Steve Pomerance

The Boulder City Council is considering forming a Downtown Development Authority (DDA). This entity would be run by downtown property owners and have the power to use tax-increment financing (TIF) to fund improvements in downtown. The theory is that the DDA’s improvements would increase property and/or sales tax from this area, so it should be able to collect this increment to finance public improvements. The DDA’s board would make the decisions within the limits of Boulder’s zoning and other regulations, and state law. DDA’s are potentially useful in areas where there is a lot of development potential and attendant public infrastructure needs. But that is not the case in Boulder, where our downtown is mostly built out, and whose business success is more a function of the quality of the experience of residents, tourists and employees who come there but live outside of this area. A significant concern is that what the downtown property owners want may not be what the rest of Boulder...

The (re)emergence of the need to fund repairs and replacements of multiple City of Boulder buildings has encouraged me to try (again) to interest the city council in the large increase in Boulder’s spending that has occurred. I think this is important because, based on my analysis to date, the city, without seriously impacting levels of service (LOS), could reduce its operating budget and thereby save enough to fund most, if not all, of the required building work without a tax increase. I started by looking at the overall budget. It increased (inflation-adjusted) by about 23% over the last 10 years. Then I deducted the capital expenditures, so that it only reflected the operating budget, which in theory measures how much is being expended to pay staff and others to maintain LOS. The operating budget per capita (inflation-adjusted) increased by over 18% during the last 10 years; the number of employees increased by around 200 to well over 1,500, even after eliminating the library em...

Earlier this week, Boulder council members Matt Benjamin and Tina Marquis  published a lengthy complaint  accusing citizens of verbally abusing city staff. They told people to, instead, communicate their concerns directly to the council by showing up at public hearings or emailing them. The problem is that, based on the visible evidence, this council majority pays essentially no attention to anything anyone says. If they really wanted people to come to the council meetings or write to them with their concerns, then they need to demonstrate that they actually care by responding with useful action. A start would be to allow testimony from all the people who sign up, not just a random selection. Council members should ask questions right away and not wait until the end of the meeting. Tell them what the city can do for them. If things get repetitive, the mayor can always t...

The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s stated core value is Sustainability. Other values include “identity and sense of place” and “great neighborhoods.” The question is whether the proposed densification of our single-family neighborhoods, allowing apartment buildings, business and retail development, etc. is consistent with these values. This densification involves making BVCP Land Use Map changes. Under the City-County agreement (see, for example, Appendix B, Exhibit B, pages 159 et seq, in the 2020 BVCP update), such Map changes must meet the following criteria: a) On balance, is consistent with the policies and overall intent of the comprehensive plan; b) would not have significant cross-jurisdictional impacts that may affect residents, properties or facilities outside the city; c) would not materially affect the land use and growth projections that were the basis of the comprehensive plan; d) does not materially affect the adequacy or availability of urban facilities a...

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...

I’ve been following the council’s process around the Boulder airport and have been frustrated by the lack of good background info regarding the options. So, I did a bit of research. Thanks to all who helped me, including a long-time climbing partner, who is a pilot and an attorney and was involved in the Aspen airport fight. Regarding the “straw poll” that the council took at a recent study session: Some attempted to treat this as a decision to accept a grant from the FAA, which, per the FAA’s terms, would require continuing the airport operations indefinitely, and under FAA jurisdiction. The council should read its own rules. Charter Section 16 states, “The council shall act only by ordinance, resolution, or motion.” The Boulder Revised Code Sec. 2-2-8 requires a council motion to approve the city manager’s signing of any lease of three years or longer. And the council is only empowered to make such motions at official meetings, not study sessions. The reason that FAA jurisdicti...

Colorado’s “housing crisis” has been a rallying cry for more and more development over the last few years. But looking at the reality yields a much more nuanced picture. I finally found the underlying document produced by the state’s Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), where the “housing crisis” was discussed in detail. Published in September 2025, it’s called “Colorado’s Housing Shortfall: An Estimate and Review of Existing Studies.” There’s no direct link, but it can be found at “Colorado’s Housing Shortfall 9/2/25,” and then downloaded per the link at the bottom of this article. It’s worth the look, in my opinion. It points out that there has been a definite increase in the cost of housing, and argues that this is due to a “shortfall” in construction rates, elevated interest rates and rising construction costs. Interesting, what’s ignored is the almost total lack of regulatory efforts to control prices, as well as the obvious constraints on water, road capacity, open space, neighbor...

I attended the Monday evening meeting of the four bodies that review and approve the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update. The final item, changing the land use designations for existing established neighborhoods to allow massive densification, was very revealing. Both the County Commissioners and County Planning Commission were concerned about the impacts on these neighborhoods. But the majority of both the City Council and City Planning Board were ready to push forward to allow densification. I was appalled by their lack of concern for what their constituents who live there actually want and the total lack of interest in giving them a direct say (like voting) on the matter. On the budget issues, the South Boulder Recreation Center needs a complete rebuild, or possibly replacement, and our city is trying to sort out how to pay for it. But it is far from the only building that is old or deteriorating. Boulder first looked at the problem with the 2021 Boulder Facilities Master Plan,...

After well over a year of sometimes questionable public input processes, including biased surveys, self-selecting questionnaires, a theatrical performance and significant closed-door meetings, the draft Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan updated version is now out for public review. Comments are due by this coming Monday, 4/06. (future@bouldercolorado.gov and planner@bouldercounty.gov). The new document is very attractive in appearance, and very detailed — over 100 pages long. But the future it portrays is massively densified, including three-story and multi-unit and commercial buildings in currently single-family neighborhoods. And I saw no serious attempt to deal with our shrinking water supply, ever-increasing traffic congestion, overuse of Open Space or the many other impacts of growth. One BVCP project was “15-minute neighborhoods.” As many of you remember, this was conducted in a whole series of private meetings by a group of anonymous citizens selected randomly, rather than for t...

