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EDITORIAL: Brushback Pitch |
Glenn Walsh | 6/26/09
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The Town and County convened a joint work session last week. It was easy to tell the players without a scorecard. The players asking for money play for the Town.
The Town’s case for much more funding from the County has a surface statistical appeal, like batting average in baseball. The Town provides 80 percent of the funding for local parks and recreation while over 80 percent of the participants in Town leagues are County residents.
Yet, if you look deeper at the Town stats you find the gaudy batting average hides an anemic slugging percentage. The Town enjoys an unnaturally large revenue stream: $2400 per resident in sales and property taxes. The Town is the New York Yankees of Colorado towns.
 The County collects less than $840 in sales and property taxes for each permanent resident, and has to service a large second home and seasonal population on an expansive road network as well. Sort of the Florida Marlins of Colorado counties.
The Pagosa Lakes Property Owners Association collects about $100 per full-time and part-time resident. Toledo Mud Hens?
Why is the Town always pressing for new taxes, new fees, increased fines and more subsidies?
Of course, there is something perfectly natural about the Town’s revenue stream: it runs directly downhill. From Pagosa Lakes and the commercial developments attached geographically to Pagosa Lakes. Owing to a series of brilliant annexations, the Town created a sales tax arm running miles west along Highway 160 which saved it from poverty and irrelevance after the local sawmills closed thirty years ago.
How much of the Town’s budget is paid for by suburban residents, retirees and time-share visitors with brimming City Market carts? That same 80 percent figure probably applies here as well.
Simply put, there are services cities provide and services counties provide. Neither La Plata nor Montezuma County has a parks and recreation department. They fund the county fair and fairgrounds. Game over. Durango spends over $6 million per year on parks, trails and recreation. Cortez spends nearly $2 million on its superb parks and recreation facilities. Residents in Durango and Cortez cry out each year for extra innings.
Archuleta County could play the same percentage game with the Town. What percentage of residents in the County Jail are Town residents? What percentage of waste at the County landfill is provided by Town residents and businesses? Maybe the County should present the Town with a bill for 30 percent of annual operating costs at the jail and landfill and 30 percent of the soon-to-be-borne costs of constructing a new jail?
The memorandum the Town presented the County last week adopted a curious perspective: the percentage that local governments contributed to the Town budget. Honestly, the Town has to stop seeing itself as the bride on every wedding cake.
The County has budgeted over $700,000 this year for park and recreation spending, chiefly for the fairgrounds, the Town-to-Lakes trail, seed money for new recreation programs and capital investments in ballfields and parks in Town. County residents pay, one assumes, 80 percent of the $75,000 in park and recreation fees collected by the Town each year.
School spending for sports programs, the maintenance of gyms and ballfields (used year-round by the Town), and the bond issue for gyms and ballfields at the high school exceed $600,000. I suppose the Archuleta School District should issue a memo detailing the contributions of all local governments to their school lunch program.
If a joint regional parks and recreation program is the goal, then recognizing the sizeable contributions all local governments are making to regional parks and recreation is the first step towards first base.
The major problem with the Town’s present thinking is the assumption that parks and recreation spending is a budget busting loss rather than the Town’s finest achievement. Yamaguchi Park will probably be remembered as the finest of Mayor Ross Aragon’s many accomplishments. How did sixteen acres of prime riverside property with nearly no sewer line costs become a public park rather than an exclusive condo development?
And I thought Town Hall was in the back pocket of developers?
Wasn’t “The Town Within A Park” adopted as the “vision” for the future development of Town a few years ago? That implies some spending on parks. And some organized and healthy recreation for the youth in the town within a park.
Consider the value to the Town of the Four Corners Folk Fest, Folk and Bluegrass Festival, Mountain Chile Cha Cha, Spanish Fiesta, the July Fourth Carnival, Centerpoint Church Sports Camps, the Pagosa Springs Arts Council Gallery, the Family Festivo and, hopefully, the new home for Park Fun at the old Power House.
How attractive would downtown Pagosa be to Town and County residents, tourists and potential investors without its beautiful network of riverside parks? Or with Hickory Ridge times ten on Reservoir Hill?
Of course, the County is a county within a park. Luckily, much of that park is provided by God free of charge. For the Town, creation does not come so easily and cheaply.
The Town should be recognized and thanked for creating a town with over forty percent public open space. The Town has been the clean-up hitter for parks and recreation for years. The Mayor has hit more than enough home runs to make him a first ballot hall-of-famer. But the Council is trying to take too much of the plate this time at bat.
And it is time for the County and the School District to throw a brushback pitch. |
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