The doomsday parade on the news and social media leaves many in our communities fearful, frustrated, or numb to act. But our new generation of problems comes with a new generation of innovative solutions…
— from ‘New Messaging for the Next Era in Water’ on the Colorado River District website, February 22, 2022.
Since I’m not wishing to contribute to the doomsday parade on the news and social media, which might leave many in our community fearful, frustrated, or numb to act, this editorial series will be focusing — hopefully — on an awakening of consciousness in Archuleta County…
…an awakening of consciousness that we have a new generation of innovative solutions at hand, that will help us address a couple of problems. The problems might not be new, exactly, but might be getting worse. Or at least, ‘more obvious’.
One of the innovative solutions proposed by the taxpayer-supported Colorado River District is to change the tone of the conversation, through communications management. Instead of talking too much about “the problem”, the District apparently intends to develop an “External Affairs Team” that can focus attention on the strange bedfellows coming together for positive solutions.
The solutions cannot be too positive, of course. We could not, for example, expect Colorado’s Western Slope ranchers and farmers to stop irrigating their acreage and revert to dry-land agriculture.
Nor could we expect Colorado’s Front Range communities to embrace a “no-growth” mindset, and cease trying to grab water from the Western Slope and divert it across the Continental Divide. (Or even, from the drought-stricken San Luis Valley?)
Either of these solutions would dramatically change the “water landscape” in Colorado. But we shouldn’t expect to find them mentioned in the upbeat communications apparently being planned by the Colorado River District. The bedfellows might be strange, but not that strange.
Over here in our own little neck of the woods, we depend heavily on the snowpack in the San Juan Mountains to supply our water needs in Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County. At the moment, the situation looks positive, when measured at the National Resources Conservation Service SNOTEL gauging sites. Typically, Wolf Creek Pass reports a “snow water equivalent” (SWE) total of about 23 inches around the end of February. (SWE is essentially the amount of water produced if all the snow were melted down.)
The SWE usually hits its high point of about 36 inches around the end of April. As of Friday, the SWE at Wolf Creek Pass was almost 30 inches. This might suggest that the outlook for Archuleta County is: plenty of water for 2022, with all its reservoirs full. (Maybe, overflowing?)
Meanwhile, the taxpayer-supported San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) is planning to do some upbeat communications of its own during 2022. At the February 21 board meeting, a majority of the SJWCD board of directors voted to hire a Carbondale, Colorado-based “strategic communications firm”, Project Resource Studio, to act as “communications managers” for the District.
The board chose the Carbondale firm over two applicants from Pagosa Springs. The SJWCD board had also rejected another Pagosa communications firm, late last year.
This selection aligns with a pattern typical among Archuleta County governments: given a choice of consultants to help you better understand and connect with your taxpayers, you should always choose the firm least familiar with your community.
(Disclosure: I serve as a volunteer on the Conservancy District board of directors, but this editorial expresses my own opinions, which are not necessarily the opinions of the board as a whole.)
Writing for the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN, reporter Josh Pike made a valiant attempt to summarize the selection process.
According to the board packet, the SJWCD received three proposals for the position including local consultants Josh Kurz and Michael Whiting, and Carbondale-based Project Resource Studio.
Directors Al Pfister and Joe Tedder, who formed the candidate selection subcommittee along with SJWCD Executive Assistant Sally High, chose to recommend Project Resource Studio, suggesting that its capabilities most closely matched SJWCD’s outreach goals.
Project Resource Studio, a small four-person team, will be paid $44,425 to perform community engagement services for SJWCD. According to Pfister, this consultant will primarily work to develop education strategies to engage community members about water issues in the region and to hold community feedback panels to refine the SJWCD’s messaging…
It’s my understanding, speaking as a SJWCD board member, that the PRS team will consist of three people — “One primary communications manager and two support communication managers” — and that SJWCD’s 2022 budget for “communications management” work is actually $10,000. The PRS team has expressed their willingness to be paid up to $44,425, however.
The team will charge $185 per hour for engagement services and refinement of SJWCD’s messaging.
Speaking as just one SJWCD board member, I did not vote in favor of this proposed contract. Which is not to say that I believe communications and community engagement are unimportant. Quite the contrary. I would not have chosen to serve as editor of this not-for-profit online magazine, the Pagosa Daily Post, for the past 17 years, if I thought communications and community engagement were unimportant.
And I will be the first to admit that the communications and community engagement by the San Juan Water Conservancy District, over those same 17 years, has been almost non-existent. In that regard, I’m delighted that the SJWCD board wants to have a closer connection to the taxpayers who fund their expenditures.
Those expenditures have not been insignificant. By my estimate, the San Juan Water Conservancy District has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.3 million in taxpayer contributions since the Daily Post began publishing in 2004.
Readers may ask, “What has SJWCD done with $2.3 million?”
Perhaps Carbondale-based Project Resource Studio will provide the community with an answer to that question. But we already know that $1 million of that total was a grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), and was used to help purchase the $10 million Running Iron Ranch, located in the Dry Gulch Valley, as the site for a future water storage reservoir. PAWSD (Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District) paid the other $9 million, using a CWCB loan.
The Dry Gulch Reservoir has been a political hot potato ever since.
Here’s a map of the planned reservoir, as revised in 2013:
As drawn in this map, the proposed reservoir would roughly triple the total amount of water storage available to serve the Pagosa Springs area.