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Opinion: Where did all the money go?

What started me on this subject was the recent discussions on the Boulder City Council about asking the citizens for more money. It would be one thing if there were a serious analysis of the long-term spending habits to date, but I have not seen anything remotely like this. And without that, it’s impossible to know if this money is truly needed to maintain our quality of life and preserve our environment, or if this is just what is perceived to be the simplest way to do whatever the council majority dreams up next. Some time ago I did some analysis of the city’s expenditures over recent history; I updated my work in the last week. I attempted to compare the overall budgets from 20 years ago and 10 years ago with the current budget numbers. I adjusted the raw data to account for inflation (using the CPI) and for the city’s population, and also for the extra revenues from the separation of the library district. What I found surprised me. From 20 years ago to 10 years ago, the per-person ...
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Opinion: The push for more data centers, more housing and more impacts

 As I write this, there are two competing bills in the Legislature regarding data centers. One promotes them by providing massive tax breaks, while the other tries to address at least some of the impacts.  This conflict exposes the underlying weaknesses of our way of providing infrastructure to serve new development and our failure to use basic economics to make development more self-regulating. The underlying problem that we face is the unwillingness to fully acknowledge and quantify the impacts of more development, and then to charge new development the costs of mitigating those impacts. For example, last year the PUC gave permission to Xcel to pursue massive new investments in renewable energy, including wind, solar and battery storage (and a small gas plant, presumably for additional backup), so as not to miss out on the federal tax credits. Allegedly, two-thirds of this is needed for data centers, with only a small portion because of...
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Opinion: Crowded, congested and dry – the future of Boulder

Last week, the  Boulder City Council voted 7-2  to proceed with looking at annexing an area of currently rural land north-east of U.S. 36, called the Area III planning reserve. It’s approximately 500 acres, part private and part owned by the Parks Department, bought decades ago for eventual use as playing fields, etc. The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan states that expanding the city into the Area III-PR “will only be considered if there are priority community needs that cannot be met within the existing Service Area.” Sensibly, the Planning Board voted 4-3 against looking further at this time. The basic argument being made is that we need more housing. More, more and more housing. A friend did a detailed look at coming housing growth inside the Boulder city limits. Here are the numbers: There are about 27 projects at various stages, totaling over 15,000 new units....
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Opinion: The City of Boulder goes after its own citizens … and loses!

As many of you already know, three Boulder citizens filed a lawsuit against the city over both the process and the substance of the city’s attempt in early March 2025 to sell $66 million worth of bonds to finance the ill-considered South Boulder Creek dam. The court ruled against the citizens. Then, in early July, the city filed a motion to go after these citizens for attorneys’ fees. But on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, the judge ruled for the citizens and against the city. His excellent comments included the importance of preserving the citizens’ right to challenge the city’s actions (my words, not his). In the original lawsuit, the citizens alleged that the city (1) failed to follow the city charter in passing the bond issue at a single reading “by emergency” and (2) that the fees the city intended to charge calculated on “impervious surface” within the city were not legal to use to pay for the dam that, for the most part, would contain water coming from outside the city. In my opin...
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Opinion: The next steps toward a clean, resilient electric supply

·          The Boulder City Council, at the request of some members, has made its draft letter to Xcel even stronger. Good for them! I hope the council passed it last night. ·          I agree that Xcel needs to pay financial penalties for unnecessary and/or overly long shutdowns, and compensate businesses that are financially damaged and customers who suffer negative impacts. ·          But the question remains: What leverage, besides bailing out of the franchise, does the city really have to get Xcel to bring its grid up to snuff, both in terms of surviving the windstorms and providing cleaner, cheaper electricity? Local efforts to provide resilience hubs — more neighborhood-level solar-plus-batteries, etc. — are good angles to pursue. But they all run up against the difficulties associated with a century-old...
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Opinion: The critical focus for 2026: fixing our electric grid

