Wednesday, September 11. The Springs Resort development meeting. 5:30pm, The Springs Resort conference room, 165 Hot Springs Blvd. Opportunity for the community to speak with the developers about the development project.
Wednesday, September 11. Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation regular board meeting. 5:30pm, Chamber of Commerce conference room, 105 Hot Springs Blvd.
— two notices in the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN, September 5 issue.
For a person like myself — a community meeting addict — the above notices for 5:30pm meetings pose an interesting dilemma.
Attend the Springs Resort development meeting…? And possibly have a chance to discuss a plan for a 27-plus-acre ‘Urban Renewal Authority’ scheme that could re-direct up to $79 million in taxpayer revenues away from our schools, fire department, county government, town government, library district, and water districts, and into the pockets of two private developers?
Or attend the regular board meeting of the government-funded Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation and hear about… what? Government-subsidized broadband internet? Their upcoming “Friends Breakfast”? (The SUN notice gives no indication what might be on the agenda, and I found no information about the meeting on the PSCDC website.)
We might assume that both meetings have something to do with ‘development,’ although whether said development would be beneficial to the larger community — to the ordinary folks who live here in Archuleta County — remains to be seen. My experience of Pagosa Springs, since arriving here in 1993, has been of one ‘development’ after another, although things came to a temporary standstill, pretty much, between 2008 and 2012.
Community development occasionally has positive benefits. I’m thinking, for example, about the (once-controversial) development of a rural access hospital — now known as the Pagosa Springs Medical Center. The hospital sometimes struggles to provide a professional level of service (or so I’ve heard, from several people) but my personal experiences have been good ones. I appreciate many of the retail outlets and restaurants and service businesses that have come into existence here since 1993.
But ‘development’ viewed from the 30,000 foot level has not been universally beneficial for the ordinary folks who’ve made Archuleta County their home. In many cases, the benefits have accrued to a select few, while the rest of us have watched our roads crumble, our housing disappear, and our taxes going into expensive new government buildings — while wages in the private sector have been mostly stagnant.
The “Urban Renewal Authority” (URA) tax subsidy scheme that’s been proposed by the Springs Resort (and that will be discussed, it appears, at Wednesday’s September 11 meeting at the Springs Resort conference room) is one example of a plan that would greatly benefit a select few, and might cause considerable harm to the community as a whole.
We’ll be sharing a more thorough analysis of that project in a future editorial.
The good news is that our Pagosa Springs Town Council — Mayor Don Volger and members Tracy Bunning, David Schanzenbaker, Nicole DeMarco, Mat deGraaf, Matt DeGuise and Maddie Bergon — are approaching the URA proposal with thoughtful consideration, and considerable care.
The good news is that we have a volunteer Council willing to look ‘outside the box’ of endless, unfettered development as the only model available to a rural community.
This has not typically been the case in Archuleta County. In the past, our community’s elected leadership has often been willing to hand our tax subsidies, and vested rights, and special dispensations as if they were going out of style, all in the name of ‘development.’ The assumption, for so many years, was that development creates jobs — something in short supply here, especially after the sawmills closed down in the late 1970s and early 1980s — and that jobs were a good thing, no matter how little they paid in wages.
And no matter how ‘more development’ might impact our infrastructure and services.
I’ve come across other glimmers of good news during attendance at community meetings. I’ve heard both the Town Council and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners discuss the idea of putting a ‘cap’ on the number of vacation rentals — STRs, Short-Term Rentals — in the community. At a recent Council work session, members of the real estate industry packed the room, and argued for uncontrolled growth of the STR industry, but I had the feeling the Council was not swayed but those arguments. Rather, I heard the Council make a tentative suggestion that we cap the total number of vacation rentals, within the Town limits, at 10 percent of the available housing units, and that we look at limiting the number of STRs on a given block — so that our residential neighborhoods don’t turn into commercial hotel districts.
Last year, local voters approved a increase to their own property taxes in a effort to keep and retain quality teachers and staff at our four public schools, and also to increase school security. (That tax increase sunsets after seven years.)
It seems that the community might be seriously looking at the affordable housing crisis. Several local and regional housing and service organizations have formed a ‘housing coalition’ to explore ways to cooperate on the provision of housing options. The Archuleta County Housing Authority is in the midst of planning a low-income apartment complex on Hot Springs Boulevard, thanks to a donation of land from the Board of County Commissioners. The Town of Pagosa Springs is developing a ‘deed restriction’ template that might serve to keep new affordable housing projects from becoming ‘unaffordable’ in the future. Such deed restrictions might encourage our permitting agencies — the Town, the County, and Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation (PAWSD) — to waive fees for specific projects, if they are assured of long-term affordability.
As the Rolling Stones once promised us, you can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, you just might find… you get what you need.