The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners have been sitting at their work session table more than usual lately. It’s budget season, which is a lot like hunting season, but without the camouflage clothes.
Here’s a photo from a budget work session earlier this month. Commissioner Steve Wadley is famously drinking one of the two or three Cokes he consumes at an average work session. We also see Commissioner Ronnie Maez, and several County staff. Barely visible on the far right is the head of Peter Jankowski, the County Administrator who resigned suddenly after just a few weeks on the job.
The BOCC is hunting for a new County Administrator to replace Mr. Jankowski. They are also hunting for a new County Attorney to replace interim attorney Todd Starr.
Commissioner Michael Whiting is seated outside the frame. At a recent meeting, he stated that the County is currently experiencing a 30 percent turnover rate. So the hunt for employees, generally, must be an ongoing effort.
The budget under discussion in this photograph clocks in at about $33 million. Finance Director Larry Walton and his team designed the 2019 budget back in September based on the assumption that the voters would reject the Ballot Measure 1A sales tax increase, and the BOCC would then need to shuffle money around to try and build a small, affordable jail.
Commissioner Maez has stated, on several occasions, that the jail money would need to come partly from Road & Bridge. So maybe, fewer paving projects for the next 15 years or so?
Most of the road pavement in question exists in Pagosa Lakes, a large — 21 square miles — complex of smaller subdivisions that, unlike Aspen Springs and Alpha Rock Ridge and Loma Linda and San Juan River Village, were never organized into metro districts to maintain their own roads. According to the numbers I’ve seen over the years in various government budgets, it appears to cost $1 million per mile, or more, to rebuild a badly constructed, poorly maintained paved road. Pagosa Lakes — a major residential area with no metro district, and a lot of paved roads — would need to spend around $40 million to properly rebuild its paved roads.
The County’s draft 2019 budget shows about $2.25 million in paving expenses for next year. If the Road & Bridge Department did absolutely no maintenance on our paved roads — no maintenance to preserve existing pavement — and spend $2.25 million per year only on rebuilding the badly constructed paved roads in Pagosa Lakes, it would take 18 years to finish the job. At $2.25 million per year.
If costs didn’t increase. And no maintenance were performed. By then, most of the pavement would be already falling apart from lack of maintenance. You might say, Pagosa Lakes created an unsupportable monster when they paved their roads. And the rest of the county is footing the bill.
For the past decade, certain folks have been arguing that the formation of additional metro districts might be a solution to the County roads problem. Metro districts allow local neighborhoods to adjust their own road maintenance budgets as needed, and allow citizens to have a more direct voice in how well their neighborhood roads are maintained. That same vigorous debate, urging the formation of metro districts, was coming from the BOCC back in 2005. But then, in 2006, the voters passed Ballot Measure 1A… and nothing much happened for the next five years… except that our roads got worse.
I’m not sure if metro districts are the real solution. They might work better than our current system; they might not. Aspen Springs metro district spends about $4,000 per mile to maintain its gravel roads; Alpha Rock Ridge metro spends about $10,000 per mile, also for gravel roads. The County spends about $8,000 per mile on a mix of pavement and gravel.
I don’t see metro districts as a bad thing, but one thing seems very clear: metro districts, by themselves, will probably not solve the problem of expensive paving and asphalt maintenance. The successful metro districts in Pagosa Springs maintain only gravel roads. The apparent facts are: our community cannot afford paved subdivision roads. Especially if Commissioners Maez and Wadley plan to pull money out of Road & Bridge to build their new jail.
I came across a fascinating article this morning, posted to the discardstudies.com website in 2016 by Max Liboiron.
Most of the research I’ve been doing over the past week about trash and recycling and government waste has been talking about “municipal solid wastes.” The stuff households throw away.
The leftover spaghetti no one ate last night. The cardboard box my new shoes arrived in. The plastic water bottles I was too lazy to recycle — and that couldn’t be recycled anyway, because China has stopped accepting most of our plastic.
We Americans, with our consumer lifestyles, generate a lot of municipal trash. According to the EPA, each American creates an average of about 4.5 pounds of trash per day. That amounts to about 250 million tons of trash per year. About 170 million tons are deposited in landfills each year, and about 80 million tons get recycled. (We assume it gets recycled.)
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, folks. The American industries, that produce the stuff we quickly throw away, are not included in the above total. Here’s a picture from Mr. Liboiron’s article:
American households generate 250 million tons of trash every year. American industries generate 7.6 billion tons of (often very toxic) waste per year. That’s billion, with a ‘b.’ And that’s only an educated guess, because no one — not the EPA, or anyone else — is tracking how much waste is being generated by our industrial corporations, according to Mr. Liboiron’s article.
I was not able to find a figure for how much waste local governments generate. But I’d like to share a couple more pictures.
This is the downtown Archuleta County Courthouse, on San Juan Street. More than half of the square footage has been abandoned by the County government. Our BOCC wants to abandon the entire building, someday, if they can figure out a way to pay for brand new facilities.
I assume the BOCC would expect to sell the abandoned building, someday, and the purchaser would then raze the building and build something more contemporary-looking. Tons and tons of brick and wood and glass and metal would be deposited in our County Landfill.
If we really cared about recycling, we would be looking beyond the plastic bottles and the cardboard shoe boxes. We would be recycling the things that really make a difference… like, our government buildings.
Maybe add a second story?
