June 10.
A work session of the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners: Veronica Medina, Warren Brown, and John Ranson.
The subject: The ongoing difficulties involved in maintaining county roads.
Archuleta County Road & Bridge Manager Eric McRae was seated at the table, along with Public Works Director Mike Torres, and with a substantial pile of documents sitting in front of him. Mr. McRae told the three County commissioners that his department had spent the past several months trying to better understand why Archuleta County struggles with road maintenance, and therefore had collected these documents.
He said he was open to receiving additional documents related to the maintenance of Archuleta County roads — from whomever might have them.
“Our discoveries… we’re still open to corrections. We can add to this file. If anyone has a document that we’re not able to turn up… we spent quite a few months searching, because we don’t want to make false statements.”
Mr. McRae mentioned an agreement, in 1998, to continue County maintenance of roads within 12 subdivisions for a five-year period, leading up to a public vote in 2001. He implied that the vote would have increased the property tax mill levy to fund continued road maintenance. The measure was defeated.
County Commissioner Warren Brown wanted some clarification.
“So when you say, it was voted down, was this a November election where the public in general was allowed to vote, whether they wanted to continue this maintenance within these subdivisions, following the five-year period?”
Mr. McRae: “Yes, that is correct. And that document is here as well.”
Commissioner Brown: “Thank you.”
Mr. McRae: “I know this has to be laid out very clearly, because it’s stretched out over a long period of time… And this is a problem that I think all of us are facing.”
I have to agree, that all of us are facing a problem. But the problem is bigger than just unsatisfactory roads in 12 subdivisions.
When the U.S. embarked on a national experiment in automobile-centric suburban development in the 1950s and 1960s, the future looked bright. Young families raising their Baby Boomer children were able to move out of urban centers and purchase affordable tract homes in mass-produced subdivisions, and commute to work in the cities, on newly-constructed freeways.
Those single-family homes had garages that could accommodate the two or three cars necessary to this new type of habitation, and each home had a front and back yard. New schools were quickly constructed; shopping malls popped up to serve retail businesses and fast-food chains.
Miles and miles of roads and sewer lines and electrical lines and water lines were laid to serve this experiment, and for the first 50 years or so, things seemed to be going fine…
…Until the aging infrastructure began to fail, in ways that were expensive to maintain, and repair.
When the developers from Arizona and Texas discovered Pagosa Springs in the 1960s and 1970s, the suburban experiment looked like a viable way to make a nice profit, buying up ranch properties and chopping the land into 1/4-acre parcels, or one-acre parcels, or 35-acre parcels, served mainly by gravel roads and miles of utility infrastructure.
50 years later, the maintenance problems have only become worse, in spite of millions of tax dollars spent. What seemed like a good idea in 1970 has become a seemingly unsustainable problem in 2025.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) board of directors, but this editorial series reflects only my own opinions, and not necessarily the options of the PAWSD board and staff.
17 years ago, PAWSD cooperated with the San Juan Water Conservancy District to purchase a 660-acre ranch as the site for a future water reservoir, based on engineering reports that Pagosa Springs would be seriously short of drinking water by 2020. Seven years later, the PAWSD board had determined that it made more sense, financially, to fix the leaks in its water lines — which were leaking about 40% of its treated drinking water — rather than build a reservoir costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
An agreement was reached with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, who had loaned the money to purchase the ranch, to defer a portion of the loan payments and use the deferred money to address the leaking water system.
10 years later, after millions spent fixing leaks, our water lines are 10 years older, and still leaking 40% of our drinking water.
Is it possible that we’re running as fast as we can, just to stay in the same place?
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
— from ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There’ by Lewis Carrol, 1871.
In 1991, the largest subdivision in Archuleta County — Fairfield Pagosa — filed for bankruptcy, and 21 square miles of subdivision roads and utilities needed to start looking for one or more caretakers.
Especially, the roads.
Since the Fairfield bankruptcy settlement, finalized in 1997, and since the creation of the Pagosa Lakes Property Owners Association, Archuleta County has been maintaining the roads in various subdivisions.
But not in all subdivisions.
Several sizable subdivisions — including Loma Linda, Aspen Springs, Timber Ridge, and San Juan River Village — created tax-funded metro districts to maintain their own roads. Those residents pay an extra property tax mill levy on top of the taxes they pay to Archuleta County, but have some of the best-maintained roads in the county, according to reports.
Our situation in Archuleta County is somewhat unique. All across the U.S., suburban communities were created during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but many of those communities incorporated and established municipal governments to oversee the maintenance of streets and infrastructure and provide municipal services. But none of the suburban subdivisions in Archuleta County created municipal governments, which left the majority of residents — outside the Pagosa Springs town limits — relying on the County government to maintain their roads.
County governments in Colorado were not designed to provide municipal services.
It would appear that about 75% of the county population are not paying enough taxes to properly maintain their neighborhood streets and roads, or even the arterial roads.
This has gradually become a serious problem… 50 years after the roads were built.
In some cases, poorly built.
Read Part Three… tomorrow…