After the Ballot Question A ballots were counted on Tuesday, July 14 — and we learned that nearly three-quarters of the participating Town voters had approved an amendment to the Pagosa Springs Home Rule Charter— reporter John Finefrock contacted the three local activists who had circulated the petitions to place the proposed amendment before the voters. Comments by the activists were quoted in the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN newspaper. The amendment gives Town voters the authority to approve Tax Increment Financing before it can be used by the Town Council or the new Urban Renewal Authority to help finance “urban renewal” projects within the town limits.
Activist Glenn Walsh submitted the following comment:
“The overwhelming majority of Town voters told Town government to present them with projects which benefit all of us, not the narrow interests of a few developers. Projects which bring middle class jobs, work force housing and improvement to genuinely blighted parts of our community will be approved. Massive corporate welfare for luxury hotel suites and $750,000 short stay condos will be rejected.
“This vote should be a big wake call for Town government. This URA ‘scheme’ has been a very tightly guarded inside game to date. Public discussions have been very guarded and tactical. The entire community — all county taxpayers — need to discuss and decide which projects deserve our tax dollars. That’s the only way to develop projects with real game changing impact.”
Mr. Walsh is here referring to the fact that a municipal “Urban Renewal Authority” (URA) is granted special powers by Colorado’s Urban Renewal Law, allowing the Authority to compel surrounding school districts, fire districts and other special districts to forego tax revenues — for up to 25 years — from development projects the Town designates. Under the Urban Renewal Law as written in 1958, county voters have no authority to participate these decisions.
Unless, of course, the Town government asked the county voters to participate? It has not done so, thus far. Instead, the Town Council has intentionally avoided community-wide representation on the URA commission.
The information distributed by Glenn Walsh, Greg Giehl and myself prior to the July 14 election focused attention on the proposed Springs Resort/Springs Partners project that had generated the Town Council’s “urban renewal” decisions last November:
Mr. Finefrock asked me for a statement to include in his SUN article, which I sent to him:
“The Town Council made a questionable decision, last November, to designate a vacant 27-acre parcel as ‘dangerous urban blight’. They then compounded that error by refusing to grant direct representation on the new Urban Renewal Authority commission to local governmental districts that could be forced to contribute tax revenues to future projects for up to 25 years. Going door-to-door during our month long petition drive, we heard over and over the disappointment felt by the town taxpayers over the Council’s URA decisions.
“I’m grateful for the folks who wrote the Town’s Home Rule Charter and allowed the citizens to initiate changes to their municipal government whenever they felt things were getting out of hand — as the citizens did back in 2013, when the Town was proposing an amusement park on Reservoir Hill, and the voters stepped up to require taxpayer approval. I feel much more positive about development in Pagosa Springs now that the voters have spoken.”
The overwhelming voter reaction on July 14 was due, in part, to the project that had generated the creation of a municipal URA in the first place — the 2019 proposal by developers David Dronet and Jack Searle to develop a mixed-use neighborhood on 27 never-developed acres adjacent to the Springs Resort on Hot Springs Boulevard, using an estimated $79.6 million in tax reimbursements to build out the streets and infrastructure for what was advertised as a $180 million project.
There are currently three 20-year-old streets opening onto the vacant 27-acre property. Two of them are still unimproved.
I believe unimproved gravel streets are prohibited within the town limits. But the past owners of this vacant travertine meadow have received special treatment by the Town government over the past 30 years. Many community leaders have contended, over the past 30 years, that this special treatment would generate economic vitality — something the Town government has attempted to create within its historical downtown, with only mixed success. Nearly all the economic expansion over the past three decades has happened, instead, uptown in the Pagosa Lakes area. And nearly all of that uptown economic growth was funded by private investment, rather than via taxpayer subsidies.
When Mr. Dronet and Mr. Searle began to meet with local leaders to drum up support for their tax-funded streets project, no one at Town Hall had much familiarity with Colorado’s Urban Renewal Law, and Town Manager Andrea Phillips asked Mr. Dronet to submit written answers to some questions. Here’s one of Ms. Phillip’s questions, with Mr. Dronet’s answer:
Q. I did hear a story of a developer essentially taking out a loan that wasn’t really necessary, paying it back but somehow charging himself – and then the URA – 20% interest. Now that doesn’t really make sense to me, but it was scary and that poor URA was totally taken advantage of.
A: There are crooks out there. I believe with this Council and this community the scrutiny will be very high, and need for transparency will be huge. As I said earlier, this is just the beginning of long process and partnership… damn, this is really going to be a big pain in the ass. Remind me again, why am I doing this? In all seriousness, I hope you’re seeing why it’s so important to me that the Town and community are really behind this project. As I’ve shared I need to believe that the public side of this Public-Private Partnership wants to make this happen, because there will surely be challenges and obstacles, because this is the real world, and we have to work together to solve them as they arise. If that strong support isn’t there, I don’t even want to start down the path. We’re about to get married, so we both better be sure we want to spend the next 25 years together!
From my experience knocking on literally hundreds of downtown doors this past spring, the “community” is not “really behind this project.” In fact, many of the voters I talked to had a distinctly negative view of Mr. Dronet and Mr. Searle and their proposed $79.6 million tax subsidy scheme.
So we have to wonder. Did Mr. Dronet truly mean what he said?
“If that strong support isn’t there, I don’t even want to start down the path.”