Back in 2000, Red Wassenich — a resident of Austin, Texas — was enjoying a morning show on radio station KOOP called “The Lounge Show”. The show featured offbeat music — Bing Crosby singing “Hey Jude”, for example — and Mr. Wassenich was inspired to call in and make a donation to the station.
The person who answered the phone asked, “Why do you support the show?”
Mr. Wassenich recalled his response. “I don’t know. It helps keep Austin weird.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than he felt a jolt of inspiration. He’d been watching his funky, once-affordable hometown undergo a transformation into a high-tech, high-cost boomtown where restaurants held wine-tasting parties at $50 a glass.
Mr. Wassenich thought the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” accurately reflected the sentiment many locals felt about their fast-changing town, so he and his wife began printing bumper stickers and the motto started to spread. Soon the kids at the university were wearing “Keep Austin Weird” t-shirts.
Local businesses, who were being threatened by the arrival of chain stores and corporate franchises, latched on the slogan.
The “Keep XXX Weird” slogan proved catchy enough to be adopted by residents in at least a couple of other cities: Portland in 2003 and Louisville in 2005.
That’s about the time a slightly different bumper sticker started appearing on vehicles here in Pagosa Springs.
“Keep Pagosa Pagosa”
I guess most people knew what the phrase meant. Or thought they knew.
Maybe:
“Don’t change Pagosa. We like it the way it is.”
Funky, affordable, and maybe a bit weird? Or at least, different from the run of the mill?
I’m thinking about these bumper stickers as I listen to my audio recording of a joint meeting, held on September 17, between the Pagosa Springs Town Council and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners. For a couple of decades now, these are two organizations that have been promoting a more affluent version of Pagosa Springs — one occupied by people who can afford $600,000 homes… homes that have $100,000 RVs parked in the yard, rather than broken-down pickup trucks…
A version of Pagosa Springs visited by a better class of tourist.
Maybe someday, we can have wine-tasting parties, costing $50?
The first presentation at the September 17 joint meeting featured recreation advocate Bob Milford, who announced a new Pagosa Area Recreation Coalition (PARC) that’s looking for support from the Town and County governments. The group has been discussing ways to “get a sustainable outdoor recreation plan for the greater Pagosa area.”
“We’re talking about how we can resolve some of these issues, as we have more people coming in. We have these beautiful natural resources and wildlife that we want to protect…
“But we still have to have great recreation.”
An interesting statement, offered as a self-evident fact. It’s not “We’d like to have great recreation…” but “We have to have great recreation….”
Recreation, supported by taxes, and by volunteers like Mr. Milford, has become absolutely essential.
The new PARC organization obtained a grant and hired the SE Group to help develop a community-wide recreation plan. Presumably, once we have a plan, our elected leaders will feel more confident spending money on recreational amenities.
Mr. Milford proposed that PARC will be establishing a “task force of 30 to 35 folks who represent different recreation interests, and we’re going to spend the next year putting together a recreation plan that’s sustainable and community supported, so that any projects we do will have community support on the deal, and it will be much easier to get funding, and make sure that folks agree on the direction that we’re heading. Right?
“So one of our goals here, as we get through this effort, is to make sure that the County, the Town, the Forest Service, the Southern Ute tribe, and all the folks work together to resolve the issues and come up with a sustainable recreation plan.
“Because the folks that come in don’t really know the different boundaries, and the different rules. I think we’ll find that, if we work together as a group, we’ll have a better outcome than if each person does their own thing.
“As we saw with Jackson Mountain, where there’s a project and a lot of communication didn’t happen, and the facts didn’t always come out. So we want to sit down with all the different folks in a room and divide into small working groups to work on each of these issues. Kind of do the heavy lifting on this deal, and come up with a plan in a year or so.”
Speaking of Jackson Mountain, some of our Daily Post readers may remember that lengthy planning effort, spearheaded by the San Juan National Forest.
The Pagosa Ranger District invited community comments on a proposed Jackson Mountain Landscape Project, which was initially a forest-thinning project until a group of recreation advocates proposed the addition of an an extensive trail system — 40 miles of mountain bike and multi-use trail options and the reconstruction and expansion of the existing Turkey Creek Trailhead.
Then the Archuleta County government proposed a gravel pit in the midst of the project.
After a thorough review of public, agency, and internal comments, the district decided not to move forward with consideration of the gravel pit or trail system as part of the project.
“Concerns over the probable impacts of a trail system on an important big game migration corridor have led me to conclude that we would be in error in proceeding with the analysis of the trail proposal as currently envisioned,” said District Ranger Josh Peck. “Similarly, I believe that we, in conjunction with the County and other partners, need to take a more thorough and wholistic look at potential opportunities for gravel pit development throughout the county prior to further consideration of the Jackson Mountain pit to ensure that this site best meets the needs of the community and that the potential impacts of any site are manageable.”
We all know how important recreation is to a certain segment of Pagosa’s population.
And in fact, we already have a 200-page plan. But everyone may have forgotten about it?
Read Part Two, tomorrow…
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.