You cannot call the police department in San Luis. Oh, you can, only no one answers.
“The number you have dialed has been changed or is no longer in service. Please check the number . . .“
It has been that way for a week now, or since the town board voted unanimously to fire the police chief and lay off the town’s entire five-member part-time police force.
San Luis is broke, some $750,000 in debt.
“We couldn’t afford to keep paying these guys,” is how Mayor Theresa Medina put it, later adding, “We’re still working to figure out if we need to make other cuts.”
That could be tough. Along with the cops, the board also laid off the maintenance staff. The only person on the payroll today is the town clerk.
Times are tough, and they are particularly so in San Luis, Colorado’s oldest town, and by my lights, perhaps the friendliest anywhere.
About 700 people live there. You would think word of the police department’s demise would send shock and outrage cascading down Main Street of any town.
Not so in San Luis.
No one I spoke to much cared. Some did not even know.
Augustine Padilla was tending the front desk of his San Luis Inn and Motel on Main Street when I caught up with him.
“Heck no,” he said when I inquired whether the town was upset over the police department’s demise. “We don’t have no crime around here anyway.”
He goes by Gus and will only acknowledge being somewhere older than 70. But he has lived in San Luis all of his life, and for more than 30 years has owned Gus’ Liquor and the service station on Main Street.
He can’t recall ever needing a police officer. No one in town locks their car, he says. He even keeps the key to his in the ignition.
“Oh, wait,” Padilla says, finally remembering something.
“I had a break-in at the store about six years ago. My grandson opened up and called the police. They say, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy. We caught him last night.’ “
San Luis, being what it is, he said, the burglar even paid for all the damage and for what he had taken.
“It’s a safe town,” Padilla said. “If you hear a siren around here, something is on fire.”
Mari Osuna, 20, is a waitress at Mrs. Rios Restaurant on Main Street, which her mother, Cindy, purchased from Mrs. Rios a little more than a year ago.
“We need a police department here,” she said. She has her own reasons.
No, she said, there is no crime in San Luis. Still, the cops at least kept the drunks off the road, she said.
Losing the department means losing the jail, and there will be no more inmates to visit, no one to write to, she said.
She had a brother, Jesse, she explains. He was 30 years old, “you know, in and out of jail all the time,” she said.
It was three years ago and Jesse, in jail once again, committed suicide, Osuna said.
Her way of coping with his loss was to begin visiting with or writing to the inmates at the jail.
“I like to think it kept them from thinking bad thoughts,” she said. “I just have a heart for them, and now, with all this happening, I don’t want to lose contact with the ones who are there.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
