Yesterday was a rewarding day at the Mancos Valley Visitor Center, where we volunteer four hours a day, two days a week. Sandy answered a call from someone in the SE US who's planning a trip to Mancos this summer and wanted to know about horsing around opportunities for her family in the Mancos Valley. And later someone came in from one of the local businesses to pick up some of the rack cards that list the local events for the year, fulfilling our mission of providing useful information for locals as well as for travelers.
In between times, we went over our pictures from last year's Bluff Balloon Festival ... and we just got more excited about going over there this weekend for this year's event. They're having an art show for the first time (with the balloon festival) and we're delighted to be part of it!
We're going to detour to the Cajon Group unit of Hovenweep on the way. I've only been there once before and hope it will be a sunny morning to highlight the standing-wall ruins against the blue sky and the white snow.
Still, the real fun is going to be the colorful balloons against the blue sky and red bluffs of Bluff, hopefully with white snow as well. It's a fun event, in a town that has a lot of the same small-town feeling that Mancos has. And Sunday, when they go out to Valley of the Gods to launch, could be just spectacular!
Back to yesterday. I moderated the Mancos Valley Cares forum last night. We were fortunate to have the town administrator and the school superintendent there to talk about their plans and how they relate to each other and to the overall context of the county and of the infrastructure of the Mancos Valley.
One thing that came out is that this tax-averse county is going to have to deal with the transportation infrastructure at some point. Unlike other counties, Montezuma passes no money along to the municipalities and, frankly, it doesn't even have the money it needs to maintain county roads. While there's plenty of bitching about roads, voters recently turned down a ballot issue that would have provided more funds for roadwork. We've got roads in the valley that are becoming used way beyond their original design capacity, but we can't afford to maintain and resurface our roads, much less widen or realign them!
The school superintendent addressed our declining enrollment and their efforts to attract young families to the community. Part of this issue is: Where are they going to go? The Town is basically built-out, residential occupancy is at a high level and subdivisions outside town in the valley are not cheap. A related and perhaps prior issue is jobs. We are a bedroom community (median travel time to work is 23 minutes, suggesting a LOT of folks are working in Cortez, Durango, etc.), but we need to have jobs and services here, too, at least in part to generate revenue to support Town services to residents and businesses.
There's good news on that score, at least for the moment. Despite the gloomy economy overall, and in the face of reduced revenues from gasoline sales associated with lower prices per gallon in 2009 than in 2008, the Town's sales tax receipts in 2009 were 3.63% higher than in 2008! That's really amazing and I personally think the renaissance in the downtown area is an important factor.
Light is coming to the valley, we're waking up ... time to get breakfast and then go to Cortez for a SWOS board meeting. tv
1 comment:
"Tax-averse county": aren't we all!
And "declining school enrollments": Yes, Wausau, WI has the same, PLUS a big hoo-hah going on between the teachers union, the district superintendent, and the school board over the long-delayed teachers contract.
It's all about money, of course: less state aid, less tax income, teachers can't/won't accept status quo, much less take less of any benefit; union doesn't like the superintendent but can't/won't be specific about why. . . . LJH
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