The most interesting item on the Tuesday, March 3 Board of County Commissioners agenda was, I thought, the scheduled discussion about the BOCC loaning $250,000 in “contingency funds”… to themselves, essentially? The loan would supposedly help solve a cash flow problem plaguing a joint Town and County geothermal drilling project currently underway.
An hour earlier in the meeting, however, the Commissioners had heard a brief presentation from local activist Doug VanderLouw on behalf of this year’s “Earth Week” organizers, the non-profit Southwest Organization for Sustainability… most often referred to as “SOS.”
Earth Week here in Pagosa Springs is scheduled for April 19-25, and SOS obviously hopes the event will get people thinking about “sustainability.” According to the SOS website, people don’t completely agree on the definition of the word “sustainability.”
There are now more than 100 definitions of sustainability. We choose to align with the most recognized, which was coined by the United Nations Brundtland Report as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Mr. VanderLouw had appeared before the BOCC on Tuesday to ask the County to “waive recycling fees at the Transfer Station, as a means of promoting Earth Week.” Commissioner Clifford Lucero, who has been involved in promoting recycling for at least the past couple of decades, responded:
“So what we’re doing… we’re waiving the fees at the Transfer Station, for recycling only. Not the other fees. And we’ve done this in years past… and way back when, we used to waive fees for garbage also for Earth Week, and we’re not doing that. Just for the recycling, and that’s just fine… I think it’s a good idea. Earth Week is very, very important, and I thank you for bringing this forward.”
The County Solid Waste Department has struggled a bit in recent years — financially — because it has been operated as a “government enterprise.” Government enterprises are expected to be funded by fees collected for services rendered, rather than in the manner that most government is operated: via generous tax collections. The Solid Waste Department collects ordinary household trash at their Transfer Station on Trujillo Road, and customers there have two options.
You can pay $3 per garbage can, to dump your trash into the compactor.
Or you can sort out the various recyclable components (glass, tin cans, cardboard, paper, aluminum, plastics) and recycle however much you wish for just $1 per visit.
I find that about two-thirds of our household trash (generated by three bachelors living together) is suitable for recycling, at $1 per visit. The remainder costs us $3 per can. It’s a small incentive to help save the planet, if you don’t think too hard about the fact that a candy bar now costs $1, and a small cappuccino costs $3.
I guess we are helping save the Earth, one cappuccino at a time. And during Earth Week, we won’t even have to pay that $1 for recycling.
But let’s get back to the discussion about real money, and real efforts to save the Earth.
Pagosa Springs did their small part to help save the U.S. economy, back in 1980, when our national security was hanging in the balance. The nation had recently been through an oil embargo and had suffered a wake-up call about our dependence upon foreign oil, and the anxiety at the government level had produced the usual result — yet another federal bureaucracy, called the Department of Energy. It had become obvious that the “free market” was not able to provide gasoline and heating oil in the qualities to which we had become accustomed, so the federal government stepped in and began funding huge capital projects to solve the problem.
One of the smaller energy projects funded by the Department of Energy, in the late 1970s, was an innovative municipal heating system for the small, rural town of Pagosa Springs — that would use geothermal water as its heat source, rather than coal, oil, or natural gas. Two new wells were drilled behind the County Courthouse, and pipes were laid in some of the main streets of downtown Pagosa. After tweaking the system, the Town government began providing winter heat to local schools and a few handfuls of businesses. But the project never fulfilled its original promise of heating Pagosa’s entire downtown with geothermal water. 35 years later, the system suffers from regular maintenance and reliability issues, and it’s not clear how much longer the Town will be able to afford to maintain it. Nor does America appear to have a shortage of oil or natural gas at the moment, thanks to developments in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology.
But we have new reasons, in 2015, to continue celebrating the federal Department of Energy. The world is now suffering — not from a lack of fossil fuels — but from too much burning of fossil fuels. The resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) might be slowly causing the Earth’s atmosphere to become unpleasantly warm.
Whatever the case, the Department of Energy is still eager to promote the development of geothermal-driven energy in the small, rural town of Pagosa Springs. And a handful of local citizens have been building up a business plan over the past few years, to show that — with enough government subsidies and the formation of a few new bureaucracies and tax credits and loan guarantees — the people of Pagosa Springs might someday benefit from a $26 million geothermal electric power plant.
Even though drilling for natural gas has basically come to a halt in nearby La Plata County, due to a glut of natural gas on the market, a small company called Pagosa Verde was able to convince five government entities — the U.S. Department of Energy, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, REgion 9 Economic Development District, Archuleta County, and the Town of Pagosa Springs — that we should be drilling here in Archuleta County for hot water. One of the new bureaucracies created was the Pagosa Area Geothermal Water and Power Authority (PAGWAPA), which is essentially a joint board of BOCC and Town Council members who are willing to accept DOE and DOLA grants on behalf of a non-profit corporation called Pagosa Waters, which in turn hires the private, for-profit company called Pagosa Verde LLC to drill holes. At the moment, Pagosa Verde has a minor cash flow problem, however. The companies involved in drilling the exploratory wells are asking to be paid.. and the grants from DOE and DOLA require invoices for reimbursement.
So Pagosa Verde has to pay the drilling companies first, and then ask DOE and DOLA for the money. And wait (patiently?) while the government processes the paperwork and writes the checks. But Pagosa Verde started this project with only $500,000 of County and Town tax revenues available to them — and they’re trying their hardest to spend $6 million by next September when the DOE grant deadline runs out. So apparently, the money is going out faster than it’s coming back in.. as Pagosa Verde principal Jerry Smith explained to the BOCC and the gathered audience on Tuesday. If the County and the Town could please kick in another $500,000 — just temporarily, to tide everyone over for a few months — and Pagosa Verde will agree to cover any invoices that might be rejected by DOLA?
The County’s share would be $250,000. The County Commissioners have a “contingency fund” of $500,000 in their budget, and this certainly seems to quality as a “contingency.” And it also qualifies, apparently, as something of an emergency?
Something that wasn’t planned for, in the Pagosa Verde business plan?
Commissioner Michael Whiting appeared to have some concerns, during the Tuesday discussion, that this little cash flow problem may not be the only thing that wasn’t planned for.