EDITORIAL: Frustrated, Again, by a Housing Discussion, Part One

It was nearly 9pm by the time I got home from last night’s three-and-a-half-hour Town Council meeting, and quite frankly, I was feeling frustrated.

I wasn’t the only one feeling that way.

Local activist and builder Peter Adams — chair of the Town Planning Commission — also left the meeting looking discouraged.

Local activist and director of the non-profit Pagosa Housing Partners, Lynne Vickerstaff, kept her composure, but I imagine she felt baffled and somewhat defeated by last night’s discussion.

Local activist and builder Andre Redstone — chair of the Town Historic Preservation Board — had expressed his disappointment with the Town government’s lack of action.

Meanwhile, we can also admit that these feelings of frustration are somewhat incongruous, because the Town of Pagosa Springs, over the past two years, has done more to address the housing crisis than was done by this government for the previous 30 years. That’s how the dance goes with government: two steps forward, one step back. (Or in the case of the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners, it’s more like one step forward, two steps back.)

And we can agree that — over the past two or three years — a number of community activists have stepped up to encourage action by local government, to help address the housing crisis. People like Peter Adams, Lynne Vickerstaff, and Andre Redstone. We saw hardly any community activism like this over the previous 30 years.

My own feelings of frustration resulted from a discussion, by the Town Council and Town staff, about the ‘Roadmap to Affordable Housing 2019-2025’ document. This 54-page report — which you can download here — was presented to the Town Council by Pagosa Housing Partners (PHP) in early January. It outlines a number of approaches to our community’s affordable housing problem, many of which have proved successful in other Colorado communities… and ways that the public and private sectors can cooperate on solutions.

The report was funded by the Town Council last summer, as part of a $50,000 grant that also paid for a community housing survey and subsequent analysis of that survey, plus training for PHP staff. The general idea of the grant (as I understood it) was to help create a professional advocacy organization here in Archuleta County that would champion a range of approaches to the housing crisis. We’ve never had such an organization here, to my knowledge. Not ever.

Although the Archuleta BOCC had promised to help support this effort two years ago, when it came time last summer to put their money where their mouth was, the BOCC declined to help fund the PHP effort.

Meanwhile, we’ve watched our local governments spend hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting tourism, and promoting ‘economic development.’

The tourism effort seems to have been a mixed blessing, however, because it’s created additional low-wage jobs, in a community with a vanishing stock of affordable housing. The disappearance has been aggravated by the conversion of residential homes into vacation rentals.

The ‘economic development’ effort over the past decade has been mostly a waste of taxpayer money, in my humble opinion. You can’t create jobs and economic vitality in a community, when the new employees have nowhere to live.

At any rate, the Town Council had taken the past two months to study the ‘Roadmap to Affordable Housing’ and at last night’s meeting, everyone on the Council seemed satisfied with the 54-page plan. It was accepted unanimously by the Council as a good plan for our local housing effort.

But who is going to implement the plan? Push it forward? Do the work? The Council appeared to embrace the idea that one central organization or person is needed to champion the ‘Roadmap’ plan. The Town Council and Town staff seemed curiously hesitant, however, to accept the simple idea that PHP — the non-profit organization that wrote the plan — is the right organization to also move it forward.

The Council earmarked $50,000 for housing grants in their 2019 budget, and there are several housing organizations in the community that could conceivably apply for those grant funds. But only one of those housing organizations has stepped up, over the past two years, to promote and champion everyone’s efforts with a comprehensive approach: Pagosa Housing Partners.

Curiously, we found the Council and staff discussing RFPs. ‘Requests for Proposals.’ Going out to bid. Reviewing various responses.

Is that really the best path forward?

Here’s Town Manager Andrea Phillips:

“It would be a violation of our purchasing policy if we picked a firm [to spearhead the ‘Roadmap’ plan] without going through an RFP process, due to the amount of money we are probably talking about here. So, yes, I do think that would be a good step. I do think we would have some other folks that would [submit responses.] In 2018, when we allocated the money for housing, we received three responses. So just to follow our own purchasing policy, I think it would be a good idea to put out an RFP of some kind.”

As a result of last year’s RFP process, the Council ended up choosing to grant funding to PHP. But as Council member David Schanzenbaker pointed out, the terribly bureaucratic process of finally choosing a vendor from that RFP had taken more than six months. It’s already March. We’re really going to go through another RFP process?

As many of our readers know, affordable housing was one of three ‘Joint Strategic Priorities’ adopted by the Town Council for funding in 2018. The other two ‘Strategic Priorities’ were to expand access to childcare, and to promote broadband internet.

Hasn’t the Town Council has granted several years of funding to our local childcare advocates — now consolidated as the non-profit Archuleta County Education Center — without ever going through an RFP process? Hasn’t the Town Council granted a decade’s worth of funding — probably more than $500,000 — to the non-profit Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation, without ever going through an RFP process?

But suddenly, it’s the Town policy to require an RFP… to move our affordable housing effort forward?

I’m frustrated.

Read Part Two…

Bill Hudson

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.