Steve Pomerance

Please find the full presentation below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xmjmpFcsRzsilhdNe5bQTiHfCAvUKUu-/view?usp=sharing

  I’ve been studying the flood situation again, and it is becoming increasingly clear to me that (1) the proposed “100-year” detention pond for South Boulder Creek will not stop the areas that flooded in 2013 from being inundated again, and (2) the related Annexation Agreement that allows massive development on CU South is full of holes and should be repealed. Let’s be straight about the 2013 flood. Much of Southeast Boulder is a floodplain, created by South Boulder Creek, Viele Channel and other local flows. Given climate change and the resulting stronger storms, even if a storm centers on the Eldorado Springs area and drains into South Boulder Creek, it is a virtual certainty that this “100-year” pond will overtop with some frequency; so the downstream area will be flooded anyway. But if the storm centers a few miles further north over Southwest Boulder, water will come down Viele Channel, completely missing the detention pond. Then the water will do just what it did in 2013 — ...

In my almost 40 years in Boulder politics, I have never seen a project create such controversy, and it’s no surprise: CU South is the size of downtown Boulder both in acreage and development potential. The proposed “100-year design” flood detention pond is inadequate given climate change and the limited pond size, which cannot reasonably be expanded once CU develops the nearby area. The deal was negotiated without investigating a land swap with city-owned land north of the city limits. Condemnation of the needed property was apparently not even looked at. And it was done without a proper flood control master plan to evaluate the costs and benefits of projects on Boulder’s many creeks, determine which ones were worth doing, and then prioritize them based on the most benefit (including life/safety) for the least cost. Boulder’s politics have worked best, and created the least conflict, when the processes are open and the citizens can observe and engage as matters proceed. Sometim...

I want to catch up on a number of Boulder topics where significant progress has been made, and to acknowledge the majority of the City Council for making this happen. I’m serving on the elections working group. In just two meetings we’ve resolved the basic issues around the municipal initiative process that was upset by ballot issue 2Q. It appears that we will have a process ready to be put on the ballot as a charter amendment this November. It will be similar to the one that existed prior to 2Q but with some significant improvements. We haven’t started on the effort to shine light onto “dark money.” But given the council’s clear direction to push the envelope on this one, I am confident that we can come up some good strategies that will reveal the big money donors behind the ads that push certain candidates but avoid saying the magic words “vote for” or “vote against” that would trigger their being regulated. The council majority has kept its promise to increase the jobs-housing...

Relative to  my last column  on the flaws in the site review process, on Wednesday  the Camera covered  the Boulder City Council’s “workshopping” of a ballot item to extend the current capital improvements tax. This tax funded, for example, the rebuilding of the civic center area between city hall and the library. What caught my eye was a failed attempt by council members Bob Yates, Jan Burton (who is running for re-election), and Andrew Shoemaker to remove $2 million of the funds targeted for replacing Fire Station No. 3 at Arapahoe and 30th, and instead spend the citizens’ tax money to make operational the “arts cinema” that the developer of the Pearl West building promised during site review, but allegedly does not now have the funds to complete. This hole in the site review process has been known about for years, so why hasn’t it been fixed? So it’s clear, Station No. 3 is undersized to cover all the growth in east Boulder, and is too close to the Boulder C...

Much of what has made Boulder such a great place to live has been the work of people half a century ago. These people recognized what I call the “ ratchet effect ,” that bad development decisions cannot be undone, so policies needed to be put in place to prevent, or at least limit, the damage that a growth-at-all-costs majority of the council could do. These policies include charter limits, like the Blue Line that prevents city water for development from being supplied above a certain altitude, the 55-foot height limit that has prevented high-rise development from cutting off our views, and the open space referendum process that allows a 60-day window for citizens to challenge disposals of open space. Other constraints include the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s requirement for Planning Board agreement for land-use changes in the area inside the city limits (Area I) and additional agreement by the county commissioners and county Planning Commission for urban development further...

My motivation for this piece came from attending the Planning Board hearing on the proposed annexation of the Hogan-Pancost property — 22 vacant acres near the East Boulder Community Center. Frankly, I was appalled at what the city staff were recommending — that the property be annexed and zoned without a detailed, binding site plan, and without full analysis of the off-site impacts. This is not the first time the staff has been off base. In 2013, the staff-supported annexation proposal was voted down 7-0 by the Planning Board. Under the staff-recommended approach, if the city and the developer cannot come to agreement on the site plan and appropriate mitigation, in particular for the apparently unsolvable groundwater issues, then the city would be in a serious bind: The city has no process for de-annexing the property, and so would have given all the leverage to the developer. This would put Boulder citizens at financial and hydrologic risk. Then, during the hearing, a consultan...

