A few major infrastructure projects are lined up outside Telluride’s door, and they’re a knocking. The Spur is full of potholes and cracks, the water main under Colorado Avenue is corroding, the water treatment plant is close to capacity and the bike path is wobbly and irregular. The town doesn’t have a river of cash deep enough to fund them all at once, say officials, but the problems aren’t simply going to go away.

So today, the Telluride Town Council is holding a work session to hash through its infrastructure needs and try to brainstorm some funding mechanisms for them. The work session is scheduled for 1 p.m. in Rebekah Hall.

“The town has a couple of really substantial infrastructure needs that we are not able to meet financially,” said Town Manager Frank Bell. “There’s no question that it’s going to cost money and it’s going to be painful for the town to absorb these projects, but I think we’re to the point where we can’t just put them off and expect them to go away.”

The council will be discussing the need for each project, the ramifications of not addressing them, construction timetables and impacts and potential funding strategies for each.

Bell said reconstruction of the Spur is probably the biggest priority for the town. The heavily-trafficked Spur, which constitutes the only highway into Telluride, is deteriorating from the base. A few years ago, the town mapped out a plan to fix the three-mile stretch of road one mile at a time (mile one was completed at the end of last summer). But with voluminous traffic, the road deteriorated at an alarming pace, and Public Works officials say the Spur’s reconstruction has become urgent. Last summer, the town drafted a ballot question that asked voters to approve a $10 million bond — funded by property tax increases — to reconstruct the final two miles of the Spur. However, the council pulled it from the ballot before the election, citing a desire not to burden property owners with onerous taxes.

Although the town plans to patch the road this summer, it emerged from the winter potted and cracked, and the time has come for a solution, Bell says.

“While there may be some short-term, seasonal patching strategies we can accomplish to ‘band-aid’ the road deterioration, doing so wastes resources and does not address the greater problem,” Bell wrote in a memo.

Potential funding strategies Bell will present to the council include a combination of a property tax and sales tax increases, putting a $13 million bond question on the ballot, and the creation of a new “street and alley fund” in the town budget to create a revenue source for the repayment of bonds for big projects like the Spur.

The other infrastructure projects the town will discuss include:

• The water main under Colorado Avenue, which is corroding and has sprung leaks in recent years. This project was also on last year’s ballot, in the form of a $5 million bond, though it was packaged with an ambitious revamping of the south side of Colorado Avenue, and it was soundly defeated by the electorate. The town estimates that just replacing the water main, block by block, would cost $2.6 million. Funding strategies the town will discuss include placing a property tax initiative on the 2008 ballot, applying for a grant that would pay up to 80 percent of the costs and packaging the project with a project to improve the water treatment plant and creating a $4.5 million bond question for them.

• An upgrade of the town’s existing water treatment facilities. The current plant is hindered by the limited amount of water it can process in a day, periodic limitations caused by turbidity during the spring run-off, an aging mechanical system and other factors, Bell wrote in a memo. The town has a plan to build a new Pandora water treatment plant at the end of the box canyon, but litigation with the Idarado Mining Company has stalled the process, so it needs to upgrade and maintain the current facility if it is going to function as the town’s primary treatment facility. A funding option is to loan the necessary funds (a maximum of $700,000) to the depleted water fund from the healthy sewer fund, and an alternative is restarting the town’s well in Town Park.

• Reconstruction of the bike path, which has developed some bumps and cracks over the years as tree roots undermine and stress the asphalt. Since the reconstruction of the Spur would likely obliterate certain areas of the bike path, town staff recommends the town doesn’t spend large sums of money on this project.