EDITORIAL: The Impending Troubles in Downtown Pagosa Springs, Part Two

Read Part One

If you like to know more about the Pagosa Main Street Program and the new Facade Improvement Grant, please join us this Wednesday, August 23, for a Main Street Community Meeting from 5:00 – 6:30pm at the Ross Aragon Community Center. Light refreshments will be served…

— from an announcement posted to the Town of Pagosa Springs website, August 2023.

There was good news. And bad news.

The light refreshments included 4″ sandwiches from Subway, cookies, and a few other goodies that I don’t recall, a week later. Some fruit, perhaps? It was a nice touch, though, to have refreshments.

Colorado Main Street Coordinator Gayle Langley welcomed about 25 local residents — most of whom appeared to be business owners — to the presentation at the Ross Aragon Community Center. We’d come to learn about how the Main Street program might help the economic situation in Pagosa Springs, as it appears to have done in some other Colorado communities.

Some of us might have come with a measure of skepticism?

The good news was, that the Town of Pagosa Springs has officially formed a 13-member Main Street Advisory Board and is in the process of building a Main Street website.

As Main Street Advisory Board chair Rick Holter explained, during the presentation, the local Advisory Board has some particularly ‘Pagosa’ goals.

Activation.

Fun.

A walkable downtown.

Mr. Holter:

“We kinda got started last fall; did our strategic planning last fall. The top three priorities are to ‘activate the street experience’… and we use the word ‘amplify’ a lot… so, the idea is to create that feeling that Main Street is not just a place to drive through; it’s a place to stop and actually get out and do stuff. And buy stuff. And experience stuff.

“We are committed to layers of ‘fun’, as we call it. So this is not, like, a very serious, traditional, ‘Chamber of Commerce’ kind of effort. This is an effort for everybody to kind of enjoy themselves, because that’s the kind of town we live in.

“And third, we want to… we really want to move and connect people. We want to figure out ways to make the town more walkable. Places that are kind of road-blocks now — in terms of walking or biking, or other forms of transportation — we want to figure out ways to ease that. We want to connect the river, which runs through us, to the road which runs through us, and try to figure out ways to get people who are walking along the river to walk up on the street. And vice versa.”

Mr. Holter shared some additional thoughts. But I’d first like to react to his initial comments.

For decades now, community leaders have been trying to get people traveling on Highway 160 to stop and enjoy the community. Back in the 1980s, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) had metal guardrails along sections of the downtown highway, and local citizens campaigned to have the guardrails removed, arguing that the metal rails were the discouraging travelers from stopping in Pagosa.

The local citizens were successful in getting the rails removed.

The Main Street Advisory Board wants to further ‘activate’ the street experience for visitors, and get the tourists walking along the river to also walk through the commercial district. And buy stuff.

Using whatever money and assistance is available through the Colorado Main Street program, and through the Town government, the Board apparently wants to apply their efforts to making downtown even more ‘tourist-friendly’ than it is, already.

I didn’t live in downtown Pagosa in the 1980s, when the guardrails were still in place (although I did visit during the 1980s) but when I moved here in 1993 and bought a home downtown, the Main Street was not a string of tourist gift shops and real estate offices. In fact, most of the businesses downtown served mainly the local residents. You could buy — downtown — camping gear, stationery, toys and games, groceries, power tools, appliances, wood stoves, furniture. You could buy books and magazines, clothing, shoes, houseplants, picture frames, bicycles, snowboards, fabrics, ice cream cones, cowboy hats.

Heck, you could rent videos.

We had a real downtown, back in 1993. A ‘walkable’ downtown, even.

But we took down the guardrails.

Currently, you can find plenty of gifts, souvenirs, ‘antiques’ and t-shirts, downtown… along with swimsuits and inner tubes. You can find real estate.

Actually, a few other useful things. You can still buy cowboy hats, downtown. Shoes. New and used books.

At the conclusion of the Colorado Main Street presentation, when the floor was opened for questions, I asked the three experts what a community should do, if the downtown has stopped serving the local residents and now serves primarily summer visitors. Does the national Main Street program, begun in 1980, have any solutions to that problem? Because, speaking as a downtown resident, it didn’t seem to me that ‘Facade Improvement Grants’ would necessarily help us revive our once-authentic downtown.

No ideas were forthcoming. Maybe there’s actually no way to have it both ways… a tourist-friendly downtown that also serves the locals?

Between the state of Colorado and the local governments in Archuleta County, millions of dollars have been spent subsidizing the tourism industry and making Pagosa more tourist-friendly. Below is a selection of ‘user-generated’ photos submitted to the Town’s tourism-promotion website, VisitPagosaSprings.com, by visitors to our community.

39 submitted photos. As you can see from the random presentation, ‘Downtown Pagosa Springs’ does not typically appear in the photos our visitors submit.

You will find one shot of local residents (deer)… crossing Highway 160… and one shot of tourists with yellow flags… crossing Highway 160…

The rest of the photos show either the Springs Resort mineral baths, or scenic beauty in locations far from downtown.

Is it time to switch gears? And put some effort into making Pagosa’s downtown more ‘resident-friendly’?

As stated before, the August 23 presentation focused on some good news, and some bad news. For those who are comfortable with our historic downtown serving mainly summer tourists, the ‘Facade Improvement Grants’ and the planned efforts of the Main Street Advisory Board will be good news.

But the final conversation of the evening concerned CDOT.

The bad news.

Read Part Three, tomorrow…

Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.