Yesterday morning, Thursday March 28, Pagosa Springs Town Council members Tracy Bunning and Madeline Bergon spent well over an hour at a large table at Pagosa Baking Company, drinking coffee and chatting about political issues with nine local residents. The topics du jour included Town impact fees, affordable housing, housing in general, the worrisome presence of numerous vacant commercial lots all through the historic downtown corridor, the proposed County jail, the possibility of combining our Town and County governments, the protection of wetlands habit along the river, and the failure of the Town government to fully address its own noxious weed problems.
Based on my personal experience writing about local politics, these types of public gatherings with local leaders are relatively few and far between, and typically address a particular issue, with each member of the public allotted maybe three minutes to express an opinion. Some of the more contentious Town gatherings have involved, for example, the approval of the Walmart building permit, a proposed tax increase for a downtown recreation center, a proposal to convert a section of Reservoir Hill Park into a amusement park, a proposal to institute ‘impact fees’ within the Town boundaries, and the proposal to fund a vehicle bridge at South 5th Street with local tax revenues.
That’s not a complete list, but we might note that all the proposals just mentioned were being promoted by at least one Town Council member. Some had significant public support. Of those contentious issues, only the Walmart approval and the ‘impact fees’ adoption actually made it through the mill.
Yesterday morning’s gathering was anything but contentious. The two Council members arrived without an agenda, and were obviously there simply to listen to the public’s concerns, and answer the public’s questions. And the coffee was delicious. I’m looking forward to the next three ‘Coffee with Council’ events, scheduled to take place the last Thursday of the month. On April 25, Council members Mat deGraaf and Matt DeGuise will be at The Lift Coffee House, 175 Pagosa St., Unit 4. On May 30, Nicole DeMarco and David Schanzenbaker will be at Boulder Coffee Cafe, 634 San Juan St. On June 27, Mayor Don Volger and Madeline Bergon will be at Higher Grounds, 189 Talisman Drive.
If the future is reflected in yesterday’s coffee meeting, the public will be able to participate in real conversations about real issues.
But the meeting where I hoped some real conversation might take place at 5pm at Town Hall: a Council work session focused on the community’s housing crisis. I left disappointed.
When I moved to Pagosa Springs in 1993, the majority of the homes here (including mobile homes and apartments) had been constructed prior to 1980, during a time when homes and apartments were still rather affordable to build (or set up, in the case of mobile homes.) But we were already beginning to see a social divide develop, between wealthier retirees — buying their dream home in the mountains — and the working class folks who’d grown up here, or come here before it was “discovered.”
Anyone who lived in Pagosa in the 1980s or early 1990s will admit that the town wasn’t famous for its architectural appeal. From its very beginning, Pagosa had always been a working class town, with funky working class homes and funky working class businesses. But the surrounding landscape was magnificent. As the wealthier retired folks discovered this little mountain paradise, attitudes began to change. The old, funky town now needed to be upgraded.
Our local governments had to choose sides, and they generally sided with the wealthier newcomers — by making it progressively more difficult to build affordable housing. The local planning departments justified their new policies as “preventing unsafe homes from being built, and preventing unattractive neighborhoods.” But one result of the ever-more-numerous rules and regulations and policies was the gradual disappearance of the type of dwellings a working family can afford to buy or rent.
Which is to say, in their well-meaning effort to make Pagosa Springs “more attractive” to people with money, our local governments helped create a housing crisis.
I was hoping someone at the Town Council work session last night would mention this problem, and that we’d hear a real conversation about a very real issue. But as it turned out, the work session discussion about ‘affordable housing’ was dominated by the Town Planning Department staff. I was especially disappointed to hear the Town staff suggest to the Council that the non-profit Pagosa Housing Partners — the folks who were awarded $50,000 last year to conduct a survey of the community and then create a comprehensive “Roadmap to Affordable Housing” — were not worthy of continued funding. Instead, the Town staff recommended the expansion of its own Planning Department bureaucracy, as the best way to move the community’s housing agenda forward.
I thought that was probably one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time.
Following the meeting, a local activist stopped me on my way out and offered some advice about a particular affordable housing project that might — or might not — be in the works. He mentioned in passing that he didn’t understand why I continued to publish the Pagosa Daily Post, considering that many people in the community dislike how I write, and what I write about, and probably end up disliking me as a person as a result.
We all have our jobs to do, and mine happens to be: keep the feet of our elected and appointed leaders, to the fire. It’s not always a pleasant job, but someone has to do it.
One the face of it, the job of a government planning department might appear to be: promote the thoughtful and healthy development of the community. But in fact, the job is not nearly so pleasant as that. When you’re a government planner, and you’ve been trained and educated to believe that government planners understand, better than most, how a community ought to develop, your job becomes focused on stopping things from happening whenever they don’t fit into your planning concepts.
What we need to solve our housing crisis is a team whose job is to make things happen, not a team that wants to prevent them from happening.
Stopping things from happening is often a benefit to society. Unfortunately, our local government planning departments have been, for the past 30 years, stopping people from having affordable homes to live in. I know that wasn’t their intention, but it was the end result. And we really need to have a conversation about that… before it’s too late.
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.