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PAWSD Gets Called on the Carpet, Part Five |
Bill Hudson | 3/16/10
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Read Part One
Okay, now I’m starting to sweat a little. This is already Part Five, and I’ve covered only three of the 25 issues raised by the Archuleta County Commissioners in their March 8 letter to the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District.
Every issue raised in that letter has its own little twist, and all taken together, the 25 issues point to a slightly twisted approach to community planning on the part of PAWSD — and on the part of the water district’s partner in the proposed Dry Gulch project, the San Juan Water Conservancy District, another taxpayer-funded special district charged with helping secure water resources for Archuleta County.
Before I proceed with investigating issue Number Four, I’d like to share some information gleaned from a telephone interview yesterday with volunteer researcher Al Bledsoe. Bledsoe began researching the PAWSD financial records last summer, at the request of the BoCC. Continued...
Cover of the 90-page PAWSD Service Plan, supposedly the guiding document for the water district, filed on January 26, 1977 — and apparently not updated since then. |
In 2007, Bledsoe had served with current County commissioner John Ranson on the volunteer Citizens Financial Oversight Task Force — back before Ranson was elected to the BoCC in 2008. That task force had been charged with helping “diagnose and treat” the County’s financial meltdown — and near-bankruptcy — in 2007, when a discrepancy of almost $3 million was discovered in the County financial records.
In the two years since then, the BoCC — under the chairmanship of Bob Moomaw — has been attempting to draw the PAWSD board and staff into some kind of cooperative relationship within the rest of the community’s government leaders. Moomaw’s stated concern centered on his belief that the proposed Dry Gulch project, with its current impact fee structure and enormous bonding requirements, was threatening to burden county residents with such an overwhelming debt load that other government entities would be unable to fund other necessary projects.
PAWSD, however, has remained steadfastly aloof and uncooperative, in terms of considering any changes to its Dry Gulch plans. As resident Lee Vorhies told the PAWSD board at their most recent meeting, “The perception I’m getting from the people I’m talking to, they feel that this [PAWSD board] is one of the most arrogant boards that they’ve ever seen operate.”
The PAWSD board seem inflexibly determined to “stay the course” with their Dry Gulch Reservoir — in spite of the fact that the sands of financial resources are disappearing rapidly from beneath their feet. More about that later.
“My whole objective is to get PAWSD working in a positive, pro-active way, just the way we did at the County,” Bledsoe told me in yesterday’s interview, referring to his work with the Citizens Financial Oversight Task Force in 2007. “I think the County has made tremendous since we all started working with them during that financial disaster.”
Bledsoe took on the job of reviewing PAWSD’s financial condition — and the Dry Gulch project in particular — at the request of the BoCC. And although, according to PAWSD manager Carrie Weiss, the water district found Bledsoe’s research to be somewhat inconvenient, PAWSD willingly provided any and all documentation requested by Bledsoe, as I understand it.
 Getting a handle on the water district’s plans and financial condition presented something of a learning curve for Bledsoe. Bledsoe’s financial background is not in government accounting, but rather in working with electric and gas utilities. But it was precisely that different background that got Bledsoe thinking about oversight, and regulators.
“My experience says that all utilities have a regulator — someone independent of the entity and its board, that looks at their numbers to see if the rate increases they are requesting, and the capital structure that they have, make sense.
“And my assumption, when I first got into this, was that there must be some kind of oversight process for PAWSD.
“But everyone I talked to in the community said, well, no, there isn’t anything like that. The only oversight that PAWSD appeared to have was the PAWSD board. Which is not really oversight.
“At one point in my research, I called a Department of Local Affairs entity that provides support to water and sanitation districts — and I called the head of that group and talked to him, and told him what the issues were, and he said the County has oversight responsibility for that special district.
“And he said, ‘Before you go too far down the line, you ought to look at amending the Service Plan.’
“I’d never even heard of a service plan. And I talked to the County Commissioners, and they hadn’t heard of a service plan, either.
“So I asked [County attorney] Todd Starr to find the PAWSD Service Plan. And he found it.”
The PAWSD Service Plan is a 90-page document which was filed in the District Court of Archuleta County in 1977. It appears that it has not been amended or updated since that date. I was able to obtain a copy of that document from the County last week.
“The service plan is supposed to be the mechanism through which the overseeing authority — which in this case is Archuleta County — sets the guidelines and structure under which the special district operates. And if you have read that service plan, you’ve seen that it’s pretty generic and not very specific.
“But it is very specific as to what the service territory was, and it was specific about their growth projections — and what their debt issuing authority is.”
One of Bledsoe’s main concerns, when he began his research last summer, was the increasing debt load that PAWSD has taken on in the past several years.
“So what needs to happen is, that service plan needs to be amended.
“And it needs the approval of the County Commissioners.”
Ah. So now we begin to perceive the meaning of the term “called on the carpet.”
Read Part Six... |
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