At the end of January, the Pagosa Springs Town Council held a Zoom work session to discuss the ins-and-outs of the real estate business with a couple of experts. The Town had contracted with a national real estate firm called CBRE to guide proposed government investments in local real estate — an interesting choice, considering that CBRE has no Colorado offices anywhere on the Western Slope, and, presumably, little familiarity with the Pagosa Springs business landscape or community.
We’re familiar with the typical government approach to hiring consultants — based on the idea that an ‘expert’ on your community’s needs and desires is someone who lives at least 60 miles away.
Two of CBRE’s Denver-based consultants were present for the January 28 work session: CBRE Mountain States Regional Manager Karlen Beitman and Advisory and Transaction Services Vice President Melanie Davis. You can see the consultants discussing Pagosa real estate, and Town priorities with the Town Council in the screen shot below. Mr. Beitman is wearing glasses and a blue plaid shirt in the lower left. Ms. Davis is to his immediate right. I do not recall Ms. Davis making any comment during the meeting.
Mr. Beitman stated that he’d had some preliminary discussions with Town staff about…
“…what are the priorities of what people see and think, as the immediate needs. There are consistent themes — and no surprise to you — workforce and affordable housing bubbles to the top in every conversation that we’ve had. So we assume that’s probably where we are going to start…”
During the work session, the two experts presented no particularly useful information, but they did toss out some potent real estate terms like “achieving your goals” and “key priorities” and “portfolio of owned assets” and “mapping the Town’s inventory.” Their goal, it seems, was mainly to hear what the Council members were thinking.
“What’s most important to us, getting started,” Mr. Beitman explained, “is getting an inventory of what [the Town government owns]. So we’re about 80-85% done, mapping out your inventory of assents. We’ve got about 70 parcels here…”
Mr. Beitman shared a map that CBRE had assembled showing some Town-owned property.
The largest parcels on the map are, of course, the five downtown municipal parks… the Town-owned cemetery… the Town-owned wetlands conservation easement… and the Solid Waste Transfer Station on Trujillo Road… none of which are likely to be converted to other real estate uses in the near future. The other large parcel is the Town’s former sewer lagoons site, which recently designated as “Yamaguchi South” and undergoing a study for conversion into yet another municipal park. The smallest Town-owned parcels are generally too small for building anything, or are inaccessible.
Mr. Beitman didn’t mention these issues during his presentation. But I’m mentioning them because I was part of a similar mapping effort back in 2016.
This very same work — “mapping the Town’s inventory” — was performed four-and-a-half years ago by the Archuleta County Affordable Housing Workgroup, a volunteer committee that spent several months making an inventory of all government-owned land in Archuleta County. Their subsequent report identified several government-owned parcels that might be especially suitable for future affordable housing projects, and those recommendations were included in the 2018 “Roadmap to Affordable Housing” which the Town Council officially adopted in 2019.
Maybe the Town government neglected to share its existing municipal documents with the consultants? I have no idea. But I’m often disappointed when our local leaders hire consultants from Denver, who know very little about our community, to explain our community to us.
If we look at this image of the Zoom meeting on January 28, and if we think about the people currently serving on the Town Council…
…you might conclude, as I do, that we have a number of very intelligent people on the Council. At least four of them — Nicole Pitcher, Mat deGraaf, Rory Burnett, and Shari Pierce — are familiar, directly or indirectly, with real estate or the construction industry.
If we total up the background knowledge of all our Council members, we’re looking at 100 years of experience with Pagosa Springs history, culture, and progress. Maybe more? And if you had a way to calculate the overall familiarity of our Town leaders with the Pagosa Springs community, you might determine that the people working at the Town and serving on the various Town boards and commissions have easily hundreds of times more knowledge about Pagosa Springs, its people, its current problems, and its future potential, than a couple of Denver-based consultants.
It would be hard to calculate the amount.
I am not proposing, mind you, that the Town Council are omniscient geniuses, or that they fully understand their own community. Each member brings a unique life experience to the table, and like all of us, they see the world through a certain set of glasses. But what the Council believes they can learn from Denver-based real estate experts about the needs and desires of Pagosa residents, I cannot say.
Much of the conversation on January 28 — coming from the Council — concerned affordable housing. Council member Rory Burnett, for example, asserted that the Council needs to keep in mind the distinction between “low income housing” — generally conceived as federally-subsidized rental housing — and “workforce housing” — generally conceived as subsidized, in some way, by local governments or non-profits. Indeed, that distinction was described rather clearly in the 2018 “Roadmap to Affordable Housing” officially adopted by the Council two years ago.
Mr. Beitman did not offer any indications, during the January work session, that he’s an expert in affordable housing. His resume on the CBRE website says:
Before joining CBRE, Mr. Beitman served as the Director of Real Estate for Denver International Airport. In this role, he was responsible for generating non-aviation revenue through the planning and development of office, retail, hotel and industrial commercial real estate located on airport property…
His primary interest at the Town Council work session appeared (to me) to include the promotion of luxury housing and the tourism industry…