Opinion: Thoughts on the election results and next steps for Boulder

It appears that Boulder’s ballot measure 2K to borrow $400 million failed. So, it’s likely that the city cannot bail itself out of the irresponsible behavior of the various councils in ignoring the need to do major deferred building work on our facilities, such as our recreation centers, etc., and just spending whatever extra revenues came in on non-critical items.

Dealing with this immense backlog will require the council to take significant actions. The way I see it, these will involve multiple steps. One is cutting back on the staff added over the last 10 or so years; this will free up revenue to pay for the necessary work.

As I pointed out some months ago, the various councils added some hundreds of new staff positions, which increased spending by many tens of millions of dollars. So, this council could immediately begin an evaluation of what positions are not necessary and close them to allow the savings to take place.

A second step is to put together a task force of informed citizens to figure out what the most cost-effective solutions are to resolving the needs. And a third is to determine in what order to do the work, since the extra money freed up will come in over a number of years and not in one big lump.

Fortunately, in Boulder we have some really great human resources that could help a lot in sorting all this out. For example, former council member Bob Yates, in his most recent newsletter, discussed a group of citizens he worked with on a very similar problem before he got on the council. There was a long list of expensive capital improvements to be done. The group winnowed it down and reduced its cost very substantially, to the point where it became quite doable.

For another example, Yvonne Castillo, who is on the Parks and Rec advisory board, has been attempting for years to dig into the details of the cost estimates for building renovations gathered by the city staff, but has been frustrated by the lack of available information. Since the majority of the capital backlog is in that department (although the fire stations and the police building are also part), having an appointed citizen group follow up and expand on her work would be very helpful in getting the information necessary to make the numbers more realistic and doable.

Also, a citizen group working on getting a performance auditor for the city has been looking into the excessive costs associated with the city’s attempt to move its offices to the Alpine-Balsam site. Although this is not directly related to the 2K bond issue, this group’s work points out the lack of real fiscal responsibility in both the Alpine-Balsam work itself and in the poor supervision by the council.

So, the obvious and necessary fix is to appoint a citizen oversight group to take on dealing with the long list of buildings that the failed $400 million bond issue was to address.

There is no lack of such informed and involved citizens in Boulder, as I’ve tried to point out above. Thus, the mayor and council should have no problem finding people. But for such people to be willing to get involved, the council will need to convince them that the council really wants their input, even if it disagrees with the views of some council members, or puts the council’s previous work in a less than favorable light.

For this to happen will also require the council starting to operate more independently of staff, and not just taking their input as gospel. This will include the Council Agenda Committee stopping sending multi-hundred-page packets to the council for their meetings without having reviewed and edited them down to a reasonable size and integrated comments from council members and the public.

This is a big change, and will require scheduling staff work a week or more earlier. But previous councils have managed this successfully. It’s about time the current group did so also, so everyone can be better informed.

I wouldn’t normally comment on the national situation in this column. But given the need to tamp down Trump’s behavior, the Democratic Party’s takeover of both the Senate and the House in this election was and is critical for our democracy to continue to function. (Also, I was personally pleased by James Talarico’s victory in Texas; I supported him, and thought such a victory would open things up in a traditionally conservative state.)

 

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