Last week, the Colorado Sun posted an article by reporter Jason Blevins with an interesting headline.
Colorado mountain towns say they can’t handle any more tourists amid labor, housing crises
This headline suggests that ‘Colorado mountain towns’ are not only universally weary of tourists — and of course including Pagosa Springs as one of those ‘Colorado mountain towns’ — it also implies that all Colorado mountain town exhibit the same general feelings about tourism in 2021.
Mr. Blevins’ kicks off his article like this:
Crested Butte has pulled its summer ads as businesses struggle to accommodate crowds. A Telluride councilwoman wants to redirect tourism funding toward housing. The Colorado Tourism Office is without a leader. Chaffee County commissioners rejected a 20,000-person annual music festival.
Angst over tourism is growing as mountain communities emerge from crowd-restricting pandemic closures. Overlapping waves of visitors and new residents are amplifying an unprecedented labor shortage and housing crunch. And with that seasonal distress comes a growing call to silence the statewide promotion of Colorado as a vacation wonderland.
“It’s a carrying capacity issue,” said Geneva Shaunette, a Telluride town council member who wants to redirect $2 million a year to workforce housing from tourism-campaign spending. “With the drastic situation we are experiencing with housing and a lack of employees we simply cannot handle that many people. We need to ease off the gas of marketing. Telluride already is on the map. The whole ‘Come to Telluride because how great it is,’ we physically can’t handle that anymore. And we have many better and more important things to spend our money on.”
I spent the past week going door-to-door, handing out invitations at local businesses, to encourage local residents to participate in the Pagosa Housing Partners ongoing Residential Housing Survey (which you can access here.) With all of the tourists in town this summer — echoing last summer’s invasion — I expected to hear business owners and managers expressing satisfaction with our ‘successful’ tourism economy.
But that’s not what I heard. In fact, not a single person I talked to seemed happy about what has been happening in Pagosa Springs.
What I heard, instead of satisfaction, was an overwhelming sense of frustration about where the community is headed. Not that I was soliciting these responses; the business owners and managers volunteered their feelings.
Frustration with feeling overwhelmed by traffic and too many visitors.
Frustration with neighborhoods being transformed into vacation rental districts.
Frustration with the lack of workforce housing, and with the shortage of committed employees.
But not everyone feels frustrated. Some people I had not spoken to during my tour of local businesses attended the meeting of the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board — a joint effort by our two local governments, the Town of Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County — met earlier this week, with one rather contentious issue on the agenda.
Should we keep spending money marketing Pagosa Springs as a tourism destination? The Tourism Board thought that was a good idea, generally speaking.
Should the Lodgers Tax be redirected to fund other community needs? Like, say, workforce housing? The Tourism Board didn’t like that idea, generally speaking.
Numerous people in leadership positions have been arguing that the millions of dollars spent on tourism marketing over the past decade have created a small town that is no longer pleasant to visit or live in.
Or work in.
On Thursday, the Town Council spent about 8 hours discussing its 2022 priorities at their annual retreat.
One of the discussions centered on an unanimous recommendation — actually, a set of four recommendations — that had been approved by the Town Planning Commission two days earlier. The recommendations had come at the request of the Town Council.”How should the Town deal with the challenges caused by the proliferation of vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods?”
The Planning Commission recommendations:
1. That a purchaser of a new property in a residential neighborhoods would need to own the property for two years before applying for a vacation rental license.
2. Greatly increase the amount of the licensing fee — when the property is not the owner’s primary residence — from $500 a year to $6,000 a year, and apply all of the collected revenue to workforce housing.
3. Allow only one vacation rental license per property.
4. “To the greatest extent possible”, redirect the revenues from the Town Lodgers Tax from tourism promotion and marketing to workforce housing efforts instead.
These recommendations will be brought before the Council at a future meeting for possible approval.
Have we had our fill… of tourists? Here’s Council member Mat deGraaf, commenting on that topic… and echoing the comments by Telluride Council member Geneva Shaunette, quoted at the beginning of this article.
Mr. deGraaf:
“Something that’s really pertinent to the [tourism discussion] is ‘capacity.’ I mean, we can bring people here, but if it’s a two-hour wait to get into each and every restaurant, they probably aren’t coming back. Right? So it’s a bigger issue. We’ve been on this meteoric rise; we see that every month, with the graphs from [the Tourism Board]. I mean, I wish our ski hill was that steep.”
Below is a sample of the graphs Mr. deGraaf is referencing.
As we see, the Lodgers Tax revenues for 2020 (the rust-red bars) began spiking in June last year. The spiking revenues have continued into 2021 (the dark brown bars) with collections for January, February, March, April and May bringing in approximately twice as many dollars as in 2015.
Council member deGraaf continued:
“And we’re not able to respond fast enough. And the private sector is not able to, either. Like I said, about waiting for a restaurant table. Obviously, we need a few more restaurants…”
Except that our existing restaurants are already running short-staffed. We have no workforce to handle additional businesses.
Mr. deGraaf:
“We have these demands that are just not able to be met. I think our user experience is suffering. People used to come here because it was quiet; it was sort of their special spot. And it’s not that way anymore…”
I am reminded for some reason of a famous Yogi Berra quote.
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”