Steve Pomerance

The Boulder City Council did the right thing last Tuesday night. They rejected another attempt to amend Boulder’s charter to allow executive sessions (meetings closed to the public), and considered a proposal to allow a committee of two council members to work in private on negotiating property deals, like the proposed purchase of Section 16, the southwest corner of Rocky Flats Wildlife Preserve. Currently the city charter prohibits closed meetings of the council or any of its committees, except that it allows two council members to work together confidentially while doing the evaluations of the city manager, city attorney and municipal judge. This proposal would be a logical extension, and a reasonable way to explore allowing the council to participate in delicate negotiations, but without threatening Boulder’s invaluable open government requirements. The council also correctly refused to put another attempt to alter Boulder’s 55-foot height limit on the ballot. This latest prop

On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to listen to the former mayor of Las Cruces, N.M. discuss the struggles that they went through in trying to create a municipal electric utility, just as Boulder is considering. Two things struck me: First, Boulder is way ahead in terms of doing the homework of evaluating options and considering upsides and downsides. Second, Boulder`s circumstances are quite different. Clearly, we can learn from Las Cruces` mistakes, but fundamentally we face far fewer obstacles than they did. However, one thing is a constant — Boulder will have a fight with Xcel Energy just as Las Cruces did with El Paso Electric Company (EPEC). Monopolies hate to give up their customer bases. Las Cruces spent millions of dollars in legal fees and years of time to gain the power to condemn the distribution system. (The distribution system is the wires, poles, transformers and substations that take power from transmission lines and deliver it to our homes and businesses.) But und