A natural disaster in a small town typically has a ripple effect — with ripples spreading out to the very edges of the community, possibly for decades to come.
The same can be said for a so-called ‘positive’ community occurrence… like, say, the creation of a new charter school. The ripples can spread.
As I hinted yesterday in Part Two of this editorial series, life is a web of interdependent connections. Some connections are more peculiar than others. One example of peculiar connections might be found at the Parelli Building, located at 7 Parelli Way near the Walmart store.
In 2005, the Parelli Natural Horsemanship organization purchased a vacant 3-acre parcel in the new Aspen Village subdivision as the site for their new international headquarters, and as the distribution hub for Parelli publications and horse-training equipment. The roads and infrastructure for the surrounding subdivision had barely been completed when the new 30,000-square-foot Parelli Building opened for business, decked out with high-speed Internet connections not normally found in small, rural Colorado towns.
Currently, the Archuleta County Assessor website values the Parelli Building and property at about $1.2 million. But two recent professional appraisals estimated the property’s value at closer to $4.7 million.
In 2015, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners condemned their own detention center following a roof leak. The roof leak had not caused any actual structural damage to the jail — it’s a concrete jail, after all — but some of the electronics had been compromised. Or so we were told. For various reasons, the County commissioners did not want to repair the jail, which was about 25 years old and thus was not up to the latest jail standards. In fact, during the early 2000s — under the authority of then-Sheriff Tom Richards — the jail had consistently violated federal guidelines, due to overcrowding.
The BOCC also wanted to build new courtrooms, and a new Sheriff’s admin. A new “Justice Center” in other words. The community deserved a fine new facility for processing criminals, we were told. Other Colorado communities were already building new justice centers. We just had this old Courthouse with a ruined jail.
After the roof leak provided a convenient excuse, two of the three commissioners — Clifford Lucero and Steve Wadley — began hankering to build a new “justice center” on 5 acres of vacant County-owned property on Hot Springs Boulevard, right across the street from Town Hall. But when initial estimates for that proposed project suggested a cost of maybe $30 million, the BOCC decided to look at other options, just for comparison purposes.
One of the options that made it to the table focused on the Parelli Building.
In 2015, the Parelli organization was in the midst of developing a new business model, and was seriously downsizing their Pagosa staffing; many of the rooms in the building were already being underutilized. The main building was unsuitable as a jail — it wasn’t made of concrete — but it could be remodeled to serve as a Courthouse and Sheriff’s Office, and a detention facility could be constructed next door for perhaps $7 million.
Remodeling is not necessarily cheap. But when the initial estimates came back from the architects, it looked like the “Parelli Option” would have cost the taxpayers about $16 million, including a new Jail, a new Courthouse, and a new Sheriff’s office.
Let’s consider that number more closely. $16 million for a new state-of-the-art Jail, a new Courthouse, and a new Sheriff’s office, all conveniently located together in a “justice center.” This $16 million option was rejected by commissioners Lucero and Wadley, in favor of a $28 million project on Hot Springs Boulevard. (Which was later rejected in favor of a project in Harman Park.)
In preparation for a special BOCC meeting on June 13, Archuleta County Finance Director Larry Walton had put together a little report, which read, in part:
On March 5th, 2019, the Commissioners approved a proposal from Nunn Construction to serve as Construction Manager/General Contractor (CM/GC) for the Pre-construction Service portion of the project. Today, they are coming before you to present their Guaranteed Maximum Price Proposal for this project…
At the time of this writing, no GMP proposal has been presented to staff for advance review. However, during a BoCC work session on June 11, 2019, representatives from Nunn Construction indicated their GMP proposal would total about $14,395,000. This is considerably higher than originally estimated…
It was also noted that sub-contractors in the region are very busy and they are having difficulty obtaining bids for this relatively remote, rural location.
In addition to the above project costs, the architect on the job [Brad Ash?] was apparently prepared to recommend that the County allocate “an additional contingency of 3-5% of construction costs. ($431,850 to $719,750).” This would put the potential cost of the project in the $15.8 million to $16 million range.
I still don’t know if the BOCC accepted the offer from Nunn Construction, and I don’t know if $14.4 million was the actual offer made on June 13. (I didn’t attend the special meeting.) But I am amazed (or perhaps horrified?) that our community could have had a complete “justice center” — Courthouse, Sheriff’s Office and Detention Center — for maybe $16 million.
Instead, it seems we will get only an oversized, 30,000-square-foot Jail for $16 million. That’s what I call a natural disaster.
But luckily for us, every cloud has a silver lining. Because commissioners Lucero and Wadley rejected the Parelli Building as the site for our new Justice Center, the 30,000-square-foot building became available as the location for the community’s first, tuition-free, District-authorized charter school: Pagosa Peak Open School, now completing its second year of operation.
Pagosa Peak is currently in negotiations to purchase the entire 3-acre property and building for a price of perhaps $4.7 million. If the negotiations are successful, Pagosa Peak would have long-term access to a building big enough to accommodate more than 200 elementary school students, with room left over.
Such an enrollment might help prevent overcrowding at Pagosa Springs Elementary School for many years to come. And thus saving the taxpayers up to $30 million — the recent estimate we were given for a new, expanded elementary school…
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.