The policy that “growth should pay its own way” was in the original Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, approved in 1970. I’ve been a proponent since my first campaign for Boulder City Council in 1985. But the city’s implementation has been sporadic and incomplete. Our city utility tap fees are quite accurate, but the charges for general fund departments like libraries, and parks and recreation, are less adequate. The charges for transportation and affordable housing come nowhere near what’s needed to prevent increased traffic congestion and to provide housing for many of those who come here to fill the new jobs. In my observation, the real profit in the development business comes from “privatizing the profits and socializing the costs.” An analysis I did of an annexation in a neighboring city showed that essentially all the profit came from avoiding paying just the costs associated with meeting the demand for transportation and schools; paying for affordable housing would have made...

The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan has now been in existence since the 1970s. It originally was a relatively simple agreement between the county commissioners and the city council that prevented sprawl and kept urban development within the city’s borders. Over the years, it has expanded to become a massive document containing multiple (and sometimes conflicting) policies, land use maps, department master plans, and the like. But it lacks three critical elements — a clearly defined vision for Boulder’s future, a citizen approval process for this vision, and a way for the citizens to ensure that their government sticks with this vision once approved. These shortcomings have shown up multiple times in recent years. For example, the proposed Hogan-Pancost annexation, near the East Boulder Community Center, was supported by city staff and rejected by the planning board, both based on the BVCP’s policies. The Envision East Arapahoe project, with its 55-foot buildings, emerged out of t...

The good news is that the Boulder City Council will begin discussing growth issues at the council meeting this Tuesday, Sept. 2, and there is talk about having a study session on development in October. Unfortunately, study sessions work only if city staff has sufficient direction beforehand to provide the needed information and analysis. But what direction should they go? Vic Fruehauf, a well-known Boulderite who started Fruehauf’s Nursery and was on the Boulder Planning Board, used to say, “If you don’t know your destination, any path will do.” He would frequently repeat variations on this theme during attempts to revise the land use regulations during the 1990’s. His point is even more applicable today: How can the city sort out all the growth-related issues when the big-picture goal is neither well-defined nor agreed upon? We don’t lack for advocates on all sides. For example, some are pushing for more and denser housing, arguing that it will be affordable even though the mar...

This column was stimulated by a recent city of Boulder newspaper ad. It said, “Now Showing on Boulder’s Channel 8 — Is Building in Boulder Over?” The ad goes on to discuss Longs Gardens, a 25-acre parcel of agricultural land near Broadway and Iris Avenue, and asks whether this site is appropriate for “the ‘right kind of development’ that is not car dependent.” The show itself was basically a discussion about some of the more recent iterations of “new urbanism” (dense, mixed use areas that in theory promote alternatives to driving) versus the value of green space and urban agriculture (including its value to children as a learning experience). I found the presentations, which involved a sitting council member and a member of the Transportation Advisory Board, rather troubling. First, neither participant provided any context. Discussions about growth in Boulder need to start with the numbers: Under its current zoning, Boulder has the potential to add something like 60,000 more jobs t...

The Colorado state constitution gives cities the absolute right to create their own electric utilities. We now have had positive votes in three elections — replacement of the franchise fee in 2010, conditional authorization to create the muni and provisions for funding the process in 2011, and this year when Xcel, through surrogates, put its own item on the ballot. The next steps are negotiations and court proceedings over the price for the distribution system and how the parts will be separated between the two utilities. And there will be proceedings at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over whether Boulder’s departure will “strand” any of Xcel’s generation facilities. The roots of this struggle go back about a century. Very briefly, to eliminate multiple sets of wires being run down streets and the resulting competition that dampened profits, both governments and electric companies opted for regulated monopoly status. The regulators were supposed to design rules that creat...

A few months ago, I discussed “Disruptive Challenges,” a paper published by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the research arm of a large group of investor-owned utilities. The paper accurately describes renewable energy as potentially disrupting the business model used by these utilities to extract high profits with little risk. Disruption is now manifesting in Europe, where the growth of renewables has been extremely rapid. Apparently the initial subsidies led to lots of installations, which reduced overall costs, which then allowed subsidies to be reduced. According to a recent article in The Economist entitled “How to lose a half a trillion euros,” market valuation of European utilities has dropped by over half since 2008. One major factor is the inability of their coal-powered generation plants to integrate with the variable output of renewables. Because the Europeans require utilities to accept all the renewable energy generated, these slow-ramping plants are becoming fo...

Clearly, Xcel is behind the current attempt to amend Boulder’s charter in a way that could stop Boulder from creating a clean, innovative, and financially responsible electric utility. The proposed language was taken word-for-word from a poll Xcel did, and Xcel is intending to fund this effort to maintain its highly profitable monopoly. (See Camera stories of May 16 and 22.) Here’s what the initiative says, and what it means: The first paragraph requires that, “Before the utility issues any debt, voters must approve the amount of the utility’s debt limit and the total cost of debt repayment that the utility will incur…” This requires voter approval of both a debt limit and the total cost of debt repayment. This is much more stringent than even the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR). It forces a vote on the exact total cost of repayment, not on the maximum as TABOR requires. This means that the utility will have to guess at the final interest rate, because the vote will occur well b...