Steve Pomerance

Note: This column has been updated to reflect that six cities are a part of the lawsuit against the state to protect local authority. A key story in Monday’s Camera was about Lafayette having joined Aurora, Arvada, Glendale, Greenwood Village, and Westminster in a critically important lawsuit that will decide whether home rule cities, including Boulder, get to determine their own land use, or if the Legislature and governor can dictate how to zone and manage our cities. I’ve put a fair amount of time into researching this issue; here’s what I’ve found to date: The Colorado Constitution allows cities to become “home rule” and in effect, self-governing by the citizens passing a charter defining their form of government, with certain basic structural rules. Article XX, Sec.6 provides that the laws of home rule cities “supersede … any state law in conflict therewith.” The case law refining this system started in the late 1800s on topics relevant to all cities, like how courts operated. The...

The first meeting of the group of 48 volunteers to discuss “15-minute neighborhoods” was Saturday, May 10. According to one of the many pages on the city’s website devoted to this subject, “15-minute neighborhoods are neighborhoods where daily goods, services and transit are within a 15-minute walk (about a 1/4 mile) of where people live or work.” Unfortunately, because much of the city’s material comes across as being biased towards establishing these neighborhoods (which require massive densification of most residential areas), the people who volunteered were possibly biased toward that outcome. But the rest of us will not know, and have no way to determine, the extent of such bias in this process, because the meetings’ locations, names of participants, agendas and materials are secret. So, those of us who were not among the chosen cannot attend these “Citizen Assembly” meetings even as observers. I think that is terrible. A process this consequential should be done openly! The argum...

I was surprised by a recent move in our Legislature by some Democrats who are pursuing House Joint Resolution 25-1023. This resolution, if passed by both houses, would initiate a lawsuit in state court to invalidate Article X, Section 20, of our state constitution, commonly known as TABOR. Their objective apparently is to disempower our ability to vote on state-level tax increases, a power that we voted for ourselves over three decades ago. They want to do this without having to put it on the ballot so we get the final say. The politicians’ position is based on the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, the “Guarantee Clause,” which requires that states have “a Republican Form of Government.” Their argument is that this does not include “direct democracy,” like citizen-sponsored initiatives. Although the resolution specifically targets TABOR, this could end up being applied to other direct democracy votes, because the arguments would be the same. My first research was to look at which states ...