My daughter Ursala mentioned a couple of weeks ago that she was unhappy with the performance of our old toaster, and that she wishes she had a toaster that coordinated with the green tones that provide the accents in our white-painted kitchen. A toaster the same color as the electric tea kettle, for example. That would be ideal.
It wasn’t just the color, though. The old toaster was browning only one side of the bread.
I live in the same house as Ursala, and her husband Chris and their two daughters, so we quite naturally share the toaster, and some of us don’t really care all that much about the one-sided toast, or the coordinated color scheme. Nevertheless, I logged into my Amazon account a few days ago, looking for a pale green toaster. Amazon did indeed have a couple of toasters in the correct color range, but the reviews posted by ‘verified customers’ suggested that the toasters — while they may have matched the kitchen decor — did not perform to the highest standards. For one thing, they didn’t accommodate bagels.
We eat a lot of bagels.
As a result of my research on Amazon (the only place I shopped that morning) we are still using the old chrome toaster — which does accommodate bagels, but unfortunately browns them on only one side.
As Mick Jagger once sang, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find… you get what you need.
The same could be said about a community.
Back in 2012, the Whittington family built the majestic EcoLuxe Hotel overlooking the San Juan River, as an addition to the existing Springs Resort and Spa.
The hotel is located a few blocks south of my downtown home, and the colors match our kitchen decor rather nicely. (For whatever that’s worth.)
Back in 2011, the Whittingtons had presented the Town of Pagosa Springs Planning Department with plans for a $250 million resort development on 27 vacant acres just south of the Springs Resort. These 27 vacant acres had belonged to various owners over the past century, and various plans had been drawn up for its development. But in 2011, the prominent downtown property was still vacant.
And it’s still vacant in 2019.
The property consists, as far as I can tell, mainly of travertine rock laid down over a thousand years by the Great Pagosa Hot Springs. It has changed ownership twice since 2011. The current owner is local developer and philanthropist Jack Searle, and Mr. Searle was present at a community meeting held in the conference room of the EcoLuxe Hotel on the evening of February 7.
As the meeting kicked off, the room was fairly full of interested local residents and business owners and public officials. (Curiously absent was representation from the Board of County Commissioners.) Our host was Springs Resort managing principal David Dronet, formerly of Albuquerque, NM. Mr. Dronet has been involved in various development projects, in the Southwest and in Florida, as president of Titan Senior Living and as the head of Dronet Developments and Platinum Holdings… but is now happily relocated to Pagosa Springs, it would appear.
Mr. Dronet pronounced his name, Drone-nay.
“The purpose of the meeting tonight is… For the past six months, following our acquisition of the [Springs Resort] property, I’ve gotten to know Jack Searle, and Ryan and Rory, and we’ve decided to form a joint venture to consider the development of the 27 acres south of [the resort.] And prior to launching into any real planning and development design, an important first step is to listen, ask questions, and then let that inform some of what we do.
“I want to introduce Mike Moore and Shawn Mathers of Tres Birds Workshop, out of Denver. And they’ve done projects all over the world. Over the past three months, after retaining them to look at this development, their process involves a data-harvesting stage. So they look at a lot of the contributory information around a potential development, and one of those steps is to talk to the community.”
This sounded like a somewhat unusual approach in our little town, right out of the gate. Historically, developers have come to town and done pretty much whatever they wanted, without a lot of community input. Only on a rare occasion have developers invited the public to weigh in on how their community will be changed. I think about the arrival of the Walmart development team, for example — a few years back — and their months of negotiations with Town officials behind closed doors. At no point in that process (that I can recall) did the Walmart folks come forward and ask the community to weigh in on the development’s design.
Okay, yes, we got a Walmart, and yes, I shop there. And yes, Walmart does support the community with their philanthropic donations. But they never asked us about our ideas and our concerns. (Certain accommodations were made, I was told, to certain government officials, but that’s not the same thing.)
I hadn’t brought my camera to this meeting on February 7 — thinking, I suppose, that this was another case where we would simply be told how our community is going to be changed, mainly so we wouldn’t be taken by surprise. But when I realized that the audience was actually going to be asked to offer suggestions and express their concerns, I pulled out my phone and snapped a couple of photos, to document the somewhat historic event.
In the photo we see David Dronet and Mike Moore taking input from the audience. (I’m not adept at shooting with my phone. Thus: my finger in the bottom left corner.)
According to the ‘tres birds workshop’ website, the name of Mr. Moore’s company is spelled without any capital letters.
From that website:
“tres birds workshop is a full-service architecture and general contracting firm based in Denver, Colorado. Our primary objectives are to unite humans with nature through the built environment and lower embodied energy + fossil fuel consumption in the practice of architecture.
“The natural world runs on highly sophisticated and efficient systems that create balance and order. We seek to mimic this efficiency and view each project as a total system to be approached in an integrated and holistic manner, using cross-disciplines: art, science (biology, ecology), anthropology, architecture and construction management.
“Our goal is to work on projects with people who share values of environmental stewardship, human health, community enrichment and artistic appreciation…”
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.