Photo: The Archuleta County Jail in the Harman Park subdivision.
As mentioned yesterday in Part Two, the 70-plus citizens who attended the March 25 ‘Interactive Community Forum’ at the Springs Resort were provided information about current road conditions, along with information about other community issues.
When I say ‘current road conditions’ I mean, ‘the reasons why so many County roads are in poor condition’.
Some of the road maintenance information was summarized in a printed handout. You can download the “Roads handout” shared at the Forum, here.
For example:
Cost to grade/blade gravel roads: For Archuleta County to “grade/blade only” 1 mile of dirt road, cost $2,910 per mile. Additional costs apply when applying fresh gravel, due to additional staffing, and hauling and cost of material.
Cost of “full reconstruct” for a paved road: Cost per mile to perform a [Full Depth Reclamation] on 1 mile of road is roughly $1,100,000 (including engineering and testing)
Cost to convert gravel road to paved road: Cost per mile to fully construct an asphalt road is roughly $1,300,000 (including engineering & design)
Well-maintained roads are not cheap. The reasons for our current road conditions are partly financial… and partly historical… and partly a matter of priorities.
For example…
One of the County government’s key priorities has been the ability to lock people up in jail, where the inmates must be supervised 24/7, and also fed, and provided with medical care. Not a cheap operation.
Back in 2015, the downtown Archuleta County Detention Center had a serious roof leak, which ultimately led to claims by then-Sheriff Rich Valdez that the jail air quality had become unhealthy, even dangerous — and then to the abandonment of the jail. For the next few years, inmates were transported to the La Plata County jail, while the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) worked on a scheme to build a large new jail in the Harman Park subdivision.
During the time that the Sheriff’s deputies were transporting inmates to La Plata, the inmates were supervised, fed, and given medical attention by La Plata County, with the costs reimbursed by Archuleta County.
From the approved 2017 County Budget:
If we add together the “Sheriff Detention” line item and the “Sheriff Jail Commissary” line item, we see that it was expected to cost Archuleta County about $1.15 million per year to house inmates at the La Plata County jail.
That same year, the BOCC asked the voters to approve a bond issue and tax increase to build a new 56-bed jail. The voters replied, “No thank you.”
The following year, 2018, the BOCC once again asked the voters the same question. Once again, the voters replied, “No thanks.”
So the BOCC went to some investment bankers and borrowed the money for a new jail, without voter approval, using an investment scheme known as ‘Certificates of Participation” — more affectionately known as COPs — which is essentially a loan that avoids the borrowing limits imposed by the Colorado Constitution.
When a government borrows millions of dollars through a voter-approved bond issue, the voters agree to higher taxes to repay the loan.
When a government borrows millions of dollar through a COP, they must repay the loan by diverting their limited funds from other community needs. And this is precisely what happened with the County jail.
On a Tuesday afternoon in late 2020, three County Commissioners — Ronnie Maez, Steve Wadley and Alvin Schaaf — listened to their Finance Director, Larry Walton, summarize a draft 2021 budget.
The presentation was sometimes difficult to understand, watching via ZOOM during COVID seclusion. But one of Mr. Walton’s numerous charts seemed very easy to read.
As we see in this chart, the BOCC had exhibited variety of approaches about County road maintenance over the preceding decade. In 2014, when many of our roads were in bad shape, the BOCC was allocating 80% of the County property tax to the General Fund, and 15% to the Road & Bridge Fund (shown as “R&B”). The remaining 5% went to the Department of Human Services. That was in 2014.
In 2015, the BOCC came to the thoughtful conclusion that our County roads were unlikely to improve unless more tax money were dedicated to Road & Bridge, so they changed the property tax formula and bumped up the R&B funding to 25% of property tax collections.
Our readers are welcome to consider whether our roads were in generally better shape in 2019 than they were in 2014.
I picked the year 2019, because the following year, the BOCC reduced the amount of property tax dedicated to Road & Bridge. The dedicated funding dropped from 25% down to 5%, for the year 2020.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the draft 2021 budget presented to the BOCC reduced the property taxes directed to roads to an even smaller amount.
0%.
The main source of citizen-generated revenue flowing to Archuleta County — and allocated each year by the Board of County Commissioners — is a property tax mill levy. Mr. Walton did not specifically mention the total amount expected for 2021 during his presentation on Tuesday. That amount was shown, however, in the “Budget Detail” posted to the Archuleta County website.
Below is the “Budget Detail” for the tax revenues assigned to the General Fund, in this draft budget for 2021. The top line shows, in the far right column, the expected property taxes requested to be spent in the General Fund: nearly $5.8 million. That number had increased from $3.9 million in 2018.
At the bottom, also highlighted in yellow, that is the total taxes assigned to the General Fund from all tax sources: $9.6 million. That number had increased from $6.9 million in 2018.
Below is the “Budget Detail” for the tax revenues assigned to Road & Bridge for 2021.
As we can see, the total local property taxes spent on our County road system in 2018 was nearly $1.6 million. As we also see, the amount of 2021 property taxes the BOCC planned to spend on our County road system? Slightly less than $33,000. And “0” from property taxes.
Who was to blame for this situation? Well, it was the local voters and taxpayers.
Here’s a quote from BOCC chair Ronnie Maez, explaining why he wanted to allocate not a single property tax dollar to our roads in 2021… while the spending within the General Fund would be 39% higher than it was in 2018. And why you and I were to blame.
“Yeah, you know, we expressed the concerns that we’re anticipating now, to the public. And we tried to do it with the first ballot measure. That failed, and we explained to the public then, that we would have to go for a COP for the jail. And the best solution was probably the first solution presented to the public, to get them to vote for a one-percent sales tax, because we were facing all these problems.”
What he was implying here was: the County now had an new annual debt payment of $800,000 to pay for the jail COPs, and they had directed the money away from Road & Bridge to help cover the loan payments…
That $800,000 annual amount does not include the cost of operating the jail, which cost us $3.8 million in 2025. Which suggests that Archuleta County currently spends nearly five times what they spent on inmate detention in 2017.
It’s worth noting that none of the commissioners and lead staff who spearheaded the COPs for the jail are still working at the County in 2026.
Nevertheless, we can see some financial reasons why the County has been depleting the Road & Bridge Fund…