At a Jan. 13 work session, the Pagosa Springs Town Council met to discuss potential ways that the town can help businesses navigate the highway reconstruction project through downtown.
Both Pagosa Springs Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Sandy Douthey and Main Street Coordinator Kathleen McFadden were on hand to offer suggestions, but no business owners were in person at the meeting.
Douthey previously gave a report to the council at a Dec. 16, 2025, meeting on a survey of downtown business sentiment, stating that, since then, the Chamber has reached out to uptown businesses who felt left out of the initial survey.
“It’s not just money, but it’s perception, the perception that uptown businesses are being left out of the focus,” she said. “So, I think it was huge that we included them in this survey, and we will continue to see more responses from uptown as we continue”
“Thank you for expanding that survey. I think that was really vital to getting more information,” Mayor Shari Pierce said.
McFadden explained that she wanted to “take the survey results” from December “and throw them into an analysis with the results” from the Main Street Advisory Board’s survey from “last spring when we surveyed businesses to ask: What can we do to help you?”
She explained that she wanted to analyze “what we are experiencing on the ground — programs that have worked, programs that have not worked — and put that all together to identify what are the big problems and what are some practical, feasible solutions that we can implement that don’t cause a cost burden or administrative burden for the businesses?”
She added, “I pulled that together in one streamlined document.”
But now, she continued, “We have a real opportunity to take what we have learned from” the first season of road construction “and make some changes, make some feasible changes that will help us,”
She noted that the primary goal should be to “increase foot traffic to build revenue during the construction,” adding that “access” to businesses was a top concern.
“If I can’t get there, I’m not gonna go shop,” she said.
She noted that, while some are more willing to find parking, in general, if people can’t find a place to stop or figure out how to get to that storefront or that block, they are just going to drive on through.
She added, “People still think Pagosa is closed for business as a result of the flooding” in October and suggested that a “Pagosa is open campaign … is something that we should consider.”
However, later in the meeting Tourism Director Jennifer Green explained that, from her end, she was not seeing comments from visitors “about the flood,” but that the comments “had shifted more about the snow.”
“Our local community, obviously, remembers [the flood] well, but the media cycle has changed significantly since then, so we are leaning into, given the lack of snow, a lot of hot springs messaging, and we doing as much as we can to show current situations so that people can see what Pagosa looks like right now,” Green explained. “Wolf Creek, year to date, has had 81 inches of snow.”
She added, “And we are not alone. All of Colorado is definitely suffering through the … lack of winter.”
Council member Brooks Lindner asked Green, “So, are you suggesting that the comments you are seeing online have shifted to the ‘lack of snow’ and therefore maybe the ‘Pagosa is open’ message is maybe not as relevant as it was post-flood?”
“Yes. That is my personal opinion,” Green responded.
She continued, “I would also say that we could do a regional campaign that focuses on Durango and maybe South Fork and over in New Mexico and really hit the more frequent visitors” who were concerned about shopping being impacted by the flood.
Green suggested that the “Pagosa is open” campaign should focus more on “the day-trip audience.”
She added that a focus going into spring break would be to emphasize that Wolf Creek has “more snow than New Mexico right now” to pull in more from that audience.
Lindner noted that he thought the town should pull together a campaign that combined what the town faced with the flooding and construction events and “all the proactive things that our community has done and use that as a piece of pillar content.”
Pierce suggested she wanted to “push back on that,” asking that if the flood “is going out of their minds, why bring it back up? Let’s just do the positive side of the messaging.”
Lindner explained he’d like to see a little more data showing that the flood event “has gone out of their minds than just some comments on social media.”
He said, “If anything we’ve benefited from the lack of snow, because Wolf Creek is the only ski area that is 100 percent open.”
Green chimed in to say that it’s not just online comments, but that on the ground at the Visitor Center, via phone calls and in person, staff has not been hearing questions about the flooding since mid-November.
She added that a visitor sentiment survey with more 750 respondents showed “quite a few comments about the construction and no comments about the floods.”
Lindner suggested he’d still like to see “more research,” not to “bring up past trauma,” but to get more insight into what visitors are experiencing.
A consensus emerged that the town could work on better signage around parking and business access and an effort for more events around town to drive local businesses.
Pierce said that “we made progress tonight” and the town staff would be ”talking to [the Colorado Department of Transportation] about business access signs, checking in with them about parking signs.”
“I think the biggest thing we need to work on is some sorts of events for next summer to encourage people to come into town,” she said, noting if anyone had any ideas she would pass the ideas on to town staff.
derek@pagosasun.com
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