…Pagosa Springs is surrounded by vast public lands and wilderness. Only 31% of Archuleta County is privately owned and 49% is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. According to Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group whose mission is to improve community development and land management decisions in the West, these public lands create a competitive economic advantage—one that we have not recognized and capitalized on as yet.
Headwaters Economics released a research report in November, 2012 that found that the West’s popular national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and other public lands offer its growing high-tech and services industries a competitive advantage, which is a major reason why the western economy has outperformed the rest of the U.S. economy in key measures of growth—employment, population, and personal income—during the last four decades.
The economy of the West, like that of the U.S. and other industrialized economies, has shifted over time from a primary reliance on the extraction and processing of raw materials to the deployment of human skills, technology, and innovation. In today’s economy, the West’s largest economic drivers are not directly tied to wood, gold, cattle, or other basic commodities, but rather stem from the growing value-added contributions of knowledge-based sectors across the region.…