Yesterday we briefly considered the possibility that the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) and the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) might be looking for ways to cooperate — after several years of discord — on the utilization of a jointly-owned 660-acre ranch northeast of downtown Pagosa Springs.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors, but this editorial reflects only my own personal opinions and not necessarily the opinions of the PAWSD Board as a whole.
This is not the only example of attempted cooperation taking place in our town. But as we can understand, cooperation ebbs and flows, as priorities change.
15 years ago, the Town of Pagosa Springs began searching for money to build a new, state-of-the-art sewer treatment plant, to replace a lagoon treatment system reaching the end of its useful life. It appeared the cost of the new plant would place a heavy financial burden on the residents and businesses within the downtown district.
Someone came up with a bright idea. Instead of building a new, expensive treatment plant, the Town could build a seven-mile sewer pipeline to pump its wastewater uphill to the PAWSD treatment plant, which currently had plenty of extra capacity.
The PAWSD Board and the Town Council became convinced that this was a feasible, money-saving solution, and the pipeline was funded through a loan from PAWSD reserves, with a promise that the Town customers would pay back the loan. At the time, no one seemed concerned that the pumping system, for a seven-mile-uphill pipeline, might pose problems in the future.
Like, what would happen if Pagosa Springs experienced an extended power outage — say, as the result of a regional wildfire that destroyed transmission lines? And the pumps stopped working?
When the pipeline was nearly complete, PAWSD and the Town sanitation district still had a few important details to agree upon, and the lawyers got involved. That’s never a good sign. The discussion became a debate and ended up in arbitration, and both parties — the Town Council and the PAWSD Board — were left with a bad taste in their mouths.
The friendly feeling of community cooperation disappeared, to be replaced by mild but lingering animosity, as the pumping system began to operate in 2016.
Lately, however, the two governments have been struggling, in different ways, with wastewater issues.
The Town has spent well over $1 million, replacing pumps, and building an ‘overflow’ vault to handle a potential (temporary) failure of the pumps. (The vault would not handle an extended failure, however.)
At the other end of town, PAWSD has been saddled — by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — with the requirement to remove more of the nitrogen from its wastewater effluent, at a cost of several million dollars. To help finance the upgrades, the PAWSD Board substantially increased its customer rates on the wastewater side.
Town customers will be paying for a portion of the upgrade costs.
Looking into the future — and not terribly far into the future — the Town Council and the PAWSD Board have concluded that our community might be best served by a new, state-of-the-art sewer plant located near the high school, and by a sewer pipeline that ran downhill instead of uphill.
Both governments have committed funds to exploring this idea, from an engineering perspective.
Understanding the financial implications, will be another question to address. Would the Town customers and PAWSD customers benefit, financially, from a joint project? That’s not yet clear.
Would everyone benefit if the two separate sanitation districts were consolidated into a single district? Another question currently under consideration.
So far in this editorial series about cooperation, we’ve touched lightly on the arts community, the community’s water supply, and the community’s wastewater treatment opinions.
Another area exhibiting a cooperative spirit, here in Archuleta County, is housing.
Back in 2008, the Town Council and Board of County Commissioners collaboratively funded a ‘Housing Needs Assessment’. Our local leaders understood that we were headed for a housing crisis, and that the community needed an official study in order to qualify for certain types of federal and state funding to address the problem.
But this was 2008. The Archuleta County housing market was already in freefall, prior to the Great Recession, and subsequently, dozens of local families lost their homes to foreclosure. At the same time, sales tax revenues were declining, and property tax collections would soon take a hit.
Affordable housing didn’t seem to be the key problem when the 2008 Housing Needs Assessment arrived.
By 2017, however, the housing crisis had again come to the fore, and again the Town Council and BOCC cooperatively hired the same Denver consultants to assess our housing needs, again. The 2017 Housing Needs Study indicated a worsening problem, and each government agreed to earmark $50,000 to begin addressing the crisis.
The money ultimately created a community housing plan and helped kick-start the 34-unit Rose Mountain low-income housing project that was finally completed in 2023. Along the way, the Town Council invested in some vacant properties, with the idea that the property would be donated to a private company that can provide middle-income housing. Unfortunately, that project has been treading water for the past two years. The BOCC, meanwhile, donated some tax-lien parcels in the infrastructure-deficient Chris Mountain and Trails subdivisions, to two local non-profits: Habitat for Humanity and the Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation. Together, these two groups are planning to oversee the construction of 13 homes in 2024, aimed at working families.
Like many mountain resort communities in Colorado, Pagosa Springs has plenty of housing, but about 40% of it functions as second homes or vacation rentals.
The creation of housing for working families, here in Archuleta County, is extremely challenging, just as it is in many other American communities. So, maybe it takes a village?