Aside from the beauty of these 100 acres which include old growth forest and large herds of elk, deer and other wildlife, in this economic environment, is this really the time to get involved with another development?
— from a letter to the editor in the June 18 Pagosa Springs SUN.
The Town of Pagosa Springs will be considering a subdivision ‘Sketch Plan’ approval next Tuesday, June 23, at a Town Planning Commission meeting at 5:30pm in Town Hall.
The proposed ‘Pagosa West’ subdivision would occupy about 100 acres across the highway from the City Market shopping center and just east of the Pagosa Springs Medical Center. The applicants seeking the approval are the Dragoo family from Montrose. According to my sources, they have not yet purchased the property in question.
The project has faced some challenges over the past couple of years. We’ll get into some of those difficulties in a moment.
Two days ago, the Town held a meeting of the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID). The Town Council serves as the board of that district, which is convenient on one hand, but can also pose uncomfortable conflicts if the sanitation district’s needs and wants conflict with the more general needs and wants of the rest of the Town government.
Last week, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) board of directors discussed a potential budget shortage during 2026. Most of the revenue that funds PAWSD operations — water and wastewater service for about 75% of the Archuleta County community — comes from customer fees. That includes monthly water and sewer fees for existing customers, as well as fees charged to new customers hooking up to the system.
An apparent slowdown in Pagosa’s construction industry poses the biggest threat to the 2026 PAWSD budget.
Disclosure: I currently serve as a volunteer on the PAWSD Board of Directors, but this editorial reflects only my own opinions, and not necessarily the opinions of the PAWSD Board and staff.
This editorial series is going to touch on the some of the ways these four entities — Pagosa West, Town Planning Commission, PSSGID, and PAWSD — are interconnected and mutually interdependent.
Let’s start with Pagosa West. A bit of history, dating back to May, 2024.
Pagosa Springs realtor Shelley Low and developer Doug Dragoo settled themselves at the work session table on May 21, across from Archuleta County commissioners Warren Brown, Veronica Median and Ronnie Maez, to discuss a hopeful topic.
The topic: a potential location for a new Archuleta County administration building near the Pagosa Springs Medical Center, as part of an ambitious proposed development along Highway 160.
Ms. Low introduced Mr. Dragoo and then summarized his ambitious development project, with a series of Power Point slides.
“I’m hear to talk to you about an ideal location for the new County building. This first slide shows… that the property runs all along Highway 160, past the Talisman Drive McDonald’s… and all the way to the existing three-way stoplight at Pinon Causeway…”
100 acres of relatively flat, vacant property, dotted with hundreds of Ponderosa pines.
On this map, the Pagosa Springs Medical Center is in the lower left corner. The City Market shopping center is to the left, top, and the Walmart store is at the top right. The upscale residential neighborhood known as Pagosa Lakes Ranch is immediately south of the 100 acres.
Ms. Low:
“We have approximately 42 acres of [potential] commercial, with a proposed access and road structure across from the hospital. And this is where we would like to see the County building, along with our proposed workforce housing.”
She was here referring to a vaguely-planned Archuleta County administration building, for which no site had been yet chosen. For a price of over $2 million, the Board of County Commissioners could buy five acres in Pagosa West as the location for their future admin building. Additionally, the purchase would help fund the construction of a new paved road and other infrastructure on the property, to facilitate a second project by the Dragoo family: several dozen units of so-called “workforce” housing, subsidized in part by the Town of Pagosa Springs.
“The remaining 57 acres, just south of that, is going to be residential, designed for high-end homes, some professional homes, patio homes, and hopefully, some senior living apartments.”
Ms. Low stressed the word, “hopefully”, regarding the “senior living apartments”… although it was easy to assume, at the time, that a hefty measure of hope was attached to every aspect of the Pagosa West project.
Just a mile east of the 100-acre parcel, one can drive through the mixed use Aspen Village subdivision — 90 acres of potential commercial and residential development that is not even half-way built out, 20 years after the streets and infrastructure were installed. If not for the Walmart store, Aspen Village would be almost devoid of commercial and residential traffic in 2026.
But of course, hope springs eternal.
For the next several months, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners appeared to favor the property purchase proposed by Ms. Low and the Dragoo family, but ultimately chose to purchase a different parcel, in Aspen Village .
At the May 2024 work session, Mr. Dragoo and Ms. Low had rattled off a list of the types of businesses that would no doubt be moving in — eventually — once the County administration building and the workforce housing were in place.
Ms. Low:
“The whole point is, it’s got to be synergistic with the residential, and with the commercial. It’s something that Pagosa has never seen, and it’s just perfect timing. And we have the perfect developer…”
Well, that was a bit of a stretch… that a blend of residential and commercial is something Pagosa has never seen. But it sounds like something a savvy realtor might confidently state as a fact.
We’ve had a synergistic blend of commercial and residential in downtown Pagosa for over 100 years. The mixed-use area around City Market could have remained a synergistic mix, but a significant portion of the residential has recently been converted into vacation rentals.
And a mile to the east, we have a 90-acre development called Aspen Village, platted in 2006 as a synergistic blend of commercial and residential — but, thus far, less than 50% built out, 20 years later. And adjacent to Aspen Village, we have the Harman Park mixed use subdivision, also half occupied 20 years later.
Were Ms. Low and Mr. Dragoo proposing yet another “synergistic” development that will be sitting mostly vacant 20 years from now… with additional under-utilized streets and infrastructure that the taxpayers would struggle to maintain?
Read Part Two… tomorrow…