Nicole DeMarco hosts the 8am ‘Good Morning Pagosa’ show on our local KWUF radio stations — 1400AM and 102.5FM — and does interviews with various Pagosa personalities about current events and ongoing projects. I’ve had the pleasure of appearing on the show a couple of times lately, to discuss political issues from a news reporter’s point of view. (Our discussions on KWUF are scheduled for the third Thursday each month.)
Ms. DeMarco has, herself, a deep interest in political processes, and her interest led her to seek an appointment to the Pagosa Springs Town Council, in which capacity she often asks the ‘hard questions’ about government spending and policy.
During the radio show yesterday morning, we were discussing (among other topics) the failure of Ballot Measure 1A, which would have increased the County government’s sales tax collections by 50% for the next 15 years. The money would have been spent exclusively in “Justice System Capital Improvements” for those 15 years, although we had no clear explanation of how, exactly, the Board of County Commissioners planned to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $44 million in additional taxes — except for the $19 million they promised to borrow for a new Sheriff’s office and Detention Center.
Recent discussions in the County Administration meeting room have suggested that Commissioners Ronnie Maez and Steve Wadley want to redirect money away from the Road Capital Improvement Fund — and also, possibly, from other County departments — in order to build a new jail facility.
As many Daily Post readers know, we already have a jail. But it suffered a roof leak in 2015 and was quickly abandoned. ‘Condemned,’ you might say. During two failed campaigns to increase the sales tax, jail supporters hosted tours of the jail facility and pointed out, to tour participants, the numerous reasons why no one in their right mind would want to recycle this 9,000 square foot facility as a jail. (You see what you want to see. I thought the facility looked in decent shape.)
The alternative to recycling is, of course, to build a brand new jail facility elsewhere… at a cost of maybe $12 million?
We will be talking more about recycling. And roads.
And waste.
During our radio show, Ms. DeMarco suggested an interesting perspective. We all know that Archuleta County has done a mediocre job of maintaining 300 miles of county roads over the past several decades, and there are good reasons why residents of the unincorporated County would complain about their neighborhood roads, and about the primary roads that connect the various neighborhoods.
But, really, do we have any right to complain?
Ms. DeMarco posed the question: When a person moves to a rural community like Pagosa Springs, shouldn’t they expect to drive on poorly maintained roads? Obviously, Pagosa Springs is not a thriving metropolitan area with a myriad thriving industries and plenty of high-paying jobs — and thus, a generous tax base. On the contrary, our community basically has one industry. Visitation. That industry is supported by low-paying hospitality jobs, a decent medical center, a few construction companies focused mainly on building second homes, a large timeshare development, and more recently, hundreds of Short-Term Rentals. STRs. Vacation rentals, and the management companies that service them.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly wage in Archuleta County, last year, was half the average wage paid in Denver. ($678 vs. $1,334)
If I expect to live in Archuleta County, shouldn’t I also expect to drive on bad roads? Didn’t I choose that very lifestyle — in exchange for a non-urban environment blessed with clean air and clean water and thousands of square miles of scenic beauty?
You can’t have your cake, and eat it, too.
But maybe we don’t believe it? Maybe Commissioners Ronnie Maez and Steve Wadley apparently believe that we can spend $44 million on new Justice System facilities, in a community where the roads cannot be properly maintained, and where the low-paid employees are living in RVs, or paying half their income on rent.
When I first began to research the finances behind our County road problems — in this article series, in 2011 — I sat down with our then-Public Works Director, Ken Feyen to discuss, specifically, the County’s paved roads. Not the gravel roads. Just the paved roads.
Mr. Feyen:
“Ideally, on a newly paved road, you would do a seal coat after three, four, five years, depending on weather and traffic. Then about your seventh or eighth year, you would do a chip seal. And you would alternate about every three to five years. If you do that, your asphalt will last pretty much in perpetuity.”
Mr. Feyen was describing the proper procedure for caring for paved roads — a description that matched very closely the procedure I’d heard described the previous day from Elam Construction manager Thomas Leffew. Elam Construction was in the process of doing a single-layer ‘clip seal’ on North Pagosa Boulevard — a “temporary fix” expected to last maybe a couple of years…
Mr. Leffew had not used the term “in perpetuity” when we talked about sealing our local asphalt roads. And “in perpetuity” is, quite frankly, a term I would hesitate to use when referring to any paved roads in Archuleta County. It assumes a road properly constructed in the first place.
Public Works Director Ken Feyen was perhaps the fifth Public Works director at the County since I’d begun writing for the Daily Post in 2004. That is to say, there’d been a bit of turnover in the Public Works director position. Each new incoming director has been faced with overseeing the maintenance of about 300 miles of County road, about 44 miles of it paved.
44 miles of headaches, in other words.
Elam manager Leffew had used the word “horrible,” to refer to the poor construction of some of our paved roads. In some cases, Mr. Leffew noted, the pavement thickness varies between 1 1/2 inches and 5 inches. (I believe 3 inches is a typical specification.) At least some of our paved roads appear to have been built without a proper crushed rock base, he told me. Poor design and drainage add to the problems. Heavy trucks participating in Pagosa’s once-vibrant construction industry had given the roads a good beating.
And then we had the “ten years of zero maintenance” problem mentioned by Mr. Feyen.
The Archuleta County Road and Bridge Department has been maintaining over 200 miles of roads for many decades, but it’s only within the past twenty years that a bankruptcy settlement with the Fairfield Resorts provided several million dollars for road “improvements.”
Improvements that we could not afford?
A County report from 2006 states:
“The majority of Fairfield settlement money was used in 1999-2000 to build, reconstruct or resurface some roads in the Pagosa Lakes subdivisions. A map and list of the roads is available from the Road and Bridge Department…”
The County Road and Bridge Department has no equipment for building or maintaining paved roads, however, so we are reliant on private contractors like Elam Construction to maintain the County’s 44 miles of pavement, nearly all of which is located in the Pagosa Lakes area. In other words, Pagosa Lakes — formerly Fairfield Pagosa prior to the Fairfield bankruptcy — has been blessed with about 40 miles of badly constructed, poorly maintained pavement.
Laying seal coats and “chip seal” coats on badly constructed, poorly maintained pavement is, at best, a temporary band-aid. Yet even that very minimal maintenance costs us three to five times what it costs to maintain a typical gravel road. What basically needs to be done in Pagosa Lakes, it appears — at first glance — is to rebuild all the paved roads.
That would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $44 million. About the same amount two of our three County Commissioners wanted to spend on “Justice System Capital Improvements” through the (failed) 1A sales tax increase.