Do we need a County government in Pagosa?

This may be the perfect time to ask the question “Do we really need a County Government structure in Archuleta County?”

We, the tax payers, are paying two administrations to do many of the same tasks plus we have a third redundant government entity. Let’s deal with the first two, first.

We have a Town of Pagosa Springs Planning and Building Department and an Archuleta County Planning and Building Department. But, we can merge the County into the Town and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy.

All we need to do is delete the County structure, modify the Town charter and become an expanded home-rule Town adopting the Council-Manager form of government, with an elected mayor and Town council, and a professional Town manager. Which is a lot like how the Town works right now. Home-rule means that we can easily create our own local rules for a single entity government that works for us instead of blindly following the two layer Town and County system boilerplate laid out in the State Constitution. Colorado already has 58 Cities and 28 Towns that are Home Rule Municipalities.

Why should we pay the Town to develop a comprehensive plan and vision for parts of Pagosa Springs and then turn around to pay the County to develop comprehensive plans and visions for other pieces of Pagosa Springs? We have intelligent, hard-working staff in both the County offices and in the Town offices.

A unified Planning and Building Department would be able to make use of most of the existing County and Town staff. We don’t need both a Town Manager and a County Manager and two separate staffs with separate budgets. We can choose to remove this unnecessary overhead. We would lose the need to talk about the “Big Box” issue at a series of Town meetings and then start all over again at the County level.

We would lose the need to pay for and maintain separate County offices which perform functions that an expanded Town government should handle. We would lose the need to pay for the Town and County to constantly negotiate policy with each other. Granted, there would be growing pains for the Town as it matures and modernizes into its larger role. There are two other examples in Colorado of combined Counties and Cities occupying the same geographical area. Functions like the jail, the sheriff, and the tax assessor would be administered by the Town Council though current staff would continue serving.

Not only would we save our public money on overhead, we would save our public time and focus by having one set of meetings for planning and administration instead of two separate processes. How much public time have we lost in the current County fiasco still in the early stages of unraveling?

The long finger of the Town’s jurisdiction already runs up the Highway 160 hill and includes the shopping mall of the new City Market and most other commercial properties. Although Pagosa Springs still acts like a Tale of Two Towns, the east side and the west side of Town are now functionally unified. The vast majority of the residents in Archuleta County already use both the west and the east sides of the County as a unified Town because it really is. The Town already receives half of the sales tax generated by the new City Market anyway. Why shouldn’t the west side of the County benefit directly from the 2% of the sales tax which gets sent down the hill to Town Hall. At the moment, most of the sales tax revenue which the Town receives is generated on the western side of Town though over time downtown will become an economic force.

Archuleta County covers an area of 1,364 square miles but only 34% of the lands are in private ownership. About half the County land is National Forest and about 15% of the land belongs to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. In other words, the total amount of land that the Town and the County manage is only 34% of the total amount of land in the County. If you subtract the land included in the Town’s Future Land Use Plan, and the National Forest/Open Space Land and the Tribal Lands from the entire area of the County, the remaining privately held residential and agricultural lands do not form a large enough area or populace to justify the existence of a separate County Land Use Planning administration.

It just doesn’t make sense for us to pay for an obsolete layer of government. Let’s not bother with trying to bring the County into the 21st Century, let’s just get rid of it.

The traditional Town-County model in the Western United States envisions something like several distinct towns or urban centers surrounded by a sea of agricultural lands. In the case of Archuleta County, Pagosa Springs serves as a central urban axis, the backbone, of a single unified entity more urban at its axis and increasingly more agricultural or open space the farther beyond the axis you travel.

Our small Town axis radiates as a single vector from Aspen Springs in the west and through the downtown at the east and beyond. This single axis and unity of County-wide purpose is hinted at in the map of the “Future Land Use Plan” of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. Some people may still cling to the outdated myth of a community divided. But the Hispanics, the Utes, the ranchers, the Christians, the healers, the artists, the horse people, the hunters, the outdoor athletes, the second-home jet setters, the retirees, the real estate investors, the contractors, the merchants, and the employees all comprise a unified community clearly orbiting around the one, single commercial axis of Highway 160.

