Photo: A postcard mailed out by the “Vote Yes on 1A” campaign committee, October 2022.
I’ve often proposed, here in Daily Post editorials, that past decisions by Archuleta County business and political leaders allowed our community to build out as “suburban sprawl”… and that this development pattern was inherently unsustainable in a rural community without a strong industrial base. Since the 1970s, our community has built out largely on a low-wage ‘tourism-second-home economy’ which cannot easily support the high cost of maintaining our spread-out infrastructure.
How to fix the problem?
Can it even be fixed?
I was somewhat surprised when the Archuleta County government, in the summer of 2022, proposed an increase to the local sales tax from 4% to 5.5%. People in Pagosa Springs aren’t terribly fond of tax increases, generally speaking, and in Colorado, local and state governments must get voter approval for tax rate increases.
When the votes were counted on November 8, 2022, the proposed sales tax increase had been defeated by close to a 3-to-1 margin.
5,541 voters said “No, thanks” and only 2,078 said, “Yes”.
The final count was not a surprise to some of us. We had seen a poll posted on the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN newspaper that suggested a resounding defeat.
But the Board of County Commissioners may have been surprised by the lack of love shown by the community, for a couple of reasons.
For one, they had promised that they would (probably) spend most of the additional revenues on road maintenance — the unsustainable maintenance project about which the County regularly receives the most complaints.
And secondly, they had hired a respected polling company called Magellan Strategies, and had been told that, based on a scientific survey, 62% of likely voters would “definitely” or “probably” vote “Yes” on the tax increase.
Clearly, the BOCC should have hired the Pagosa Springs SUN to do their polling.
It sounded to me, like no one had yet done any polling of the property owners in the Cloman Industrial Park, when Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation (PSCDC) Executive Director Emily Lashbrooke appeared at the September 8 BOCC work session, to get a sense from the two commissioners present — Warren Brown and Veronica Medina — whether they might support the creation of a new special district within that subdivision.
This would be a taxing district with an elected board, and would be able — she thought — be able to collect maybe $27,000 a year with a 5 mill property tax levy, to be used mainly for road maintenance. As a government district, it might also qualify for future grants such as a Colorado Department of Local Affairs block grant.
We know that several Archuleta County subdivisions have formed metropolitan districts — “metro districts” — to collect dedicated tax revenues for maintaining their subdivision roads. The result has been some of the best maintained roads in the county, in those particular neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods still pay 18 mills of property tax to Archuleta County, on top of the 10- to 14-mills paid to their own metro districts.
These metro districts exist in high-property-value subdivisions like Colorado Timber Ridge, and in low-property-value subdivisions like Aspen Springs.
The rest of unincorporated Archuleta County struggles with less-than-excellent road maintenance… to put it mildly. We’ve been well aware of this problem since the 1990s, but have failed to do anything about it.
The subdivision known as Cloman Industrial Park does not have a metro district, or any type of special road-maintenance district collecting an additional mill levy just for roads. But they could have one.
Based on the online Archuleta County property map, it looks like there are about 56 parcels in the industrial park, either vacant or developed. Ms. Lashbrooke suggested, on September 8, that a 5-mill tax assessment for a special road district there might generate around $27,000 a year. If so, then each industrial park owner would be contributing — on average — about $480 a year towards their roads. Obviously, the vacant properties are valued differently from the developed parcels, so the property tax amount would vary.
I want to go back, however, to the 2022 defeat of the “Measure 1A” sales tax increase.
Although Magellan Strategies totally missed predicting the outcome of that election, they totally could have seen the defeat coming, because one of their survey questions asked the likely voters if they thought the Archuleta County government “spends taxpayer money wisely.” In August, only 27% of the surveyed voters agreed with that statement.
When the Measure 1A ballots were counted in November, only 27% of voters had voted in favor of the proposed tax increase.
Every two years, we elect one or two of our County commissioners, and each newly-formed Commission talks about roads, but struggles to solve the core problem. The core problem being, too many subdivision roads needing too much maintenance, compared to the overall tax base.
If the property owners in Cloman Industrial Park will create a special district and tax themselves for road maintenance, they might be able to improve the long-range economic viability of that commercial neighborhood.
The BOCC — which most voters do not trust — need not be involved.
Back in 1787, Thomas Jefferson write in a letter:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
That may be true, but I don’t think any blood needs to be spilled in order for Cloman Industrial Park to have well-maintained roads. The patriot property owners merely need to agree to tax themselves.
Complaining endlessly about an underfunded County Road & Bridge Department will not produce satisfactory roads.
But we might be able to fix our roads, one metro district at a time.