To build upon what the others have written as comments:
What you've pasted is a concrete5 view. You'll notice there's no db querying or PageList building in there. For that, you need to look in the controller. (This looks like a page list block view, so the controller will be in / concrete / core / controllers / blocks / page_list.php (on c5.6+).
The concrete5 api code to do what the others have suggested (let mysql handle the skipping) is done within the ->get()
call. So, on about line 135:
$pl->get(1, 1);
Remember not to modify the files directly, but to override them the c5 way. There are plenty of tutorials on this on the c5 website.