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Planning for an Uncertain Future, Part Four |
Bill Hudson | 7/26/10
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Read Part One
It’s Monday morning. I woke up early, about 3am, thinking I’d focus on getting Part Four of this article series finished off, and maybe get back to sleep before heading down to the coffee shop. But lying there in bed, waiting for my energy to build up enough to throw off the covers, I began thinking about the article I’m working on for the Pagosa Post Magazine, our little print adventure that began back in March of this year.
One of my assignments for next month is an article about my friend Cass Calley, one of the few professional artists in Pagosa who actually makes her living doing art — in her case, carved and etched glass panels for high end residential homes and commercial settings. She works out of her studio in Aspen Springs, but her work is on display throughout much of Colorado, especially in resort towns like Vail, Aspen and Telluride, where people can afford her remarkable pieces.
Calley has also installed her works in numerous Pagosa Springs homes. We actually have some very wealthy people living here in Archuleta County, though you might not guess it from the condition of some of our community’s infrastructure (especially our roads) and some of our neighborhoods.
Some of those very wealthy people live here full time, but more often, I think, they have second homes here, and escape for the winter — something I occasionally think about myself, when I’m shoveling two feet of fresh snow out of the driveway.
 I was talking to one of my friends last week, a local realtor who lived here through the last major recession in the 1980s, and he suggested that we will never again in our lifetimes see that curious combination of financial events that led to Archuleta County’s incredible growth during the two decades prior to 2007 — a nation-wide housing bubble of quickly escalating home prices, cheap mortgage rates and relaxed lending practices, and a momentary romance between the soon-to-retire Baby Boomers and Scenic Rural America.
In that remarkable meeting of social conditions, Pagosa Springs began to believe we could “sell our way” out of our traditional rural financial rut. We were cash poor but land rich, blessed by dramatic scenery looming over vast open ranchlands — property just waiting for all those wealthy second-home buyers.
One way to bring some of that wealth into the Pagosa cash flow is, of course, to buy a pickup truck and a dog, and set yourself up as a general contractor. Another great way is to get your real estate license and open an office on Main Street.
If you are a government, you might want to levy some new fees and taxes on those wonderful second-home owners who are moving here to enjoy our rural lifestyle. You also might want to adopt some new codes and requirements, to assure that every new home and building will fit the picture of “New Pagosa” — the new vision of our town, a town that has left behind its dirt-poor past and is moving inexorably into the 21st century as a modern, energy efficient, financially secure Rocky Mountain resort community.
The folks sitting around the table at last Thursday’s joint Town and County work session were dealing with a very different concept, however. Pagosa Fire District chief Ron Thompson has been working with the Town and County staff to draft up a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) that would allow the fire district to relax some of its fire codes — codes that were threatening to put a damper on an already struggling construction industry.
Our fire district, like many other fire districts in America, had continued to upgrade is fire safety standards by adopting the new national fire codes. Those new fire codes — written mainly by fire experts living in big cities with big city infrastructure, and big city densities — had specified things like wider driveways (so fire trucks could better access a burning house in the one-in-a-thousand chance the house caught fire) and expensive new features like sprinkler systems in private homes (whenever the pressure from the fire hydrant down the street was ‘not up to standards.’)
Local fire districts are not entirely “to blame” for these new codes and standards, as I understand it. In fact, a lot of the new fire safety requirements are coming from our nation’s insurance companies. Insurance companies, for obvious reasons, don’t like to pay for burned houses and other unfortunate events, even though their only reason to exist is to pay for burned houses and other unfortunate events. Insurance companies, for obvious reasons, prefer to insure homes that are extremely unlikely to ever catch fire, and which — if they did catch fire — can be extinguished quickly.
So insurance companies, for obvious reasons, charge higher premiums for homes that are too far from fire hydrants, or are in neighborhoods where the hydrants have low water pressure (“insufficient fire-flows”).
And they charge lower premiums for homes that have expensive in-house sprinkler systems.
A wealthy second-home buyer — who may well want to live “out in the country” where fire hydrants are as scare as buffalo — can probably afford to install an in-house sprinkler system. He or she may even be able to afford to extend a water main and install a fire hydrant near his or her home.
But as we look into the near future, we may not be seeing too many wealthy second-home owners moving to Pagosa Springs. What we may need are some new fire codes that function reasonably well in a dirt-poor rural Colorado town.
Luckily, the latest edition of the International Fire Code contains a section that allows a fire chief to exempt properties from meeting certain standards if the buildings are “rural.” The International Fire Code does not specifically define the meaning of the word “rural” as far as I know, so in theory our local fire department could define the entire county as “rural.” (And I don’t think such a designation would be unreasonable.) Under a rural designation, “fire flows” are allowed to be less than optimum, and distances between fire hydrants might also be more flexible.
The Memorandum of Understanding that the Town, County, fire district and water district are currently discussing seems to rely on the fire department’s willingness to relax some fire safety standards temporarily, to allow new construction where it might otherwise be stymied — with the assurance that the water district, in cooperation with the Town and County, make a commitment to help resolve the fire safety issues “as soon as possible.”
The MOU does not specifically define “temporarily.” It just promises that we will get around to fixing it, someday.
I suppose we need to realize what the relaxing of standards could mean to a homeowner: that his house might be more likely to burn down.
It’s a trade-off. An especially rural trade-off. We might ask ourselves, is that the kind of trade-off that people willingly make, for the privilege of living outside a big city... out in the middle of nowhere?
Read Part Five... |
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