SAN LUIS – The 15 nearly life-size bronze sculptures depicting Jesus’ death glint in thin air on the path winding up a mellow hill to a Spanish Moorish style adobe chapel overlooking the Sangré de Cristo Mountains. Behind it lies an exhibit honoring Mexican priests martyred in a religious battle in the late 1920s. From the front door of the church, La Vega — a 633-acre commons area where the ranchers of San Luis, 18 miles from the New Mexico border keep their animals — is visible.
Hispanic sheepherders from near Taos established several small villages along the Rio Culebra in the San Luis Valley and set up home on a land grant decreed by the King of Spain in the mid-1850s. They built a church in the central village of La Plaza Medio and renamed the village San Luis de la Culebra. San Luis remained part of the New Mexico territory until 1861 when the Colorado territory was established.
Today, the Sangré de Cristo Heritage Center houses an extensive collection of local art, including traditional embroidery and murals, local memorabilia and a replica of a Penitente Morada, a sacred meeting site for the Catholic Penitente Brotherhood, who whipped themselves, carried heavy wooden crosses and bound one of their order to a cross in homage to Christ’s crucifixion. The oldest market in Colorado is here. And the natural beauty wrapping all of it in scenery that turns electric pink at sunset is stunning.
A person could wander this place, slowly and methodically, for days, taking in the art, culture and history. That person could think of it as a smaller, quieter version of Taos, without the commercialism and SnowMansion.
Yet San Luis doesn’t have a fraction of the tourist economy Taos does, and has struggled to become much of a tourist center at all after years of stalled job growth and economic hard times.
Today, according to census data, San Luis’ population of just over 600 is in decline and the poverty rate in Costilla County is 23.1%. And that torments Jason Medina, executive director of the Community Foundation of San Luis Valley, whose ancestors were some of the first to settle here. He wonders how to turn the town into a tourist destination so it will generate income. He wants kids who graduate there to stay — or leave, enrich their minds and maybe bank accounts and return to invest in the community.
“But we’re obviously lacking in opportunities for kids to stick around for and in industry calling people to come,” he said. And without something to sustain the families already living there, to lure the younger generation back and to pump more money into the town, he worries “San Luis will become a ghost town.”
How hope arrived in San Luis
After years of struggle trying to figure out how to make itself economically viable, San Luis may have reason to hope.
It’s Susan Sanderford, the town manager, who arrived in 2006.
Sanderford is a slight 60-something-year-old but she seems bigger when she talks about helping the community “by being its champion.”
On a crisp day in late November, she stood outside the town hall on Main Street, pointing to the Stations of the Cross stretched along La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia, or the Hill of Piety and Mercy.
“Our main attraction is the Stations of the Cross, which is so good there’s a second set at the Vatican,” she said, referring to a maquette, or model, of the sculptures created by local artist Huberto Maestas that has permanently resided in one of the Vatican Museums since 1991.
“But even though it’s helped our economic viability, it’s not enough. There’s a hard struggle in rural towns because you don’t have enough people spending money,” she added.
That’s why Sanderford spent three years on the town board of trustees drumming up ways, with her colleagues, to help the second-poorest county in Colorado become more economically viable. They wanted jobs paying wages that flowed to the families of children eating free and reduced-price lunch. They wanted shops open for business and restaurants with waiting lists. And they wanted the reasons the town is so unique — its art, culture and history — to become the economic driver that would improve its citizens’ quality of life.
But during her second term as trustee, Sanderford realized nothing meaningful was being done to move the town toward financial stability.
“So in 2017, I said why not put me on as part-time town manager,” she told The Colorado Sun. Town officials gave her the go-ahead, but she soon realized 20 hours a week was insufficient for the impact she envisioned making. With the town’s approval, she wrote a grant to fund her full-time work for three years, starting in 2018. That job is now funded by the town, and even though Sanderford has no formal training in grant writing, she has transformed herself into a fundraising machine.
The $2 million town manager
Sanderford says she has never been turned down for a grant and that her current total amount won is in the neighborhood of $2 million. That funding — almost exclusively for town revitalization — has come from within Colorado.
In 2019, she secured $113,000 from the Colorado Health Foundation to add a bike/walking path to the community park, with demolition of a decaying gymnasium on the property included. She also received $30,000 from the Gates Family Foundation to purchase property to expand the park. And she won a $33,500 Colorado Department of Local Affairs grant to purchase property next to the town hall to create a town plaza.
Not much happened in 2020.
But in 2021, Sanderford won a $560,000 Main Street Open for Business grant for facade and energy improvements for five San Luis staple businesses. These included the Central Oil Company gas station and minimart, Mrs. Rios Thai restaurant, the San Luis Inn motel, Padilla Service & Liquor and the San Luis People’s Market.
Grant-rich in 2022, Sanderford went after more money. This year, she scored $100,000 from The Colorado Trust for Entrepreneurship to train two cohorts of local students and give them each $500 in startup funds. She won a $25,000 grant from the CDOT Revitalizing Main Streets initiative to build five vendor “parklets,” or sidewalk extensions, for the new plaza.
