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Pagosa
Springs Daily News
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| EDITORIAL: Magic Numbers of Ever Increasing Success, Part One |
| Bill Hudson | 3/3/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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The Town of Pagosa Springs could use some good news right about now.
In both the community’s commercial hubs — the uptown Pagosa Lakes area and the old downtown — restaurants, retail shops and real estate offices have been living precarious lives through this county-wide economic slump, and an unsettling number have closed their doors over the past few months. “For Rent” signs — once as rare as buffalo in this little mountain town, back when commercial space was hard to come by — have remained hanging in the same shop windows all through the winter. The school district has predicted a serious revenue drop over the next two years, and many government agencies have trimmed their budgets.
Things are tight for many Pagosa Springs families. Or worse than tight — as foreclosure properties continue to appear in the realtor MLS listings.
At last night’s Town Council meeting, the Town Tourism Committee made a valiant attempt to provide some of that much needed good news, as TTC coordinator Jennie Green delivered a PowerPoint presentation to the seven-member Council.
Except that even the Council had its own vacancy, and was itself down to six members.
 Council member Mark Weiler had started off the meeting by addressing the Council from the audience, explaining that he had moved his residence and no longer lived in the same Town precinct he was appointed to represent two years ago. So, according to the Town Charter, he is no longer able to serve on the Council in that position. Weiler, in his speech, thanked the other six Council members and took a moment to praise what he saw as each member’s strengths. He then left the meeting, and that was that.
Presumably, Weiler’s seat will be filled by some candidate running for the Town Council on April 6. As far as I know, no candidate has yet applied for that slot. The deadline is March 5, and a petition with 25 Town voter signatures is required to be placed on the ballot.
Next up on the agenda, with his own somewhat upbeat report, was local CPA Mike Branch, delivering his annual audit report of the Town’s financial condition. I will cover that topic in a separate article.
The Town Council next approved a change to the Town Land Use and Development Code, to allow “resident business owners who live outside the Town limits” to serve on the beleaguered Town Planning Commission — a key municipal board that has been unable, for the past six months, to attract a single applicant for its one vacant seat. The change to the LUDC will allow business owners — and business owners only — from the greater Archuleta County, to sit on the Planning Commission.
Will there be any business owners left, by the time the seat gets advertised?
But the really good news, at yesterday’s two-hour meeting, came courtesy of Jennifer Green, as she presented an analysis of the Town Tourism Committee’s ongoing success in building a vibrant tourism industry here in Pagosa Springs.
And indeed, if you took Green’s numbers and slightly coherent analysis at face value, it did appear that the TTC has found the magic key to a successful tourist town: a glossy “Official Visitor Guide.” To hear Green tell it, it seems that the beautiful, glossy guide has singlehandedly attracted literally dozens of new vacationing families to Pagosa Springs over the past year.
Surely, that success validates the $1.2 million in taxes the TTC has spent over the past three years? At least, that seemed to be Green’s general implication at last night’s meeting.
The TTC was created in 2006 and charged with spending the Town’s new Lodgers Tax revenues for the purpose of increasing tourism to Pagosa Springs. And part of the volunteer board’s charge, according to the authorizing ordinance, was to statistically track the TTC’s success. Was the board having success? Was Pagosa’s tourism industry really seeing growth as a result of the TTC’s expenditures?
What do the numbers tell us?
It all depends on how you assemble your PowerPoint presentation, it seems — and perhaps, how fast you talk.
“The Town Tourism Committee recently performed an analysis on Lodgers Tax collections from 2007 until 2009,” Green began. “Now, the first thing we looked into was the number of properties paying into the Lodgers Tax, by property type.
“In 2007, you see that we had 19 properties total. In 2008, there were 26, and in 2009 we had 27.”
“Now what is interesting is that the largest change is actually coming from vacation rentals. In the vacation rentals category, we had 3 properties in 2007 and 10 in 2009. Now, vacation rentals account for only about 1.4 percent of our total tax collections, so we are seeing a lot of growth in that category, but it’s not necessarily a large tax contributor.”
I had questioned TTC chair Bob Hart at one of last month’s Town Council meetings, noting that the number of properties contributing Lodgers Tax had changed since 2007, and asking him to look into how that increase in the number of contributors had affected the TTC’s claims about steadily rising Lodgers Tax revenue.
Was the TTC collecting more tax — not because tourism was up, but because the Town was simply had more properties contributing?
According to Green’s presentation, the increase in contributors — from 19 in 2007, to 27 in 2009 — had almost no effect on total tax collections, since, as Green noted, the additional 7 vacation rentals had contributed — at most — only about 1 percent to the 2009 totals.
Green noted that, in spite of the TTC expending about $750,000 in taxes from 2007 through 2008 to increase tourism, the total Lodgers Tax collections actually fell by 3.5 percent from 2007 through 2008.
Green then went on to propose a rather complex — and highly questionable? — theory that the rise and fall of the Town Lodgers Tax collections is somehow connected to the number of “fulfillment packages” mailed out by the Chamber of Commerce Visitors Center approximately 6 months prior to that particular increase or decline.
During 2007 and 2008, those “fulfillment packages” consisted of a collection of various brochures and pamphlets published and paid for by the Chamber of Commerce. After April 2009, the fulfillment package consisted of the Pagosa SUN’s glossy “Official Visitor Guide,” subsidized by our Town and County governments to the tune of maybe $50,000 or so annually. Incidentally, the SUN's production manager, Shari Pierce, sits on the Town Council.
Could it indeed be the case, as Green proposed yesterday — that the rise and fall of our hospitality industry is directly related to the mailing of a magazine, or brochure collection, to people seeking information about Pagosa Springs?
Or is it possible that the seasonal fluctuations in our tourism numbers is, in fact, much more closely related to the price of gasoline?
But Green never hinted that cost of travel, or the general economy, might have some influence on our local tourism industry. She seemed determined to connect our fortunes to a glossy magazine, for some reason. Perhaps, because she could then imply that the TTC was actually doing some useful work?
The main problem with the Pagosa Springs Town Council’s approach to tourism promotion is that they have asked the TTC — the committee spending the money — to then analyze its own success or failure.
No committee composed of normal human beings is going to analyze its own performance and come to the conclusion that it has basically failed. Our egos are too big for that. If we are normal human beings, we are going to present the numbers in a way that makes us look good.
It’s left up to the press, I guess, to talk about the cold hard truth.
Read Part Two... |
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