Opinion: An improvement in the City Council’s process on the airport and elsewhere
Last week, the Boulder City Council finally acknowledged that straw polls and nods during a study session are not decisions, and that these need to be made by a formal vote in a council meeting. They, in effect, acknowledged what Charter Section 16 already says, “The council shall act only by ordinance, resolution, or motion. All legislative enactments must be in the form of ordinances; all other procedure may be in the form of resolutions or motions.” Additionally, there now seems to be a movement to actually study topics in study sessions, including a tacit acknowledgement that the staff work on the airport was incomplete. An example: The big issue has been whether to accept FAA money, which requires an “in perpetuity” commitment to run the airport under the FAA’s terms. But the materials never really analyzed how easily the city could fund the airport. Budgets and projections for 2024 through 2030 show the airport’s annual shortfall averaging only $302,432, a tiny 0.06% of the cit...