“A geothermal heating system derived from the naturally-hot Mother Spring not only fills all twenty-three soaking pools, but also heats resort buildings and provides hot water to the resort for additional operations…”
— from the Springs Resort & Spa website
The principal developers present at the February 7 community meeting at the EcoLuxe Hotel — David Dronet and Jack Searle — are relatively new owners of the properties involved in a potential joint venture to re-make downtown Pagosa Springs.
Mr. Dronet’s company, EPR Springs Holdings LLC, purchased the Springs Resort & Spa property last June. He told us that his family has been visiting Pagosa Springs for the past 12 years.
The Resort has an impressive (short) video banner on their website Home Page.
Mr. Searle has lived in Pagosa Springs for many years, and has been involved in several philanthropic efforts here, including Justice Ministries. He became a partner in the Springs Partners LLC a few years back, when that company was seeking taxpayer funding of a bridge at South 5th Street. I undrstand that he recently bought out the other two Springs Partners LLC shareholders — Matt Mees and Bill Dawson. Mr. Searle and his family own BWD (“Beyond your Wildest Dreams”) Construction; you may have seen their signs around town. You can visit their website here.
So then, we have two key developers with new properties under their wings, apparently ready to collaborate on some type of development project on 27 acres of vacant land that has defied development, ever since it was platted in 1883.
In the map below, the thoroughly-developed Springs Resort & Spa property is shown in magenta. Mr. Searle’s vacant property is shown in green. Hot Springs Boulevard runs north to south, to the east of the properties; the San Juan River wraps the properties on the west.
Within the Springs Resort parcel, we can see the Great Pagosa Hot Spring, shown in blue.
During the February 7 community meeting, Mr. Dronet made the following comment:
“And I say that, because when I’m explaining to some friends or partners when they come here, what does this geothermal resource means and how do we convey that… We view ourselves as ‘stewards’ of a resource. It’s tough to think that ‘ownership’ of a resource like this is even possible. So we view ourselves as stewards…”
Mr. Dronet is justified in being confused about the ownership of geothermal resources, when those resources happen to be hot, smelly water flowing up from deep inside the earth. Colorado has specific laws about water, and basically, you cannot legally ‘own’ water. You can only own the right to use water.
Or so I understand.
The Springs Resort & Spa actually owns the rock that surrounds the Great Pagosa Hot Springs — the Mother Spring, as Mr. Dronet calls it — and they own the rock under the (very deep) geothermal pool. But the Springs Resort does not actually own the water in the Mother Springs. The water belongs to all of us. The Resort uses the water, and is then required to release it into the San Juan River, to serve other water users downstream.
When the previous owners of the Springs Resort — Matt Mees and Bill Dawson — wanted to expand their ‘naturally therapeutic mineral baths’ complex back in the 1990s, they apparently didn’t have enough water rights to service their proposed development. So they approached then-mayor Ross Aragon and his administration, and negotiated a geothermal pipeline to be hung below a future pedestrian bridge. The bridge would be located between the County Courthouse and the Springs Resort.
The pipeline was to direct water from the Town-owned PS-5 geothermal well — located behind the County Courthouse — over the San Juan River, to the Springs Resort.
The water from the PS-5 well did not belong to the Town government. The Town merely had a right to use the water — to operate an innovative municipal heating system for the schools and businesses in downtown Pagosa. But the Town’s lawyers, working hand-in-hand with the Springs Resort’s lawyers, came up with a clever plan to define the privately-owned bathing pools as part of a “municipal heating system.” The arrangement involved a long-term “lease” of the Town’s municipal water from the PS-5 well.
The Springs Resort also did something rather curious with the newly-leased water. They built a ‘geothermal water fountain’ that constantly pours thousands of gallons of geothermal water — apparently extracted from the Town’s PS-5 well? — into the Mother Spring.
Or so I understand it, from watching the pipes being installed several years ago.
An intelligent person might wonder how a private company could pour thousands of gallons of geothermal water into an enclosed pool, without seeing the pool overflow?
I have my own theory about this curious fountain, but I’ve not been able to verify it. The Colorado Division of Water Resources is supposed to monitor water rights, to make sure folks are not using more water than their rights allow, but I have been told that the Springs Resort never installed gauges on its numerous geothermal water lines, so we will likely never know, for sure, how much water the Resort actually uses.
But my own theory is that the water level in the Mother Spring was starting to drop noticeably, back in the early 2000s when the Resort completed all of their ‘naturally therapeutic’ geothermal pools — so the Resort came up with an very attractive method to keep the Mother Spring topped up.
And we can all agree, I suspect, that the Resort is very attractive.
The above photo was taken from the website visitpagosasprings.com, which is maintained by the tax-funded Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board. The website has an attractive slideshow banner on the Home Page, that features five well-composed photos of the Pagosa Springs area. (The first photo, when I visited, was actually a shot of Mineral County, but I suppose we can forgive the Tourism Board for that little white lie.)
When I visited the website yesterday, three of the five photos on the VisitPagosaSprings.com website featured the Springs Resort & Spa.
When Pagosa Springs first grew up around our special resource — artesian geothermal water that many claim to be therapeutic — the resource appeared to be virtually unlimited. But water that once flowed from the earth is a seemingly endless stream, now must be pumped.
The resource might not be unlimited. In fact, we may already be in the process of draining the geothermal aquifer.
No one really knows.
We’ve written about the Springs Resort and its close relationship with the Town government, in previous Daily Post stories.
The new owners — EPR Springs Holdings — did not play a role in developing the resort, based on special favors bestowed by former mayor Ross Aragon and his administration. But I share this story in hopes that future developers in the area, and future government leaders, will think twice before assuming an unlimited supply of geothermal water from what might be a limited resource.
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.