Sadly and confusingly, a Pagosa Springs blogger, who often publishes misinformation about Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD), posted the following information on September 14:
PAWSD’s Leadership Crisis:
PAWSD is hemorrhaging 40% of its treated water through aging pipes while ratepayers face a $64+ million infrastructure bill — and the district just lost its general manager, chief engineer, project manager, AND finance director all at once.
Problem: PAWSD faces a perfect storm of leadership vacuum and infrastructure crisis, with critical decisions on $64+ million in upgrades being made during a management transition.
Hysterical misinformation might attract readers to a person’s blog, but it probably doesn’t help the community understand our local governments.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer board member for PAWSD, but this editorial reflects only my own opinions, and not necessarily those of the PAWSD Board or PAWSD staff.
As mentioned yesterday in Part One, PAWSD District Manager Justin Ramsey announced his upcoming retirement early this year, and a hiring process has been underway to find a new District Manager, so that the new Manager will have a few months to work alongside Mr. Ramsey, and thus smooth out the transition.
Replacing a retiring District Manager does not normally rise to the level of a “Leadership Crisis”, and it doesn’t seem to be a crisis at PAWSD.
Other crisis situations may exist, however.
Another important personnel change took place this summer, when Finance Director Aaron Burns resigned to take a job in New Mexico. A hiring search is now underway, while Administrative Assistant Cyndi Foster is acting as interim Finance Director.
Our blogger states, misleadingly, that “the district just lost its general manager, chief engineer, project manager AND finance director all at once.” This makes it sound like PAWSD has suddenly lost four key employees.
But Justin Ramsey, as District Manager, serves three of those roles: as “general manager, chief engineer and project manager… “and Mr. Ramsey is still fulfilling all those duties. He has not departed yet. As of September, PAWSD has lost one key administrative employee.
PAWSD is not hemorrhaging 40% of its treated water, but does typically average around 20-30% water loss through its pipes. The District has an ongoing leak-prevention program — a tricky and expensive undertaking, considering that the water loss typically happens four feet underground — and has begun negotiations with a company that claims the ability to locate water leaks through a high-tech aerial survey.
The $44 million Snowball Water Treatment Plant will be completed this coming winter, and District Manager Ramsey has committed to delaying his resignation until after the completion.
PAWSD remains in competent hands. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that sad and confusing PAWSD Board meetings don’t happen occasionally.
One such sad and confusing meeting took place on September 11.
As mentioned in Part One, the Capital Investment Fee (CIF) paid by new development helps pay for the expansions and upgrades caused by population and commercial growth. Due to necessary system improvements currently under construction, that fee is now over $25,000 for a new home.
On September 11, Habitat for Humanity appeared before the PAWSD Board requesting a reimbursement of that fee for each of the three modular homes they added this year to our workforce housing inventory. Habitat homes are sold to local families that earn less than 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI), and PAWSD has been waiving CIF fees for Habitat for several years.
Habitat building projects have been supported by a wide range of government programs, local Pagosa companies, construction volunteers, and private donations.
Without a waiver of the sizable PAWSD CIF, it’s extremely difficult to build homes affordable to working families earning 80% AMI and below.
The PAWSD Board voted 4-1 in favor of reimbursing the CIF for Habitat. Voting against the reimbursement (for reasons that I found confusing) was Board member Gene Tautges.
Then the meeting became somewhat more confusing.
Next on the agenda was a very similar request for CIF waivers, to support five workforce homes planned by the Pagosa Springs CDC (Community Development Corporation). The CDC received ten such waivers last year from PAWSD — worth about $250,000 — and presumably expected the same kind of Board generosity this year.
7. Consideration of Request for Waiver of 2025 Capital Investment Fees – Pagosa Springs CDC
The CDC is not only building and marketing homes for working families; they are also overseeing infrastructure improvements to the Trails and Chris Mountain subdivisions, which will increase the viability of building homes in those neighborhoods. The infrastructure improvements are being funded by a $1.9 million grant obtained through Colorado’s ‘More Housing Now’ program.
During the discussion of the CDC request, Board member Alex Boehmer noted that the CDC had promised, last year, that eight of the homes that received CIF waivers would be sold to families or individuals who earned 80% AMI or less, and two would be sold to households earning between 80-100% AMI.
The report provided by the CDC on Thursday showed, however, that only one of the homes sold last year had met the “80% AMI or less” criteria. The rest of the home buyers had qualified at between 80% and 90% AMI.
CDC has presented at numerous government meetings this year, explaining the difficulty of qualifying families in the lower income levels who could also qualify for a conventional mortgage.
My fellow residents living here in Pagosa Springs have a range of concerns. Many are concerned about the condition of our streets and roads. Some are concerned about sufficient drinking water, or safe sanitation, or wildfire risk, or higher taxes, or increased tourism, or the condition of our school buildings.
So many things to be concerned about.
Our Town Council and Town staff, for example, have spent considerable money and energy, over the past five years, buying property to expand the municipal park system, and investing in recreational amenities that might attract tourists. Our Board of County Commissioners voted this week to spend $300,000 on architectural drawings for a new County administration building.
But we also have conditions in our community that might be defined as “crisis situations”.
Does the PAWSD board believe that “lack of affordable housing” is a crisis in Archuleta?
Apparently not.