Peak tourism season has come to an end in Southwest Colorado, giving tourism officials, business leaders and residents a chance to assess the impacts – good and bad – of the summer surge.

While tourism dollars have done a lot for Durango, the population shifts associated with it have left city stakeholders discussing more sustainable ways to welcome visitors moving forward.

The idea behind sustainable tourism is to reduce the peaks and valleys of tourism by luring some travelers during off-seasons, such as the spring and the fall, thereby reducing the negative impacts associated with peak tourism seasons.

“That’s the goal, is to raise community standards and enhance our community members’ quality of life and use visitors in one form or another to do that,” said Durango Mayor Kim Baxter.

A big push for sustainable tourism in Durango is creating shoulder tourism seasons, which means bringing more visitors to the area outside of busy summer months. The idea being that businesses might experience more steady flows of income throughout the year.

Efforts to create shoulder seasons include using lodgers tax revenue to think about new ways of marketing Durango to bring people in during the fall and spring months, and developing community events that will entice visitors from surrounding areas.

Jack Llewellyn, executive director of the Durango Chamber of Commerce, said most businesses are excited for the push to enhance shoulder seasons.

“When you’re a retail business, you feel the faucet get turned off, so to speak, when that peak season ends,” Llewellyn said.

Baxter argues that boosting tourism during shoulder seasons gives businesses the potential to pay higher wages, and keep employees on for more than just seasonal work.

“You’re looking at paying part-time people or people in low-wage jobs more money per hour, and being able to pay them a longer period of time throughout the year so that our residents and the people who make these businesses work have high wages and more income so that they can afford housing,” she said.

Durango Police Department Chief Bob Brammer said tourism can put a strain on police and fire services, most notably in terms of staffing.

“Tourism absolutely has an impact on the services we provide here,” Brammer said.

The police look at historic population norms during big events, and figure out staffing accordingly. Brammer said some of the area’s biggest events, such as Snowdown and the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, are considered “blue holidays.”

“We call it a blue holiday where everybody comes to work and it’s all-hands-on-deck so that we can meet the high demands and keep our community safe,” Brammer said.

With more people in town and on area roads, there is greater potential for crashes, especially with construction on high-traffic roads like Camino del Rio.

“A majority of our accidents that are occurring at the moment are from people that aren’t local,” Brammer said. “They’re people that are from outside the community.”

Brammer said some added costs the police department associates with tourism include overtime for officers, costs of bringing suspects to jail and costs associated with prosecuting cases.

“A lot of that is just encumbered cost,” he said. “Law enforcement is not one to regenerate money on those type of things. Those are just the cost of doing business.”

During the summer months, the high staffing demand keeps police from being more proactive about how they approach crime. Brammer said officers need a certain amount of time that is unencumbered. That allows officers to do things like follow up on cases, investigate cold cases and preform traffic enforcement.

“That work is intended to prevent crime and engage with our community and develop partnerships,” Brammer said.

Ideally, 40% of an officer’s time should be unencumbered, he said. But with population increases and staffing shortages, only about 20% of officers’ time is unspoken for, he said. With higher populations during peak tourism season, the percentage can be even lower.

“It means we’re very reactive to crime, and that means we’re just chasing the radio,” Brammer said.

Brammer said he is happy to hear City Council is looking at solutions.

“They talked about service impacts on both the police and fire department from tourism, and that we should potentially use lodgers tax to offset service costs,” Brammer said.

The peak summer tourism season also takes a toll on city utilities.

“The strain we see is simply more water usage,” said Jarrod Biggs, assistant director of utilities for the city of Durango. “Inherently, there is more water use during the summers. Some of it is outside irrigation, but some of it is tourism.”

Biggs said the city is familiar with the demands of tourism season, and for the most part, it has built infrastructure to accommodate it.

“Our water plant capacity is currently rated to meet our demands that both residents and tourists bring to the area,” he said. “Similarly, our wastewater plant is designed to meet those highs and lows.”

Biggs said the most noticeable impact visitors have on city utilities is the amount of maintenance that has to be done during the heavy tourism season. Specifically, Biggs notices that grease builds up in the downtown sewer lines.

“When a lot more people are eating a lot more chicken and fried foods, we get more grease build up and we do have to clean those sewer lines more often,” Biggs said.

Considering more sustainable practices moving forward, Biggs thinks visitors should be asked to be more conscientious about their water use, especially during droughts.

“Some of the industries have already set some of those tones, but thinking about how we can encourage and attract sustainability conscious tourists would be helpful,” Biggs said.

njohnson@durangoherald.com