More than any other factor, it is our old remnant, redundant layers of government which serve to perpetuate a myth that somehow there exists more than one community here. It is already true that the terms “Archuleta County” and “the greater Pagosa Springs area” mean the same thing. We are a single, unified community primarily focused in providing tourism, recreation, and agriculture.

This is not some “melting pot” theory of unity but by actually celebrating and acknowledging our diversity and common commercial center we can enhance our functioning unity. Let’s acknowledge and build upon the history and contributions of the Hispanic community. Let’s open the door wider and invite further participation of our neighboring Indian Nation into our Town.

So what procedures could we use to merge the County and the Town? The most simple approach could be for a large majority of the property owners in the County to simply sign on to a letter requesting that the Town annex their land. This is what has happened to all of the commercial properties along Highway 160. The Town has annexed the commercial lands all the way up to the new City Market.

An education and outreach program would need to explain to the County land owners the financial benefit of merging the County into the Town, unifying redundant staff, overhead, and meetings, and finally removing the need to pay for an unnecessary County government. There are, of course, more complicated ways, including ballot measures, to achieve a County and Town merger which will be explored at a later time. All we need is the vision and the will of the people to get it done and the details of a County and Town merger will be worked out.

There will always be the naysayers and the small thinkers and those who are afraid to grow. So, let’s just get this out of the way right now. To those who cry “Keep Pagosa……Pagosa”, the truth has to be told that change is already upon us. Retreating to yesterday is not an option. There are only two options from here: poorly managed growth or smart growth. Pick one.

I like to say that all philosophies, all religions, all politics, all personal attitudes and all cultural beliefs fall squarely into one of two camps. There are only two ways of thinking for humans. Camp #1 believes that scarcity prevails, life is difficult, the limits of what we humans can accomplish are already known and we should generally be afraid of change. Camp #2 trusts in the flow of abundance, that life is a joyful experience, and that as clear-minded individuals and as a unified community we can accomplish all that we can dream of. There are only two ways to think. Pick one.

Our small Town way of life, the open space, the ranches and our growing appeal as a tourist destination, all need to be fostered by visionary leaders who can take us into tomorrow. We need visionary leaders who are willing to do whatever is necessary to unify our community and provide efficient government capable of guiding our inevitable growth into the 21st century. We need visionary leaders who understand how to promote and honor our cultural diversity and our unity of purpose as neighbors sharing the same commercial center.

Now, on to that third redundant layer of government. There was a time when a resident of the Pagosa Lakes subdivision was truly in a separate, distinct portion of the County. There was a time when the only agency overseeing building permits in the Pagosa Lakes subdivision was the PLPOA. But the recent growth of the County Building and Planning Departments have already made much of PLPOA’s old purpose obsolete.

PLPOA served a vital role 20 years ago but now it is an unnecessary third layer of government. Anyone building in Pagosa Lakes needs a building permit from the County and, illogically, also a PLPOA building permit. The PLPOA administers it own set of land use regulations and has its own separate, redundant meetings to approve building projects. We don’t need to pay for three levels of government when one will do the job cheaper and more efficiently. To simplify the process, maybe the best way to remove the redundancy of the PLPOA is to have a majority of PLPOA land owners change the Bylaws and grant land use planning and building oversight to a streamlined, unified Town Building and Planning Department.

Archuleta County really has solidified into a single, unified entity. The need to spend money for three sets of administrations and to have three sets of governance is over. Like Benjamin Franklin so aptly pointed out to a divided set of “individual” colonies in the year 1754, maybe the time has come to “Join, or Die.” We will continue to grow and the land will continue to be built upon. Going forward, either we maintain the archaic governing structures of division or we continue to foster the unity, quality, and desireability of the greater Pagosa Springs small Town community.