Photo: The Master Plan Advisory Committee meeting at the Pagosa Springs Middle School library, January 27, 2025.
At their Tuesday, February 4 regular meeting, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to approve a Letter of Intent with Pagosa Partners I Inc. for the purchase of approximately 5.5 vacant acres in Aspen Village subdivision, for the purpose of constructing a new County Administration building. The agenda didn’t reveal the price, but I’ve heard the number $1.8 million.
We were told that the Letter of Intent is not a final purchase agreement, but we’re apparently getting closer to one. Where the BOCC thinks they will then get the money to build an Administration building on the vacant parcel is not clear, to a casual observer like myself.
Nor is it clear whether the community will be involved in helping plan the building, and the financing mechanism.
So that’s one planned government project that is not entirely transparent, at this point.
Near the end of the January 27 meeting of Archuleta School District’s initial meeting of its Master Plan Advisory Committee (MPAC), Superintendent Rick Holt stated that ASD intends for the MPAC process to be fully transparent. To that end, the consultants heading up the planning process — Colorado Springs-based RTA Architects — have been posting their research on a publicly-available website.
It’s not clear, yet, if any independent research done by the MPAC study group itself will be posted to the website… or if only the consultants’ research will be available. At this point, none of the consultants’ research has mentioned Certificates of Participation. either ‘pro’ or ‘con’.
Disclosure: I’m one of the volunteers serving on the Master Plan Advisory Committee, but this editorial series reflects only my own opinions and not necessarily the opinions of any other Committee members.
Previously in this editorial series, I shared a map showing the new schools in Colorado (the red ‘pins’) built mostly using Lease-Purchase financing. (The orange and green districts.). Colorado’s BEST program (“Building Excellent Schools Today”) made extensive use of Lease-Purchase financing in 2014, to help school districts build excellent schools today.
From my reading of the most recent BEST legislation, school districts are no longer allowed to use Lease-Purchase financing, if they want to win a BEST grant. Perhaps our legislators have now acknowledged the unpleasant amount of financial stress created on governments when they use Lease-Purchase arrangements and Certificates of Participation — and how much less stress comes from actually getting voter approval for government capital projects.
Journalist Garret Fevinger wrote a lengthy and accurate article in the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN newspaper, last week, after attending the first meeting of Archuleta School District’s Master Plan Advisory Committee. He quoted one of the consultants leading the meeting discussion, Shannon Bingham, who filled the committee in on certain demographic and educational changes taking place in America, and here in Pagosa Springs. Mr. Bingham owns Boulder-based Western Demographics.
From the SUN article:
[Mr. Bingham] continued, “This community has always done an incredibly good job of maintaining its affordability. Affordability is part of the vocabulary of all the planners that affect this community.” And while that fluency has “helped us hang on to having a certain amount of children in the community,” according to Bingham’s count, “in general we have lost kids,” he said. “If we don’t continue to build affordable housing, we will continue to lose kids.”
Mr. Bingham’s demographic assessments have been posted to a website hosted by RTA Architects. You can access the website here.
One of Mr. Bingham’s graphs showed the gradual decline in ASD enrollment in recent years, with a fairly dramatic dip during COVID crisis. He also looked five years into the future and predicted an enrollment of 1,421 in 2029… a decline from the high point of 1,742 in 2019. That would be an enrollment drop of about 15%.
From the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) website:
The Colorado Department of Education today released data from the state’s October student count taken in the fall of 2024; this information is used to determine state funding for public schools. The data shows a slight decline in PK-12 student enrollment with a total of 881,065 students, a decrease of 0.1% compared to October 2023.
So then, a one-year decline of 0.1%. If that trend continued through 2029, it would mean a decline of 0.5%
Colorado’s student enrollment trends mirror larger national declines in PK-12 student enrollment. The state’s enrollment numbers have steadily decreased over the last five years, with the exception of a bump in enrollment post-pandemic in 2021. Pre-pandemic, the state saw nearly 30 years of enrollment increases.
The October 2024 count shows the largest enrollment declines in the early elementary grades with 3,204 fewer students in pre-kindergarten through second grades than the prior year, although most grade level cohorts continue to increase in enrollment.
To judge by Mr. Bingham’s enthusiasm for Archuleta County’s “incredibly good job of maintaining its affordability”… he was presumably not aware of a recent “Living Wage” study performed by Region 9 Economic Development District.
So I sent him the following quote from Region 9’s website:
In Region 9, the amount needed to be economically self-sufficient varies by geographic location. The 2024 Colorado minimum wage is $14.42 per hour, which amounts to $30,455 per year working full time. We found that in Region 9, Montezuma County is the least expensive ($91,519 annually), and Archuleta County is the most expensive place to live ($105,919 annually) for a family of four. Using housing costs specific to each community we found that Pagosa Springs is the most expensive community in the region for a family of four ($25.08 per hour for each working adult) due to the high cost of housing.
Archuleta County was wonderfully affordable when Clarissa and I moved here with our kids, in 1993. We were able to purchase a three-bedroom house downtown for $52,000. Yes, it needed a bit of fixing up, but even with an adjustable-rate mortgage, it was cheaper than any rentals we could find.
That same downtown house sold last year for $460,000.
Archuleta County is not doing an incredibly good job of maintaining its affordability. Quite the contrary.
Our elected leaders might ask themselves if putting the taxpayers deeply into debt for new government buildings will improve the situation.