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...

Last week, the  Boulder City Council voted 7-2  to proceed with looking at annexing an area of currently rural land north-east of U.S. 36, called the Area III planning reserve. It’s approximately 500 acres, part private and part owned by the Parks Department, bought decades ago for eventual use as playing fields, etc. The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan states that expanding the city into the Area III-PR “will only be considered if there are priority community needs that cannot be met within the existing Service Area.” Sensibly, the Planning Board voted 4-3 against looking further at this time. The basic argument being made is that we need more housing. More, more and more housing. A friend did a detailed look at coming housing growth inside the Boulder city limits. Here are the numbers: There are about 27 projects at various stages, totaling over 15,000 new units....

As many of you already know, three Boulder citizens filed a lawsuit against the city over both the process and the substance of the city’s attempt in early March 2025 to sell $66 million worth of bonds to finance the ill-considered South Boulder Creek dam. The court ruled against the citizens. Then, in early July, the city filed a motion to go after these citizens for attorneys’ fees. But on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, the judge ruled for the citizens and against the city. His excellent comments included the importance of preserving the citizens’ right to challenge the city’s actions (my words, not his). In the original lawsuit, the citizens alleged that the city (1) failed to follow the city charter in passing the bond issue at a single reading “by emergency” and (2) that the fees the city intended to charge calculated on “impervious surface” within the city were not legal to use to pay for the dam that, for the most part, would contain water coming from outside the city. In my opin...

·          The Boulder City Council, at the request of some members, has made its draft letter to Xcel even stronger. Good for them! I hope the council passed it last night. ·          I agree that Xcel needs to pay financial penalties for unnecessary and/or overly long shutdowns, and compensate businesses that are financially damaged and customers who suffer negative impacts. ·          But the question remains: What leverage, besides bailing out of the franchise, does the city really have to get Xcel to bring its grid up to snuff, both in terms of surviving the windstorms and providing cleaner, cheaper electricity? Local efforts to provide resilience hubs — more neighborhood-level solar-plus-batteries, etc. — are good angles to pursue. But they all run up against the difficulties associated with a century-old...

We all have suffered, either directly or indirectly, from the failure of Xcel to provide us with a robust electric grid, one that can survive our windstorms, which are coming with increasing frequency and strength as our climate gets more extreme. And the Public Safety Power Shutoffs, which were conceived as emergency measures, are now apparently being viewed as standard procedure. The Boulder City Council is considering a letter to Xcel outlining the areas where it wants to see improvements. It accurately notes that Xcel has missed its 2022 and 2024 emissions milestones, made insufficient progress on fleet charging and other items, and, critically, keeps increasing our bills. Very significantly, the draft letter states, “we must address our community’s ongoing experience with electric reliability,” including the three Public Safety Power Shutoff events that had “inadequate coordination, unusable or overly broad outage maps, insufficient details to support emergency preparedness, and e...

Last week’s windstorms showed how inadequate Xcel’s work on fixing our electric grid has been. Unless things change drastically, Boulder’s inevitable windstorms will continue to create recurring mini-disasters. Although the direction Xcel got in June from the Public Utilities Commission covered some transmission line work, overall it appears to be inadequate to fix what’s broken. Interestingly, the PUC’s latest communication, which can be found at tinyurl.com/55h2jccn, states, “The PUC received extensive public input following the 2024 event, much of it focusing on lack of notice, inadequate communication during the event, poor mapping of impacted areas and insufficient planning to identify and protect critical infrastructure and facilities.”  From my and many others’ observations, last week’s power shutoff maps Xcel supplied online were inaccurate and lacked timeliness. And the notifications we got came multiple times, but did not contain timely updates. It appears that the PUC’s ...

It’s Thanksgiving week! I want to give thanks for being able to write this column and all the other opportunities I’ve had over the last 40-plus years to serve our Boulder community. My first political foray was in 1982, when I conceived Boulder’s solar access ordinance. This was way before I ever thought about running for the council. I had designed and helped build a few solar houses. And when I read about such ordinances elsewhere, it seemed like Boulder should also have one. I ended up working with Susan Osborne, then in the Planning Department, and later our mayor, on the concepts. And with help from then assistant city attorney Alan Boles, it got drafted and the council passed it. I was blown away — I could actually do something big that would make a positive difference to my community. That led to working at the Legislature, running for council, lots of other projects and eventually writing for the Daily Camera. As a kid, I hated listening to my parents talk politics. And my wor...

The Boulder City Council majority is about to approve a charge on homeowners who build additions to pay for more affordable housing. As with other recent fee decisions, it means more money for the council without a citizen vote, since TABOR requires a vote on taxes, but not on fees. And again, the fee’s logic and legality are sketchy, in my opinion. Here’s my take: Per last year’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, all fees, including those legislatively enacted (i.e. generally applicable), should be able to meet the Nollan/Dolan case standards: (1) there must be a “rational nexus,” a logical connection between what the fee is being charged for and the impact the fee will pay to mitigate (the Nollan case), and (2) “rough proportionality,” a close equivalence between the cost being covered and the amount of the fee (the Dolan case). Last year, the council approved using stormwater fees to pay for the South Boulder Creek dam. These fees are calculated on the “impervious area” (the area t...