We all have suffered, either directly or indirectly, from the failure of Xcel to provide us with a robust electric grid, one that can survive our windstorms, which are coming with increasing frequency and strength as our climate gets more extreme. And the Public Safety Power Shutoffs, which were conceived as emergency measures, are now apparently being viewed as standard procedure. The Boulder City Council is considering a letter to Xcel outlining the areas where it wants to see improvements. It accurately notes that Xcel has missed its 2022 and 2024 emissions milestones, made insufficient progress on fleet charging and other items, and, critically, keeps increasing our bills. Very significantly, the draft letter states, “we must address our community’s ongoing experience with electric reliability,” including the three Public Safety Power Shutoff events that had “inadequate coordination, unusable or overly broad outage maps, insufficient details to support emergency preparedness, and e...
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Opinion: Can we ever get reliable power from Xcel?

Last week’s windstorms showed how inadequate Xcel’s work on fixing our electric grid has been. Unless things change drastically, Boulder’s inevitable windstorms will continue to create recurring mini-disasters. Although the direction Xcel got in June from the Public Utilities Commission covered some transmission line work, overall it appears to be inadequate to fix what’s broken. Interestingly, the PUC’s latest communication, which can be found at tinyurl.com/55h2jccn, states, “The PUC received extensive public input following the 2024 event, much of it focusing on lack of notice, inadequate communication during the event, poor mapping of impacted areas and insufficient planning to identify and protect critical infrastructure and facilities.”  From my and many others’ observations, last week’s power shutoff maps Xcel supplied online were inaccurate and lacked timeliness. And the notifications we got came multiple times, but did not contain timely updates. It appears that the PUC’s ...
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Opinion: Thanks for being able to serve our community

It’s Thanksgiving week! I want to give thanks for being able to write this column and all the other opportunities I’ve had over the last 40-plus years to serve our Boulder community. My first political foray was in 1982, when I conceived Boulder’s solar access ordinance. This was way before I ever thought about running for the council. I had designed and helped build a few solar houses. And when I read about such ordinances elsewhere, it seemed like Boulder should also have one. I ended up working with Susan Osborne, then in the Planning Department, and later our mayor, on the concepts. And with help from then assistant city attorney Alan Boles, it got drafted and the council passed it. I was blown away — I could actually do something big that would make a positive difference to my community. That led to working at the Legislature, running for council, lots of other projects and eventually writing for the Daily Camera. As a kid, I hated listening to my parents talk politics. And my wor...
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Opinion: Fees and more fees – the insatiable quest for more money

The Boulder City Council majority is about to approve a charge on homeowners who build additions to pay for more affordable housing. As with other recent fee decisions, it means more money for the council without a citizen vote, since TABOR requires a vote on taxes, but not on fees. And again, the fee’s logic and legality are sketchy, in my opinion. Here’s my take: Per last year’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, all fees, including those legislatively enacted (i.e. generally applicable), should be able to meet the Nollan/Dolan case standards: (1) there must be a “rational nexus,” a logical connection between what the fee is being charged for and the impact the fee will pay to mitigate (the Nollan case), and (2) “rough proportionality,” a close equivalence between the cost being covered and the amount of the fee (the Dolan case). Last year, the council approved using stormwater fees to pay for the South Boulder Creek dam. These fees are calculated on the “impervious area” (the area t...
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Opinion: A job for the next council: improve our democracy

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” or words to that effect. But there is a wide range of forms of democracy — from what are, in effect, elected dictatorships, to those where direct democracy works in parallel with elected democracy. The Scandinavian countries’ democracies are rated best, along with Switzerland, and almost all have accessible processes for national and/or local initiatives. In Switzerland, citizen initiatives only require 100,000 signatures in a country of almost 9 million — slightly over 1% — and the signature gathering process is relatively simple. Also, Switzerland allows initiative votes up to four times per year. In Boulder, non-charter legislative initiatives require the signatures of 10% of the average number of voters in the last two municipal candidate elections. In 2023, over 33,000 people voted. This will likely increase substantially in 202...
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