Sanderford’s vision, tenacity and ability to make literal millions materialize from reams of paperwork and brainpower has earned her accolades from Medina, who, like most San Luis residents, doesn’t take kindly to outsiders.
Their wariness has roots in a land dispute dating back to 1960 that ended with the land grant deeded to locals in the 1800s falling into the hands of a succession of private owners. A Colorado Supreme Court decision in 2002 restored historical access to descendants of the homesteaders, who were allowed to harvest timber and firewood for personal use, and graze a limited number of livestock. But in 2018, Houston billionaire William Bruce Harrison bought the Cielo Vista Ranch and began wrangling with locals over access to land contained within the ranch from descendants of the homesteaders. Harrison later accused locals of trespassing and damaging the land, and Medina said, “he continues to shut locals out except to gather wood and take our animals up there in the summer months.”
“We are not able to recreate or hunt or fish on land given [to our ancestors] as a land grant,” he added. “And so for at least 60 years, people have been hesitant to just trust someone coming in even if saying they are coming in for a good reason. But Susan is nothing but genuine and forthcoming and very transparent about what she does, and when she took over the position, everyone was really welcoming that someone was coming in and just gave a damn — she was coming in and doing the best she could for San Luis.”
How the EPA is helping rural communities
Sanderford’s wins have resulted in revitalization projects both public-facing and not yet visible to the public. But the list of improvements San Luis needs to make it tourist-ready is a beast always hungry for more money.
Which is why San Luis, like several other Colorado rural communities, recently applied for, and received, $500,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency through its Brownfields Multipurpose Grant program funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The grants are for property cleanup and redevelopment projects in rural communities hoping to make their towns more enticing to visitors and boost the local economy.
In May, $4.78 million was spread among Pueblo, Trinidad, Buena Vista, Silverton, Telluride, Norwood and Ophir. The awards are all revitalization-focused, with projects ranging from the removal of asbestos, mercury and other hazardous materials from Keating Junior High School in Pueblo for future use as a theater, apartments and townhomes, to the cleanup of harmful contaminants and restoration of Trinidad’s Holy Trinity property, which will become housing, hotel and rental space.
Silverton will use $800,000 to address mining-related contamination at downtown properties and along the Animas River and Cement Creek corridors, and Buena Vista will restore the falling-down McGinnis Gymnasium as a prime recreational, educational and performing arts space.
But Sanderford said getting this much-needed funding wasn’t nearly as easy as applying for state grants. For assistance, she turned to Ayers Associates in Fort Collins, whose employees “worked hand in hand with me in our community to identify the projects that would make the best use of these funds,” she said. “Six local business owners walked Ayers through their buildings to see how they could get them back up and running.”
Deciding the best use of $500,000
The EPA grant arrived in October, and now the town has to dial in which projects it wants to move forward.
The funds were awarded based on the needs of the community. A planning document Sanderford emailed The Sun states the town’s goals. They involve consideration of redevelopment of vacant buildings to address housing needs, supporting entrepreneurs and exploring building community gardens.”
Although the funds can’t be used for construction, they can support cleanup and redevelopment of existing buildings. Examples include searching asbestos, lead-based paint and other hazardous materials in older buildings and identifying redevelopment sites and redevelopment strategy planning.
One of the largest barriers to redevelopment of areas impacted by brownfield sites is the cost it takes to assess and manage the cleanup of sites. San Luis says its goal is to gather environmental information, collaborate with stakeholders, identify priority sites, and develop remediation strategies that can spur activity and encourage long-term redevelopment and investment to support the health and vitality of San Luis.
Updating and retaining a town’s gems
Sanderford said the grant will help San Luis retain its “flavor” as the oldest continuously inhabited town in Colorado with the oldest market (currently closed for renovations and owned by a nonprofit so not eligible for the new EPA funding) and the first Colorado water right, for water flowing through the hand-dug San Luis People’s Ditch, which hydrates one of only two formal commons areas in the United States, La Vega, the town’s 633-acre community pasture.
The town received grant money to hire a manager to operate a performance theater, set inside the Sangre de Cristo Heritage Center, which houses the local art. Adams State College owned the building until it deeded it to San Luis’ Centennial High School in the 1950s. But it had to be shut down for cleanup and redevelopment in 2010, a project that to date has cost $1.8 million.
Sanderford is also still working on one big question that San Luis will have to face in the future: how to keep its newly restored and revitalized projects operating and open to the public.
She knows what’s needed: “tourism and to get San Luis noticed.”
Medina said he hopes San Luis can find a way to market itself like its neighbor to the north, Alamosa.
“They’re knocking it out of the park as far as [advertising] what Alamosa has to offer,” he added.
But Alamosa has funding for such things, while in San Luis, “It’s just me and Teddy,” Sanderford said, referring to her right-hand man, Teddy Leinbach.
Some additional help from the state in developing a marketing plan for San Luis could be nice, Medina added.
In an email to The Sun, Timothy Wolfe, The Colorado Tourism Office director, said the office has a long-standing commitment to fostering tourism development in places like San Luis, and encouraged the town to apply for its Destination Blueprint program, which offers destination assessment, a stakeholder workshop and 100 hours of expert consulting to winning applicants.
