EDITORIAL: The Limits of a Recreation Economy, Part Five

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Read Part One

Tourism is Pagosa Springs’ major industry: The local hot springs— for which the town was named — are some of the largest, hottest, and mineral-rich springs in the world, renowned for their restorative properties.

— From the June 2018 ‘Smart Growth America’ report on Pagosa Springs

When I looked out the window this morning, a couple of inches of snow had blanketed the walkway and the yard… and the car and the street. I assume more inches fell at the ski area up on Wolf Creek Pass.

Some friends who skied yesterday told me the ski area is expecting 4,000 customers today. That’s a pretty big number, considering we have only 13,000 full-time residents in Archuleta County.

It’s a pretty simple equation, if you bother to look at it. One family of tourists, visiting a community of 13,000 people, will have no noticeable effect on retail sales, housing prices, traffic, medical services, motel income, or anything else, really.

375,000 tourists visiting each year, in a community of 13,000, will have a much more noticeable impact.

I got that number — 375,000 — from a 2018 report posted on the Smart Growth America website. The consultants from Smart Growth America visited Pagosa Springs in 2017 to advise us on how we might grow bigger without making everything worse for everyone.

If we were community leaders who truly care about the residents of Archuleta County, we might believe that the impacts from 375,000 visitors in a community of 13,000 are overwhelmingly positive, and we might also believe that, if we could somehow double that number, everything would be even better, for everyone.

I would propose that both beliefs are sorely mistaken. I would propose that there’s a limit to the number of ‘outdoor recreationalists’ a rural community can reasonably accommodate and still function as an authentic community. And that — in the case of Pagosa Springs — we have already passed that point.

Aspen, Colorado — which we discussed yesterday in Part Four — is hopelessly and painfully past that point, and it’s quite obvious to everyone who’s not a clueless billionaire.

I will note here (as I have on many previous occasions) that “growth” is assumed by many smart Americans to be not only inevitable, but also desirable, if handled in a smart manner. And for Pagosa Springs, healthy “growth” is — some believe — dependent upon the expansion of the “Outdoor Recreation Industry.”

This industry has a couple of major components. The first is actual recreation. Hiking. Hunting. Fishing. Mountain biking. Skiing. Snowmobiling. Rafting. Four-wheeling.

The second component is the manufacture of outdoor recreation equipment.

To my knowledge, Pagosa Springs has only one manufacturing company worth noting: Voormi, founded in 2010. Voomi produces innovative outdoor clothing (you can visit their website here) and has manufacturing facilities in Pagosa Springs and Rifle, Colorado. Their fabrics are woven in North and South Carolina.

Their men’s tees run from $40 to $90. Women’s jackets run from $249 to $600. One of the company’s stated goals is to create “outdoor recreation” manufacturing jobs in smaller, rural towns.

An Outside magazine article from November 2015 quoted Timm Smith, a former chemical engineer at Gore-Tex, along with CEO Dan English:

“We don’t want the 100,000-square-foot factory in China or Malaysia,” Smith says. “We want to go into rural America and find small mountain towns with people who can sew living in them. Maybe there are only ten of those people in Pagosa Springs. But if I have ten places with ten sewers each, then I have a 100-sewer factory.”

The partners hope to transform those mountain-town economies from ones composed mainly of low-wage seasonal work to ones with a diverse, stable revenue stream — without any connection to ski resorts and tourism. “Most people who grow up in a mountain town have a minimum of two, three jobs,” says Dan. “We’re trying to provide year-round employment with benefits.”

These quotes lay out an interesting scenario: a manufacturer of clothing aimed at “outdoor recreationalists,” hiring employees in small towns where said outdoor clothing might be used advantageously. And in fact, many of us who live in Pagosa have certainly noticed the Voomi logo on clothing worn by friends and acquaintances — the ones who can afford a $90 tee-shirt, that is.

Voomi got a plug from former County Attorney Todd Starr during the December 18 “Grow Your Outdoor Recreation Industry” presentation by the CU graduate students. The students had implied that one way to grow Archuleta County’s economy was to entice one or more mid-size manufacturing firms to locate in Pagosa.

Mr. Starr was attending his final government meeting as County Attorney:

“I heard mentioned, a couple of times, ‘attracting a mid-level company.’ And I’m not disappointed at all in [the student presenters.] But I’m disappointed that we have a conversation for a half hour about economic development in Pagosa Springs, and we don’t sing the praises of Voomi.

“And my parting shot, to the elected leaders, would be that we need to do more to promote what we have in Voomi, and really capitalize on that resource, as opposed to spending all of our energy and effort going out.

“I totally and wholeheartedly accept everything these [students] are saying, except that I would say, our primary focus needs to be singing the praise of, and working with, [the companies] we already have. Doing some cross marketing, with Voormi. I mean, they’ve got ads all over. Why can’t they be talking about Pagosa Springs in those ads?

“And when we do Pagosa Springs [ads], we should be advertising Voormi.”

Interesting thoughts. What Mr. Starr was suggesting made sense, from a certain perspective — although the use of taxpayer revenues to promote a particular private company, via government-funded advertising, might not be appreciated by other Pagosa companies that also employ workers here.

But there’s a larger problem here. Like Aspen and Vail and Durango and numerous other mountain towns in Colorado — communities that have tethered their wagons to the “outdoor recreation economy” — Pagosa Springs has sold its soul to an unsustainable economic model. You can’t invite 375,000 temporary visitors into your little rural town without seeing some kind of negative impacts.

Like, for example, the disappearance of once-affordable housing. That’s something that our graduate student advisors from CU seem to have missed altogether…

Read Part Six…

Bill Hudson

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.