Steve Pomerance

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 ...

 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...