Dear Editor:
Drive north on CR 400, Four Mile Road, this fall and you’ll see two things at once: some of the best color in the county, and a dirt-and-gravel surface that looks like it lost a fight. Washboard ruts. Potholes you have to steer around. Every so often the county grades it smooth and spreads a little fresh gravel and within a short time it’s back again. That’s not maintenance. That’s a stall.
I’m not picking on Road & Bridge. The county has said plainly, in its own budget documents, that it deferred capital maintenance and replacement as a fiscal “survival tactic” after voters twice rejected justice-facility funding and the county had to build the detention center anyway. Its own 2021 audit shows the Road & Bridge fund spent only about 43% of its final capital-outlay budget that year. And in the county’s 2025 survey, 74% of residents said road service needs improvement. Not a guess, it’s in the public record.
I bring this up because Bill Hudson, writing in the Pagosa Daily Post, wants the school district to take the same approach: patch the existing buildings for a fraction of the cost and skip building the new PK-8 school. On paper, a $17 million repair bond looks cheaper than $129 million. But CR 400 is what deferral looks like twenty years in. Band-aid spending doesn’t avoid the bigger bill. It postpones it, and it compounds, because labor, materials and interest all get more expensive while you wait. The county’s own 2011-to-2026 experience with this school project makes the same point: the identical PreK-8 school that cost $49 million in 2011 costs roughly $129 million today, even before interest.
We’re living through the same lesson on Highway 160. People are frustrated by the construction now. But when it’s done, we’ll have a highway built to last, not a patchwork that needs redoing every few years. That’s the standard of investment worth wanting for our kids’ schools, not a stopgap that leaves the next generation paying more to finally finish the job we avoided.
Vote yes on the school bond. Fix it once, fix it right, and stop kicking the can down a road that already shows us where that leads.
Bob Scott
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