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| PAWSD Gets Called on the Carpet, Part Two |
| Bill Hudson | 3/11/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
When I was a child, my parents used to make me eat my vegetables — a miserable experience for me, considering that my mother consistently overcooked the vegetables into a mushy, barely edible form of penance.
We nearly always had a dessert of some kind, at the end of our evening meal, and nearly every evening, I was given the same opportunity for atonement:
“Bill, no dessert for you until you eat all your vegetables.”
The peas and carrots were bad enough; I shutter when I recall the punishment I suffered eating my mother’s broccoli or spinach. And please don’t even remind me of the word, “eggplant.”
Perhaps some of our Daily Post readers remember similar experiences?
Now imagine for a moment: you are sitting at the dinner table and you’ve polished off the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes, and all that remains between you and a clean plate is a mass of wilted, olive green broccoli.
You hear your parent issue the ultimatum:
“Bill, if you eat up all that broccoli, we are going to allow your great grandson to have dessert someday.”
Would anyone in his right mind touch that broccoli?
The Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District has found itself in the position of such a forward-thinking parent in the past few years — assuring us, the residents of Archuleta County, that if we would just pony up and swallow their $360 million, 35,000 acre-foot reservoir and water treatment project at Dry Gulch, our great grandchildren will someday have plenty of water.
At Tuesday’s PAWSD board meeting, board member Bob Huff referred to Dry Gulch critics as folks who “want to kick the can down the road” — meaning, they want to put off the hard decisions, and the immediate costs of a well-considered plan for the future.
“We, as a board, have decided, we’re not kicking the can down the road. We’re going to start planning; we’re going to start moving on that plan. And that’s what the Dry Gulch [property purchase] is all about. We’re moving forward in a step-by-step way.
“[Our critics] are people who, in the immediate future, say: ‘Look, I want an advantage right now. Let’s kick the can down the road.’ And PAWSD hasn’t done that.”
 The most vocal of PAWSD’s critics include, of course, the Pagosa Area Association of Realtors and many of our local developers and builders who see the water district’s Water Resource Fee impact fees and Capital Investment Fees and Inclusion Fees — running $30,000 or more for a large, new home in Pagosa Springs — as part of the reason behind the slow demise of the Archuleta County construction industry, beginning in about 2006 when those new fees were established by PAWSD.
But those are just the most vocal critics.
As Huff expressed it on Tuesday, “We, as a board, have decided, we’re not kicking the can down the road.”
On behalf of the citizens of Archuleta County — who supposedly would never choose to eat their vegetables if left to their own devices — the five-member PAWSD board has, like any good parent, chosen to force that broccoli down the throats of its district members.
If only Huff could have said, “We, as a whole community, have decided we’re not kicking the can down the road.” But he of course couldn’t say that — because PAWSD has never sought community consensus on the Dry Gulch project. PAWSD has not made the slightest effort to find out whether we children want to swallow Dry Gulch, because they already know the answer to that question.
So they are going to make the decision for us — for our own good, don’t you know?
At the same PAWSD board meeting, resident Lee Vorhies explained to Huff and the rest of the board, as best he could, how PAWSD appears to those of us being forced now to eat our broccoli so our great grandchildren can have dessert.
“I’ve been out campaigning for a couple of candidates, and I’ve talked to a lot of people over the past two or three weeks. And these aren’t ignorant people. There are some good, strong, thinking people here in this community, who really want to work for the good of the community.
“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. You have more executive session meetings than any board they’ve ever heard of.
“And I’m not talking about people with axes in their hands; these are concerned people who really want to see Pagosa become something special.
“Over the next two [PAWSD} elections, all of you [current board members] will be gone. Two of you are term-limited this election, and I think next time, there are term limits as well.
“Most of the people I talk to agree, that we need water. And we will need water in the future. There may be some differences about how we get there, but we’ve got to get there.
“There are a lot of people out there, and I think your credibility would grow enormously if you would agree to have a public meeting — and let those people get up and vent their spleens.
“I agree with parts of the speech [Bob Huff] just gave. Other parts, I think you’re being defensive. But I think you could do yourselves a lot of good by — you know — stepping out in front of the problem. And you could out-pace the Commissioners...”
Voorhies was here referring to repeated invitations from the Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners for a joint public meeting, and to the letter issued Tuesday morning from the BoCC to the water district.
We posted that letter in Part One; in case you missed it, you can click here to view the letter as a PDF file.
It appears that an alternate parent has appeared at the table, and is now requiring PAWSD itself to eat some unpleasant broccoli.
“Pursuant to C.R.S Section 32-1-207(3)(c), the Board of County Commissioners of Archuleta County hereby demands that Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District file an annual report,” the BoCC letter says on page 2. “The report shall address information on the progress in the District in the implementation of its Service Plan (copy enclosed) and shall specifically address the following matters, namely:”
The next four pages of the letter spell out 25 basic questions about the water district and its proposed Dry Gulch project. In particular, the letter questions various numbers released by PAWSD to justify Dry Gulch — numbers which have seemed to exhibit a certain inconsistency over the past seven years.
For example, question 3 notes that since 2003, the estimated cost of the Dry Gulch Reservoir as been presented, in PAWSD own documents, as $21,863,000 in the 2003 Harris Report, as $90,330,000 in the 2007 CWCB Loan Application, and as $186,670,000 in the 2009 MWH report.
"The dramatic and material changes in the estimates of the cost of the Dry Gulch project over such a short period of time seem to indicate that the District does not have the processes or personnel capable of developing, or overseeing the development of, reasonable cost estimates for planning major projects," states the letter.
At the Tuesday morning BoCC meeting, PAWSD manager Carrie Campbell assured the commissioners that PAWSD would comply with the request for an annual report — but protested that a simple phone call would have sufficed for requesting an annual report from the water district.
I would guess that transmitting the BoCC’s 25 complex and lengthy questions by phone might have been less efficient than sending them in a written letter. The adversarial nature of the BoCC’s letter might, however, put a damper on PAWSD board’s willingness to sit down with the commissioners in an open, public “neutral forum.”
Tomorrow, I plan to analyze the 25 very interesting questions posed by the commissioners, and give an independent, third-party view of their validity — and suggest some possible answers that might be harder to swallow than broccoli.
Read Part Three... |
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