Representative Review

Placerville, Colorado

Unincorporated community in San Miguel County ยท Not an incorporated municipality

About Placerville

Placerville is a census-designated place (CDP) and post office in and governed by San Miguel County, Colorado, United States. The Placerville post office has the ZIP Code 81430 (post office boxes). At the United States Census 2020, the population of the Placerville CDP was 362.

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

How Placerville is governed

Placerville appears to be an unincorporated community or a census-designated place, so it may have no city government of its own โ€” services usually come from San Miguel County and its elected officials. The chart below is a generic template; readers can correct it if Placerville does have local officials.

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0 of 14 positions listed. Gray dashed boxes are placeholders waiting for a name.

Residents of Placerville

Registered voters elect the officials below.

  • Mayor

    Executive

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    The city's chief elected official. Presides over the executive branch, proposes the budget and represents the city.

    • City Manager / Administrator

      Executive

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      The professional administrator who runs day-to-day operations (in some cities appointed by the council instead of the mayor).

  • City Council

    Legislative

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    The elected body that passes ordinances, sets the tax rate and approves the budget.

    • City Clerk

      Administration & departments

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      Keeps the official records, runs meeting agendas and, often, local elections.

    • City Attorney

      Administration & departments

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      The city's lawyer; advises officials and prosecutes ordinance violations.

    • Boards & Commissions

      Legislative

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      Citizen advisory bodies, such as planning, zoning appeals and library boards.

  • Municipal Court

    Judicial

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    Hears traffic, ordinance and other minor cases.

Looking for your county, state and federal representatives too? See who represents 81430 or everyone in Colorado.

History

Placerville was originally established as a small mining camp, named after the placer gold mines located on the San Miguel River and Leopard Creek. The location became known as Old Placerville after the Rio Grande Southern Railroad constructed a depot and several passing sidings west of the original settlement, calling it Placerville.

A. B. Frenzel discovered vanadium-bearing sandstone near Placerville in the late 1890s. The ore was in strataform bodies in the Entrada Sandstone (Jurassic) east of the town. The principal mineral was roscoelite, with minor montroseite and carnotite. By the fall of 1899, development was described as "of the most superficial character," although Frenzel had driven one tunnel 18 feet into the rock. By 1901โ€“1902, Frenzel was excavating several thousand tons intended for shipment to Europe. Most of the Placerville ore was less than 3% vanadium, too low grade to pay for shipment to Europe, so in 1905 the Vanadium Alloys Co. built an ore-processing mill southeast of Placerville to recover the metal as ferro-vanadium, which it sold. At least five mines were active at one time, and by 1919 the two ore mills at Placerville were producing 30% of the world's vanadium. Through 1940, the mines produced about 3.7 million pounds of vanadium.

The Placerville Schoolhouse, a one-room schoolhouse, operated from 1908 to 1960.

In 1909, the failure of the Trout Lake Dam caused the flooding of Placerville as well as Sawpit and Newmire.

Although carnotite was recognized as a minor constituent of the ore since its discovery, the amount was small, and no assays were made of the uranium content of the ore until World War II. Beginning about 1950, the small uranium content of the ore was also recovered from the ore.

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

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