I told the Town Council it was a bad idea.
But we have to give most of the credit to Mayor Shari Pierce, for her excellent summary of the issues facing the Town Council on Tuesday, April 4.
The item before them — Mayor Pierce and Council members Mat deGraaf, Maddie Bergon, Matt DeGuise, Gary Williams and Brook Lindner — was a proposed $1.25 million real estate purchase, for property that the citizens of Pagosa Springs have no pressing need for.
Yes, it was 3.4 acres of riverfront property. But the property had no existing access. Half of it was unbuildable, being in the FEMA floodway. It was terribly overpriced, as everything is, in Pagosa in 2023.
Actually, I should simply let Mayor Pierce explain the situation.
“I’m opposed [to this purchase] on many different levels, and I feel it’s my obligation to outline some of those for you.
“My first thought is, how much land along the river is ‘enough’? For the Town to have, for us to do what we need to do?
“So I started thinking about what we have — and just starting at the River Center [at the east end of town] we have property along there. Then when you come down by the Museum, we own that land there where we’re going to be putting in a pedestrian bridge…”
“Then you come around to Cotton Hole Park.
“And then when you get down to South 2nd Street… we have availability there for a potential ‘put-in’, if that’s what you’re looking for…”
“You keep going down, you have Town Park, we have Mary Fisher Park, we have the land where the Visitor’s Center is, we have the other side of the river and down to Centennial Park and over to the pedestrian bridge there…”
The Mayor continued:
“When you get over to Sixth Street, we have along Sixth Street all the way down to the townhomes.
Then we have Yamaguchi Park and Yamaguchi South…
“We have a lot of opportunities for recreation with the land we already have…”
I will interrupt Mayor Pierce, here, to note that Reservoir Hill Park includes much of the south side of the river, across from Cotton Hole Park and South 2nd Street…
The Town appears to own land on one side of the river or the other, through almost the entire downtown. And in some cases, on both sides.
Enough, as the Mayor said, for the Town government to do what we need it to do?
Mayor Pierce continued:
“I don’t believe the cost for this property is going to be only the $1.25 million. Even though we have said we [can buy it and let it sit there] , people are going to be coming to us and saying, ‘We need restrooms; we need a put-in for the boats…’ We know we’re going to need signage… We’re going to have to maintain the park; we can’t just let it grow over. All those things are going to add up. So it’s going to cost much more than just this dollar amount that we’re looking at tonight…”
“Gary, I know you said we could just keep the part along the river and sell the upper part. But the real value of the property is that it’s riverfront. And we can’t build restrooms on the lower portion, because it’s in the floodway.
“I think we might stymie potential development in that area, for a developer… when we’ve been working so hard on our East End plan to try and help that area down there.”
Here’s the parcel that was under consideration, in pink.
“I’m really concerned about the financial piece of this. A few meetings back, when we were talking about purchasing land, our staff looked at our numbers and recommended that we not spend more than $500,000 [from reserves]. This is well over that amount. I value their opinion, and I talked to [Town Manager Andrea Phillips] about it last week, and I asked her how they came up with those numbers. And that’s why we got a spreadsheet sent to us, to further let us know where we are, financially.
“But since then, we’ve spent a lot of that $500,000… And we’re talking about a new pedestrian bridge [at the River Center]… What if that comes in, over budget? Here comes more money that staff will be asking us for…
“We have a lot of projects coming up, and prices are just going up…
“When we approved this year’s budget, we also approved a 10-year capital improvement plan. This property purchase wasn’t in that plan, and I’m concern about what it would do to the work our staff has done to build that plan, and that we approved.
“Looking at our budget, after public works — which includes our street, which are very important — our next largest expenditures are for parks. And I feel we are just not putting the money where we should be putting it. We’ve committed to try and do something about housing. And then Andrea gave us a big rundown last month, about potential expenditures for sanitation — which the Sanitation Fund cannot withstand.
“It’s not going to do us any good to have another park, if we don’t have sanitation for our citizens…”
Following a bit more discussion, Council member Gary Williams made a motion to purchase the Hummer parcel for $1.25 million. Council members Brooks Lindner and Mat deGraaf voted in favor. Mayor Pierce and Council members Maddie Bergon and Matt DeGuise voted nay. The motion failed. (A motion needs a majority approval to pass.)
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.