I have been attending Town Council meetings consistently for three years, and writing about those meetings more intermittently, when my spare time and short-changed writing ability have allowed. Two things stand out. First, the intelligence, hard work and wide background of talents of the near-dozen Councilors during that period, who work for no pay and less credit than deserved from the public, and at times with less credit than deserved from my intermittent pieces.
I work in New York City each weekend, near Wall Street but not very close to huge sums earned there. People practice in New York, as they do in Pagosa, their personal perversities. Mine, on Monday, is to walk uptown and sit in on debates at the City Council, where I once worked for the Council’s only Republican member, which acquainted me with thankless governmental tasks.
 Each City Councilor represents, at least theoretically, 150,000 citizens and maybe 20,000 illegals. Each Town Councilor represents about 225 citizens. I frankly see no difference in the talent, hard work and basic smarts of the members of either board. If you consider the percentages, that is a considerable advantage the Town enjoys.
Second thing standing out: the issues which occupy the time of the Town Council are remarkably repetitious, nearly the screenplay from Groundhog Day. The four issues discussed at last Thursday’s special meeting of the Council have been topics at meetings, and joint Town-County meetings and special meetings and work sessions for years:
The Town to Lakes Trail, the proposed spine of a local trails system and the first step towards the truly community-wide goal: the Springs to Springs — Pagosa to Aspen — long trail.
The creation of a Town-long system of attractive and useful and rather expensive entryways, signs and touristy lighting, street furniture and landscaping; always on the top of Mayor Aragon’s to-do list, yet despite the collection of $1.8 million in lodgers tax dollars by year-end 2010, destined to stay atop the unstarted list in 2011.
The euphemistically named River Restoration Project, which of course has nothing to do with reestablishing the natural river environment a Ute squaw drew water from and washed blankets in, but aims to create a kayaking, rafting and tubing park along the length of the downtown San Juan River.
The construction of a skateboard park for Pagosa teens and twenty-somethings (and tourist teens and twentysomethings), which is the Cinderella (before the slipper) sport for local governments, who prefer to lavish money on sports few Pagosa youngsters play either often or well, owing to a set of largely prejudicial opinions about skateboarding and skateboarders.
For years, progress on these projects and another major, incomplete community project — the construction of an environmentally sound and financially sane sewer plant — has been two weeks away. These delays have been occasioned by two factors.
First, the Town decided years ago to base many of its build-out plans on two supposed mainstays: state and federal grants, whose moneys arrive very erratically in this small corner of the corner of the state, but whose regulations are applied with metronomic consistency, and on the fanciful speculations of Florida-based developers proposing golfing and equestrian disneylands along Highway 84.
Second, the Town has become reliant on a seemingly ceaseless planning and replanning approach which has placed it at the mercy of the calendars of out-of-Town and out-of-state state officials, quasi-state studies, consultants, lawyers, contractors and construction firms.
Signs of Losing Our Way?
The Town Tourism Committee has had a very controversial year, at least on the pages on the local newspaper it does not generously subsidize with tax dollars. Much of this controversy is deserved. Yet, as I hope to explain in an article next week, the TTC in 2010 had a superb year, earning a significant, and regionally unique, return on investment.
However, when the TTC was formed four years ago, three long-term goals were top listed. The creation of a calendar of tourist-drawing events, annual investments in tourist-related infrastructure, and the design and installation of a striking Town-wide system of entryways, street and trailside amenities and signs.
That neither of these top-list goals has been achieved is an understatement. The gateway and signage program was the focus of the TTC during its first sessions of 2007. The committee reasoned that replacing the chaotic and less than informative signage throughout Town, and installing some attractive streetside furniture and landscaping, before extending a mass market invitation was an intelligent approach. Still hard to argue with that priority.
However, it is three years later, and the Town has an expensive — $40,000 — sign plan. Essentially a catalog of attractive big ticket features and some commonsense suggestions of where to place them.
But the Town has not installed a single feature from that plan.
And last Thursday, Jon Johnson, the chair of the Wayfinding and Signage subcommittee of the TTC, proposed another plan. A “master plan” to “vision” the “implementation” of the three-year old plan.
Is this a sign of progress? In fairness, the signage subcommittee has not been given much to work with. Of the $1.4 million dollars in lodging tax dollars collected to date, only $20,000 has been earmarked for actual signs.
Johnson noted that the TTC was aiming for a signage program of “cohesive quality” and promised to “streamline and more aggressively move forward on a signage program for Pagosa Springs.”
Curiously, however, Johnson streamlined discussion of the wayfinding and signage master plan by turning the discussion to “a secondary and tandem objective of our subcommittee.”
“Equally important,” Johnson emphasized in a very friendly manner, “is a community beautification effort.” That beautification effort will apparent focus not on investment of TTC funds, but on compiling lists of property owner in the commercial corridor whose “properties really overshadow the beauty that we have been blessed with here.”
Johnson referenced a number of properties of “great obsolescence,” and informed the Town Councilors that the effort would “target them initially.” Johnson was throughout very diplomatic and friendly, promising to “approach this in a spirit of cooperation with business owners.”
However, the Town already has a code enforcement officer. Town planner James Dickhoff is widely credited with very competently and diplomatically enforcing Town junk ordinances last year.
Councilor Stan Holt interrupted the discussion about the Wayfinding and Signage committee’s self-appointed expanded jurisdiction with a more prosaic question “What type of signage would you like to fund at first.” Holt noted that one expensive sign or entryway could “blow the budget right there.”
Johnson replied that no decision had been made: “The answer is no, but we do have three or four candidates.”
There was no mention of whether the corridor beautification report of the subdivision of the subcommittee would become the subject of a full-blown TTC master corridor beautification study to be appended to the Master Plan visioning the implementation of the initial wayfinding and signage plan, however. |