Yes, it’s Christmas Eve, one of the more important days during this “Best Time of the Year”… to quote songwriter Johnny Marks in his classic tune “Holly Jolly Christmas.” (As made famous by Burl Ives.)
I could probably be amusing myself, hanging up some mistletoe, or wrapping some gifts, or baking cookies. But for some reason, I find it more amusing to discuss politics.
That’s something I was doing yesterday with a friend: discussing politics. In particular, we were discussing Part One of this editorial series, and my friend argued that Pagosa Springs “needs tourism.”
That’s a ‘truism’ I’ve heard expressed on innumerable occasions by thoughtful community leaders, and by the elected officials in charge of our tax dollars. Pagosa needs tourism.
There are a couple of meanings to the term ‘truism.’ Typically, the term refers to a statement that’s so obviously true, you’re wasting everyone’s time by even saying it. But in philosophical debates built upon the strict rules of logic, a ‘truism’ refers to a statement that has never been proved true by a definition. Instead, it’s an argument “considered to be true by the vast majority of people.” One that’s not really disputable — but still not completely defined.
And it’s a truism that helps explain why, when the Town of Pagosa Springs had an opportunity to apply for a technical assistance grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) through ‘Blueprint 2.0” our leaders picked:
“Grow Your Outdoor Recreation Industry.”
Our leaders could have selected one of the other technical assistance programs instead:
CRAFT Studio 201
Coworking 101
Certified Small Business Community
Brand Building for Communities
Film and Major Production Initiative
Creativity Lab of Colorado
Launch a Sector Partnership
Community Placemaking
But instead, they picked “Grow Your Outdoor Recreation Industry.” I’m not sure how many communities applied for that particular grant, but only four Colorado were awarded the requested outdoor recreation assistance: the Town of Pagosa Springs, Clear Creek County, the Town of Fairplay, and the Town of Rangely.
The technical assistance was delivered by some college kids.
The resulting ‘technical assistance’ could have been provided, I suppose, by someone who knows a lot about growing an outdoor recreation industry. Many times, during the 25 years I’ve lived in Pagosa Springs, I’ve watched our elected officials and community leaders bring in technical experts, to tell us how we ought to be running things. I haven’t kept an accurate tally, but my guess is that the outside experts have been mostly helpful when looking at small, isolated details, and mostly horribly wrong when looking at the Big Picture.
All of which puts the outside experts in pretty much the same boat as the local ‘non-experts’ who live and work here in Pagosa Springs. Mostly right about little details, mostly wrong about the Big Picture. But our local ‘non-experts’ have one advantage over the ‘outside experts.’ We live here. We’ve driven on the roads; we know how hard it is to find and afford a decent home; we’ve seen and remember the past failures of poor government policies.
Nevertheless, we can be horribly wrong about the Big Picture.
I gladly put myself in that same boat. I might be horribly wrong about the Outdoor Recreation Industry. But I don’t think the technical experts who presented to the joint Town-County work session on December 18 did us any special favors. As noted in Part One, these technical experts were in fact graduate students from the MENV Program at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Here, again, is some text from the OEDIT grant summary:
MENV, working closely with the Leeds Outdoor Industry Club (LOIC), will assign a team to work with each community to better understand their resources, strengths, and weaknesses. This team will work to identify opportunities in the growing Colorado outdoor recreation landscape and assist in positioning each community in the marketplace to improve reach and impact.
The Masters of the Environment [MENV] is a 17-month professional graduate degree program designed for students who would like to work in the environmental sector after graduation. MENV graduates will apply interdisciplinary knowledge and build community in ways that achieve fair and effective solutions to environmental, economic, and social problems and promote thriving human and natural communities.
It’s a truism that we all want thriving human and natural communities, and that we want fair and effective solutions to our environmental, economic and social problems. It’s also a truism that a group of graduate students from Boulder, working on a school project for three months, will have a very limited understanding of how the “Outdoor Recreation Industry” has impacted the community of Pagosa Springs over the past 40 years or so.
Nevertheless, our elected and appointed officials from the Town and County governments spent about 45 minutes listening to four MENV students advise them on the development of our local recreation industry. The students had visited several ‘outdoor-recreation-dependent’ communities — including, for example, Spearfish, SD; Grand Junction, CO; Ketchum, ID; and Salida, CO — and interviewed folks involved in various outdoor recreation industry sectors.
At the end of that presentation, one of the students pointed out the critical missing piece — if we really want to grow our outdoor recreation industry, the way other Colorado communities have been doing:
“In the case of the Grand Junction economic partnership, there are faces on a website. There’s a phone number. There’s an email address, where you can reach out and talk to someone, a real live human, about relocating to their community.
“So one of our recommendations is to create a permanent, salaried position here in Pagosa Springs, that their sole purpose is an outward lens. To really be that outward-looking face to bring in new businesses from either the Front Range or from out of state, what have you — but to be completely looking outward.
“Additionally, to create partnerships across City-County lines, across jurisdictions. You know, between the Community Development Corporation and the Tourism Office, and kind of creating these synergies where there’s a unified vision and a unified front.”
Additionally, we should focus on ‘what is already here.’ Or so they told us.
Commissioner Steve Wadley thanked the students for their presentation.
“We all very much appreciate the work you all did. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and a lot to talk about. And it was a great presentation.”
Commissioner Michael Whiting also thanked the students:
“This Powerpoint presentation represents a much beefier, heavier analysis that we’ll have access to, when they are done polishing it up. So there’s a lot more data behind this. They didn’t spend the entire three months developing a pretty Powerpoint; this is a graphical representation of the work they put in, which is tremendously detailed. I just want to acknowledge that, and thank them for agreeing to come down here.”
Different people see the same things differently. A hiker might look out at a forest of trees and see a place of quiet recreation. A timber company official might look out at the same forest and calculate the percentage of old-growth trees suitable for lumber. A real estate developer might dream about the number of well-treed parcels he could sell.
Various community leaders, over the years, have looked at Pagosa’s tourism industry and have seen endless economic development opportunities. Other leaders have seen a community dangerously dependent on a single industry, and desperately in need of a more diversified economy.
I look out at Pagosa’s tourism industry, and I see a really big problem.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.