I’ve mentioned before, that Pagosa’s real estate industry has greatly profited from ever-increasing real estate prices… increases which have greatly outpaced inflation. The price increases were driven, in part, by wealthy tourists and investors who visited Pagosa Springs for a holiday… fell in love with our community… and then paid inflated prices for real estate.
It’s a problem for the rest of us.
At the conclusion of his interview for for the vacant seat on the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, marketing guru Jesse Hensle told the Board, if he was not recommended for appointment this time around, he looked forward to the next opportunity.
Perhaps he was reading the tea leaves, because he did not receive the Board’s recommendation. That recommendation went to business owner Shane Lucero, a Pagosa Springs native who has previous served as chair of the Tourism Board. Mr. Lucero’s term on the Board had expired two days earlier, on August 18. He was applying for re-appointment for another two-year term. His endorsement by the Tourism Board still required the final approval by the Town Council and the BOCC.
Why did Mr. Lucero want to continue serving on this volunteer board? When he’s currently running two Pagosa businesses?
“Well, I’ve thought about this for a while, because I’ve been on the Board a couple of different times. And I said to myself, am I done with this? Should I be… I mean, this is something I really enjoy…
“I’ve been an active part of the Board. I help with all the events… but I also bring some history to the Board, not only in terms of what the Board has done in the past, but also some history from the town. Being a native of Pagosa. There’s that.
“Some people don’t have the experience. So when we’re talking about the community, you know, having a bad view of tourism… I’m like, are you kidding me? Like, I grew up here when there was only one restaurant, and all the roads were dirt. We wouldn’t be able to have nice paved roads and multiple places to eat, if we didn’t have these tourists coming here.
“So I’ve got a very different perspective, sometimes, from my parents generation. They say, yeah, we kinda forgot about that…”
Mr. Lucero may have a point, even though the expression “nice paved roads” doesn’t always apply, in my experience. Prior to COVID and the resulting invasion of tourists, our nice paved roads and our multiple restaurants were not too overcrowded, and it did seem like the tourists were contributing to our economic health, without being too annoying.
Here’s a graph shared with the Town Council in April. As we can see, the Lodgers Tax revenues during the COVID crisis in 2020-2021 spiked dramatically upwards. Presumably, this also indicates a spike in profits for certain tourist-oriented businesses. But it suggests, as well, a struggle to find employees, and 45-minute wait times to get a table at one of our multiple places to eat.
Since that spike, the Lodgers Tax revenue has tapered off slightly, but the collections are still above the level in 2020, the first year of the COVID-driven tourist invasion.
We might note that the drop-off in Lodgers Tax has been minimal in the unincorporated county (the olive green color), where most of the lodging consists of vacation rentals, but fell by about 20% within the Town limits (the darker blue-green bars) where much of the lodging is in the form of motels.
I noticed that nearly all the lodgers and restaurant owners who signed the now-infamous letter of complaint in October 2023 were located in town. (That letter was discussed in more depth here.)
A Board member noted that Mr. Lucero was serving on the Board last October, when “the Lodgers’ Letter” was received, causing considerable tension between the Tourism Board and a group of lodging owners. That letter asserted that the Tourism Board and staff were failing to share data and analytics in a transparent manner.
Had the lodgers’ concerns been addressed, in Mr. Lucero’s opinion?
Mr. Lucero:
“As you may remember, we asked [the lodgers] to let us know what information they wanted collected and shared, and we never got any emails from anybody… We asked several times, what information specifically they wanted, and no one ever responded…”
It’s my understanding that the Tourism Board makes its data available to the public online… whatever data it is able to collect without comprehensive help from the lodging community.
But the decision by the Board to stop promoting tourism during the summer months — and instead focus on educational campaigns that might help prevent, for example, careless practices that could cause a forest fire — is not just a local decision. The Colorado Tourism Office has labeled this change in emphasis — from ‘ever-increasing tourism’ to ‘ever-more-sustainable tourism’ — as “Destination Stewardship”.
Inspiring the world to explore Colorado “responsibly and respectfully.”
The tourism industry is now tasked not just with “selling” our communities, but also preserving some vestiges of why locals choose to live here. It’s too late for that, in some Colorado mountain towns. But maybe Pagosa Springs can still be salvaged?
The old “traditional” metrics looked only at tourism industry profits.
The Colorado Tourism Office now wants communities to collect data about social impacts, and environmental impacts.
My sense is that there’s an ongoing dispute in Pagosa Springs, between industry and government leaders who want to design our tourism policies and marketing around ‘generating profits’, and industry and government leaders who realize that we will be shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t expand our view of what it means to have a sustainable tourism industry.
That ongoing dispute raised its ugly head at last Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, when the Council was asked to approve Shane Lucero as the recommended at-large member of the Tourism Board…