Photo: Archuleta School District Superintendent Rick Holt addresses the Master Plan Advisory Committee and School Board on November 17, 2025.
Following the January 21 meeting of the Archuleta School District (ASD) Board of Education, the District staff sent out a press release announcing a decision by the Board to propose a new 140,000-square-foot facility on Vista Boulevard, at the west end of town.
Unless we consider Aspen Springs to be the “west end of town”… in which case, Vista Boulevard is more like the middle of town.
We shared that press release on Friday.
As noted in the press release, the District has been working towards this decision for nearly two years, when they signed a contract with Colorado-Springs-based RTA Architects to guide a community process to choose the right type of new facility, at the right location, at the right price.
The right price being: a price the voters will agree to pay.
Archuleta County taxpayers will pay a total of $18.1 million in property taxes this year to help fund ASD school operations. Ten years ago, Archuleta County taxpayers paid $6.6 million to cover school operations. Due to the way Colorado funds its education system, we are now paying close to three times what we were paying in property taxes to the District in 2016. District enrollment, meanwhile, is about the same as it was ten years ago.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the Pagosa Peak Open School board of directors. PPOS is a tuition-free public school authorized by ASD, and receives a share of the tax revenues paid by Archuleta County property owners. If ASD decides to place a tax increase on the November 2026 ballot and it’s approved by the voters, PPOS will likely benefit from additional funding.
I’ve been attending the community meetings hosted by ASD over the past 15 months, and I was in the audience last Wednesday when the School Board voted 4-1 to select a District-owned parcel on Vista Boulevard as the site for a proposed PreK-8 facility. I found the District press release to be an accurate summary of the Wednesday evening meeting, except for one detail. From the ASD press release :
Next Steps
Archuleta School District will apply for a Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) grant in March 2026. If awarded, the grant would require a local match, typically around 50% of the total project cost.
During the past year of meetings, the ASD staff has been telling us that a BEST grant — if awarded — would require a 55% match from the local taxpayers. It now appears that the match might be as high as 58%, according to an email from ASD staff.
I don’t understand why the District press release used the number “50%”.
The BEST grant program (“Building Excellent Schools Today”) was established back in about 2009, to help school districts build new facilities and repair existing facilities. I cannot provide compelling evidence for my theory, but I believe the program was created by the state of Colorado to help rescue the construction industry and investment banks during the financial meltdown during the Great Recession. Over the next few years, many millions of taxpayer dollars were poured into tearing down older school buildings and replacing them with new “21st century” facilities. Those millions of dollars went into the pockets of big state-wide construction companies, architecture firms, building materials suppliers, and investors.
Mostly, investors. Bond holders.
When a community votes to issue bonds to build a new $120 million school, they typically get to pay $120 million for the actual school itself, and another $120 million in interest payments to the bond holders. Typically, a $120 million facility costs about $240 million, because of interest payments over 20-30 years.
When ASD built the new Pagosa Springs High School in 1997, for example, the facility cost $12 million. But the taxpayers actually paid out a total of $26 million to the bond holders.
The cost estimate for a new PreK-8 school facility on Vista Boulevard was shared with the School Board and the community earlier this month, and reckoned at about $122 million, give or take. This was less than the estimated cost for a similar new facility located on the High School campus, which was estimated at about $130 million.
For whatever reason, the estimated price of the proposed Vista facility was not mentioned in the ASD press release.
But the District’s intention to apply for BEST grant funding was mentioned. The District has already sent a Notice of Intent to Apply to the BEST grant program. a required first step before submitting the full grant application in early March.
77 other schools and districts have submitted their Notices of Intent to Apply to BEST for this current 2026-2027 funding round.
A similar number of schools and districts applied last year, and 13 projects were approved for grant funding, with six more projects placed on the waiting list. Only two of the awarded grants were for new replacement facilities: one for $52 million and one for $17 million.
Most of the schools awarded last year are making repairs and upgrades to their existing facilities.
The available BEST funding last year was about $200 million. Reportedly, the total BEST budget this year is about $65 million.
At the last several School Board meetings, citizen participation during the public comment portion of the meetings was unusually high, with the overwhelming majority of speakers urging the Board to locate the proposed facility on the same campus as the High School.
So… why did four of the five Board members vote for the Vista Boulevard site?