why we haven’t bladed their [gravel] road. My next question is usually, ‘Where do you live? What road are you on?’ And then I end up in the engineer’s office, digging up resolutions and paperwork, trying to figure out what we’re responsible for, what was the last time we were there. That kind of thing…”
“I’ll try to list off these discoveries as clearly as possible, since they stretch over a long period of time…”
Mr. McRae noted that subdivision plats typically deed the road right-of-ways to the public. Archuleta County includes around 320 miles of public County roads — almost all, gravel roads — that were built by various subdivision developers, mainly back in the 1970s and 1980s… before the County had adopted road standards, and as a result, many of the roads were — and still are — difficult to maintain, due to poor drainage and other issues.
Mr. McRae mentioned a BOCC resolution dated from 1998.
“This was an agreement with 12 subdivisions, stating that [the County] would provide road maintenance inside the subdivisions for a period of five years. During the five-year period, the community was to hold a vote whether to continue maintenance through some sort of mill levy. And that proposal was voted down.
“We started to inform the neighborhoods of the County’s policies, and advised them to establish their HOA associations or, in some cases, metro districts in order to maintain the minor collector roads within their subdivisions.
“We decided to dig up the records of what the County has agreed to maintain, and what the County did not agree to maintain. So we went back to 1976 through 1985, and we have the accepted road list. I have all the documents.
“Most of the documents start in the 1970s that pertain to our roads.
“Our next discovery was the Fairfield bankruptcy agreement. Fairfield is what is now known as the PLPOA. The County agreed to take on the arterial roads within the PLPOA…”
That court case was settled in 1997. According to Mr. McRae, the vote by the 12 subdivisions, in 2001, to begin paying a higher mill levy to cover continued road maintenance, was defeated.
The implication, from Mr. McRae’s comments, is that County R&B has been maintaining secondary roads that it has no legal obligation — nor the financial resources — to maintain.
From the Archuleta County website:
The county has approximately 320 miles of road in its infrastructure, of which approximately 40 miles are paved or chip sealed and 280 miles are gravel. These roads are put into categories, primary and secondary, consisting of arterial roads, collector roads, and residential roads. Primary roads receive as many bladings as necessary per year. Secondary roads are scheduled to receive one blading per year but we try to blade them more if necessary.
The “arterial roads” would be, in my understanding, the major roads such as Piedra Road, North Pagosa Blvd, South Pagosa Blvd., Vista Blvd., etc. However, the list published by the County refers to some of the major roads as “collector roads”.
You can download that list, here.
Before we listen to Mr. McRae’s discoveries, I’d like to share a bit of history, and explain why, on June 10, I felt a sense of deja vu.
The Pagosa Daily Post began sharing stories about our community in 2004, and one of the first stories we covered concerned a couple of public meetings hosted by director of the Archuleta County Road & Bridge Department. (As I recollect, this was prior to the creation of a ‘Public Works Director’ position.) I do not recall the director’s name, but I do recall a significant number of local residents attending those presentations.
Essentially, the proposal from the R&B director went something like this:
Archuleta County does not have sufficient revenues to maintain all the community’s secondary neighborhood roads. The R&B Department is recommending that, going forward, it will maintain only the arterial roads, and allow the various subdivisions to figure out how they want to maintain their own neighborhood roads.
This announcement — which, as you might imagine, did not go over well with certain subdivision residents — played into the 2006 BOCC election, and the newly-elected commissioners dropped the idea of abandoning the maintenance of the secondary roads.
Now, twenty years later, are we ready to consider a similar solution?
Read Part Two… on Monday…