Steve Pomerance

Please find the full presentation below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xmjmpFcsRzsilhdNe5bQTiHfCAvUKUu-/view?usp=sharing

  I attended the court hearing last Thursday on the challenge to the ballot title for the referendum on the CU South annexation passed by the council a year ago. (Note: The council could have held a special election last January, avoiding eight months of delay.) The judge ruled that she did not have jurisdiction, basically because of the council’s amendment a few years ago to the Boulder Revised Code that said that no state laws apply to the initiative, referendum and recall processes, other than those related to certain criminal offenses. (The Code contains laws passed by the council; the Charter can only be amended by citizen vote.) Since neither the Charter nor the Code contain any procedure for challenging ballot titles, the judge, and the rest of us, were left hanging.  Additionally, because of this amendment to the Code, there is not even a legally required format for the petition itself. So that gets made up by the city (also unchallengeable, by the way). And that turns out

  The decisions around how best to protect Boulderites from flood damage and risks are complex, given our location at the base of steep foothills. I was the lead council member in the late ‘80s for Boulder’s first efforts on flood protection and have followed the CU South process closely, so I’m familiar with the issues. And information circulating now is, to a large extent, misleading and biased. First, the flood protection provided by the proposed “100-year” detention pond on South Boulder Creek is inadequate and incomplete. The fundamental problem is that, in a large storm like we had in 2013, water flows into SE Boulder (much of which is a floodplain) from multiple sources — South Boulder Creek (SBC) from Eldorado Canyon, Viele Channel from Viele Lake area near Shanahan Ridge, and multiple local drainages. And we can expect more “atmospheric rivers” as the climate warms. So, some flooding is inevitable. The proposed flood detention “pond” only addresses one source — SBC. Flood