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OPINION: Sitting on a Gold Mine, Starving |
Teddy Herzog | 8/27/10
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Closure of the downtown City Market completes the shift of our commercial center to uptown and out of downtown. “Keep Pagosa, Pagosa” has failed the same way that trying to keep a frail, elderly loved one safe from the further ravages of time ultimately fails.
Downtown has a supply of housing, a significant portion of which will no longer be here in 25 years. Our “tale of two towns” formally ends as downtown residents begin the daily drive uptown to “Fairfield” to buy a carton of milk and a dozen eggs. But first time tourists will continue to scratch their heads as to where the center of town actually is.
Our commercial center is uptown. But go downtown and there is no “there” there. We live in anytown, anywhere nondescript sprawl. The heart and soul of our community has passed away. The visitor gets no sense of having arrived.
 Communities are defined by their individual thought systems. The way that we think leads to predictable, repeated actions. These habitual patterns produce consistent results. We have a thought system that is adverse to economic prosperity. Drive the seven miles from Day Lumber to Ace Hardware. This is the result of our community thinking.
I am an optimist. And why not? Springtime is always preceded by a deep, cold winter. Economically, we have eight feet of fresh snow on the ground with another eight feet on the way.
In the springtime that will eventually follow, eventually some of us will stand up and say “enough is enough”. The frail, old-school ways of doing things here (especially the "not doing of things") will have passed away and the tombstone will have begun to collect moss. A modern generation of leadership will begin to emerge that is no longer a “caretaker” for a frail economy but rather an energetic voice and bandleader for the “big audacious goal”.
Not that our leaders will get bigger and better but rather we, the citizens, will mature as a community. The day will come when we, as a community, demand a vision worth living for. And we will empower leaders to get us there.
At some point, we are going to take advantage of the “goldmine underneath our feet” and turn downtown Pagosa Springs into the economic engine that it so obviously could become.
Until the downtown core of Pagosa Springs becomes the must-see destination for visitors and the heart and soul of our community at large, there will never be economic success. The uptown commercial center will never adequately serve as economic engine nor provide a sense of place. For our county, there can be no true economic development without a revitalized downtown core.
The “problem” is not the closure of City Market. The problem is the habit of reacting instead of creating. We need leadership to articulate a clear vision for the future and to take us there. We need a future worth living for.
We are sitting on a goldmine and we are starving. |
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