Steve Pomerance

When the council decided to try to get the Sundance Film Festival to move to Boulder, there were obvious issues. One big one was that Boulder does not have the hotel and other lodging space of a resort community like Park City, Utah, where Sundance was located and grew for almost 50 years. But now we are faced with an ordinance that would allow a potentially massive increase in short-term rentals (STRs) to attempt to accommodate this influx. Here are the numbers: Per the Web, around 24,000 people attend the Sundance Film Festival from out of state. The staff memo says there are 2,900 hotel rooms in Boulder, with an additional 74,000 rooms within 40 miles. So, for additional STRs to make a difference in the number of people in-commuting to Sundance, we will need thousands more. Is that what you want for Boulder? The ordinance the council is considering allows many properties to become STRs for “festivals” by being issued special “festival lodging rental licenses.” This ordinance states ...

I recently read about the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s  discovery of uranium in the rocks in the just-completed Chimney Rock Reservoir .  For background, the Colorado-Big Thompson system (built by the Bureau of Reclamation) was started in the 1930s, some years after the 1922 Colorado River Compact was signed. The C-BT delivers water from the upper Colorado River to cities and farms in the northern Front Range, including Boulder. Much later, Northern built the much smaller Windy Gap reservoir on the Colorado, completed in 1985, which Boulder and other Front Range cities bought into. Windy Gap’s water rights are junior to the C-BT, which is junior to the Compact. Colorado River water constitutes about a third of Boulder’s supply. Northern apparently contemplated early on the idea of building a reservoir on the Front Range to store the water collected in Windy Gap and piped across the mountains. This led to the construction of...

From observing the recent city council discussions on water, I thought it would be useful to go over some of the basics. Boulder’s water comes from three sources: North Boulder Creek (the “Watershed” below Arapahoe Glacier), Middle Boulder Creek (flows into Barker Reservoir near Nederland), and the Colorado-Big Thompson project (from the Colorado River, includes Windy Gap reservoir). North Boulder Creek drains the east side of Arapahoe Peak; the water is stored in multiple small lakes/reservoirs within the Watershed. The water flows into the Betasso Pipeline, starting on the west side of the Peak-to-Peak Highway near Caribou Ranch, then to the Betasso Treatment Plant near Sugarloaf. Barker Reservoir water is piped to Koessler Lake, west of Green Mountain, and then down a pipeline to Boulder Canyon and up to the Betasso plant. Some of this water runs down to the hydro plant in Boulder Canyon. The C-BT water flows from the Colorado River headwa...