Photo: Kelly Spence announces the formation of the new Pagosa Lodgers Association at the July 2, 2025 meeting of the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board.
On July 2, following a rather weird meeting of the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, I was walking out of Town Hall with one of our downtown business owners.
That is to say, with one of the business owners directly impacted by the ongoing highway reconstruction project through downtown — a project that’s expected to last two years.
“How is your walk-in traffic doing this summer?” I asked.
“So far, we’re down 58 percent compared to last year…”
Ouch.
But I suppose I should explain. at some point, my choice of the word “weird” to describe the Tourism Board meeting. I don’t think I was the only one feeling that way.
The Tourism Board is a joint project by the Town of Pagosa Springs and the Archuleta County government, and consists of appointed representatives from various segments of the tourist industry — lodging, restaurants, activities. The Board makes recommendations to the Town Council and Board of County Commissioners on the expenditure of the Lodging Taxes, which are collected separately by the Town and County; those taxes amounted to about $1.4 million in 2024. Traditionally, the recommended spending has gone mainly to marketing, staffing for the downtown Visitors Center and the VisitPagosaSprings.com website, and to support tourism-oriented events.
Those spending priorities may change in the future. More about that in Part Two.
The assumption, among many community leaders over the past 20 years, has been that the promotion of tourism would be a positive benefit to the residents of Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County.
As things have turned out, it has only become more stressful, among working families and seniors on fixed incomes, to afford the raising cost of living in our community — especially in the area of housing.
Was this negative impact due mainly to spending millions of dollars to promote Pagosa Springs as a tourist destination over the past 20 years? People have different opinions about the answer to that question. The folks who serve in leadership positions often claim that continuing to promote tourism is crucial to our economy.
A few people — like myself, for example — have been arguing for years that our leaders need to stop spending money on tourism and focus on our bigger problems: roads, housing, a failing sewer system, and other infrastructure needs that serve the actual residents and taxpayers.
At the July 2 Tourism Board meeting, those issues — roads, housing, a failing sewer system and other infrastructure needs — were not part of the conversation. Instead, the two-hour meeting discussions centered on the best way to gather information about which tourists are visiting and how to get more of them to visit.
Last year, the Tourism Board hired a company called Blue Room to provide local data about tourism trends to inform marketing efforts.
You can download the July Power Point here.
Unfortunately for Blue Room and the Tourism Board, the data that many other tourism-based communities use to track visitors — namely, lodging occupancy, average room rates, booking lead times, etc. — are not available to Blue Room because, unlike many other communities, Pagosa lodgers have consistently refused to provide guest booking information and room rates to Blue Room and the Tourism Board staff.
But we heard about a new development at the July 2 meeting. The Town Council and the BOCC recently amended their agreement concerning the jointly-funded Tourism Board, and specified that one of the Board seats would be allotted to “the Lodging Association”.
But an actual “Lodging Association” did not exist.
At the start of the July 2 meeting, however, a handful of lodging representatives announced the news that 13 local lodging providers have now formed the Pagosa Lodgers Association. The Association was officially registered as an LLC in May 2025. To put the number “13” into some perspective, there are about 600 lodging entities in Archuleta County, if you include vacation rentals.
Here’s Association representative Kelly Spence:
“We are the Pagosa Lodgers Association. Our purpose is to pretty much advocate for the effective use of Lodgers Tax for visitor marketing and advertising for Archuleta County and Pagosa Springs. We feel that, in order to increase tourism and position Pagosa Springs as a premier destination, we would just like to, kinda like, have a little say in what’s going on with the tax dollars that are being taken from the lodgers.” She gave a little laugh.
Just to be a bit more clear, “tax dollars” are “not taken from the lodgers”. The hotels and motels and vacation rentals collect the taxes from their guests — taxes paid by the guests — and remit the collected revenue to the Town or County.
Ms. Spence:
“We believe that by advocating for strategic, data-informed advertising and promoting initiatives that attracts year-round visitation, we can help strengthen the tourism industry and generate shared prosperity for the residents of Pagosa Springs…
“We’d like to know how we can help, in any way we can.”
At the end of her presentation, Board Chair Shane Lucero asked Ms. Spence who the thirteen members were.
Ms. Spence: “I don’t… I don’t know how we feel about… We’ve talked about just having a number [of members] provided for you guys.” She paused. “So, if you want a list, of individual members… then that’s something we can provide to you.”
Mr. Lucero: “Yeah, that’s great. Just so we know who you represent. I mean, it’s a lodging association.”
And we might add, it’s also an association that’s been allotted a dedicated seat on a public board.
Ms. Spence noted that invitations to join the association had been distributed to a wide number of lodging entities. “We try to reach out to everybody. Whoever we can get to come to our meetings. We’ve had roughly six to eight meetings so far…”
The Board would hear more from the Association members later in the July 2 meeting.
But tomorrow, in Part Two, we will first consider a different meeting, hosted by the Board of County Commissioners on June 25, also related to Lodgers Tax.
Specifically, a potential increase in the Archuleta County Lodgers Tax that might appear on the November 2025 ballot, and where that increased revenue might be spent…