No one, I think, truly expected the Town staff to fulfill all 53 of the ‘priority actions’ delineated by the Town Council a year ago that their annual retreat. (You can download that list here.)
When the Council was asked by facilitator Yvonne Wilcox, last month, to list the ‘priority actions’ the Council members felt most proud of accomplishing over the past 12 months, only 5 of the eleven items selected — Town Maintenance Facility, Streets/Sidewalks, Trails, Broadband, and Road Maintenance — were even mentioned in last year’s list of 53 priority goals.
Obviously, the Town Council’s “COVID Leadership” response to our public health crisis couldn’t have been part of last year’s priorities, because the Council knew nothing about the virus at last summer’s retreat. But I still find it interesting that more than half of the 2019 accomplishments the Council thought worth mentioning — this summer — were not part of their “strategic plan” established last summer.
Could make us wonder about the value of planning, and priority-setting.
This is not to say that the Town staff accomplished only five items from last year’s list of 53 goals. In fact, the Town made some headway on at least 22 of the 2019-2020 goals, from what I can tell. We might assume that leaves us with 31 objectives, on which little progress was made over the past year?
So many goals. So little time.
According to my observations of Town government, over the past 16 years while I’ve been documenting our community for the Daily Post, the Town of Pagosa Springs operates a bit like our typical working class family. The bigger influx of money comes in during the summer, when the second home owners and tourists are in town, and most of the municipal “projects” also take place in the summer, when the ground is not frozen. So the Town staff spends the winter months making plans for what will happen in the spring, summer, and fall.
Making plans. Like the rest of us.
This year, many of us had our summer plans mostly sketched out by the middle of March — the Town government, and the taxpayers who support it. But the novel coronavirus arrived with all its unknown characteristics, and large portions of the local economy came to a screeching halt. Here’s the most recent chart from the Federal Reserve Bank, showing the unemployment rate for Archuleta County, from January, 2004 — when unemployment was about 7percent — to June, 2020, when the unemployment rate was calculated at 11.3 percent.
We note that our local unemployment rate typically varies by about one or two percent during a 12 month period, with the highest levels of joblessness happening in February and March. We can also note that the June, 2020 unemployment rate is actually below the highest rate in the winter of 2010, when the Great Recession had finally arrived in Pagosa Springs. By 2016, however, the local economy seemed to have settled into a period of low unemployment.
This low unemployment rate, between 2016 and 2019, actually reflected a social problem in the community. Working class families were finding it harder and harder to find affordable homes as the tourism industry converted existing housing into short-term vacation rentals, and as the local construction industry — which had taken it in the shorts during the recession — focused almost exclusively on higher-priced homes. As workers left — and as retirees and second home owners moved in — the unemployment rate fell to what was actually an unhealthy level.
Then COVID arrived in Colorado, mostly in the big cities, and the Polis administration began issuing public health orders. Unemployment in Archuleta County hit 7 percent in March — not an historically unprecedented level — and then jumped to 16.4 percent in April. We have not seen that level of unemployment in Pagosa for at least the past 30 years, not even during localized downturn during the late 1980s.
And we have never seen an unemployment level of 11 percent during the month of June. The only chart I’ve been able to locate online, this morning, shows the July rate unchanged from June. These are supposed to be the most economically active months of the year, but of course, not this year. Even though we had a busy highway through town during June and July, and even though the hot springs resorts appeared to be well-populated, we’re still in the worst situation — in terms of employment — in at least 30 years.
We could blame Pagosa’s economic shutdown on the Polis administration’s health orders. But we could also note that the Archuleta County population is much older, on average, than most of Colorado… and even though we’ve seen only 40 “confirmed” cases of coronavirus infection among county residents, those of us who are over 60 are well aware that COVID is statistically more dangerous, the older you are and the more ongoing health issues you have. We can guess that, once the tourists and second-home owners leave, we are still going to be seeing a high unemployment rate in Archuleta County, and a lot of older residents sheltering at home, where it feels relatively more safe than in a busy restaurant.
With all this said, why did our Town Council, a few days ago, come up with a list of 2020-2021 priorities that did not include mitigation for the COVID crisis? “COVID Leadership” has disappeared from the 2020-2021 priorities…
Why would our Town staff be more concerned about a proposed remodel of Town Hall, for example, than about doing something innovative to help out a relatively damaged economy?
Yes, the Town government gave away some money this past spring, hoping that it could be reimbursed by CARES money, but the list of priorities that I saw at the July 31 Council retreat looked frighteningly like “business as usual.”
Perhaps that’s the way we want it. Perhaps our community leadership is doing exactly what they ought to be doing… acting like everything is just hunky dory… acting like that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.