Steve Pomerance

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...

From observing the recent city council discussions on water, I thought it would be useful to go over some of the basics. Boulder’s water comes from three sources: North Boulder Creek (the “Watershed” below Arapahoe Glacier), Middle Boulder Creek (flows into Barker Reservoir near Nederland), and the Colorado-Big Thompson project (from the Colorado River, includes Windy Gap reservoir). North Boulder Creek drains the east side of Arapahoe Peak; the water is stored in multiple small lakes/reservoirs within the Watershed. The water flows into the Betasso Pipeline, starting on the west side of the Peak-to-Peak Highway near Caribou Ranch, then to the Betasso Treatment Plant near Sugarloaf. Barker Reservoir water is piped to Koessler Lake, west of Green Mountain, and then down a pipeline to Boulder Canyon and up to the Betasso plant. Some of this water runs down to the hydro plant in Boulder Canyon. The C-BT water flows from the Colorado River headwa...

“Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”  What made me think of this saying was the recent criticism by some Boulder City Council members of Boulder County’s plans for spending its just-passed affordable housing sales tax (actually an extension and repurposing of an expiring tax). The saying is supposed to remind people not to criticize others for flaws that they may also suffer.  Their major criticism is that the County did not give Boulder its share of the total revenues as funds to go into Boulder’s long-running affordable housing programs but instead will be part of the County’s separately run programs. I understand the thinking, but it raises the question about what improvements are needed in Boulder’s own “glass house” housing programs, which, at current rates, will not reach the (inadequate) target of 15% permanently affordable units until the 2060s.  Here are some examples: The inclusionary zoning requirement (the fraction of new housing developmen...

In last November’s election, Boulder voters passed a number of charter amendments related to Boulder’s elections. They mostly addressed the provisions related to direct democracy, which occurs through initiatives, referenda and recalls. Direct democracy ensures that when citizens are not satisfied with the actions of their elected representatives, they have independent paths on which to proceed. (So it’s clear, charter amendments can also be done through initiatives, but the rules are in state law and cannot be changed locally.) The initiative process, referenda and recalls have long been paper processes: Citizens first write up what they want to do. City staff members then review the draft and provide technical feedback. Then the final version is printed, typically over a hundred copies, and circulated by regular citizens or paid circulators for months to get the requisite number of signatures. Gathering signatures has gotten harder, as many private property owners seem less wil...

Last Friday morning, I was asked by some folks to take a look at the details of Proposition 110, the 20-year 0.62 percent state sales tax increase that would fund transportation projects. In the portions of the proposed law that would give counties and cities 40 percent of the revenues (with half going to each) I noticed the following phrase, “(1) After paying the costs of the Colorado state patrol and any other costs of the department (CDOT) exclusive of highway construction, highway improvements, or highway maintenance, that are appropriated by the general assembly …,” followed by the allocation rules for the counties and cities. So it’s clear, this phrase is embedded in the current statutes, and the drafters of Proposition 110 simply included it and made it apply to Proposition 110’s revenues. Then I looked at the portion of Proposition 110 that allocated 45 percent of the proceeds to the state. I was surprised to find that this phrase was specifically removed. And it was not ...

By  MATT BENJAMIN ,  ED BYRNE ,  ALLYN FEINBERG ,  MARK MCINTYRE ,  STEVE POMERANCE ,  EVAN RAVITZ ,  TYLER ROMERO ,  MICHAEL SCHREINER ,  JOHN SPITZER  and  VALERIE YATES We urge city of Boulder voters to vote  yes  on Ballot Question 2G, which reads, “Shall Sections 38, 45, and 56 of the City Charter be amended pursuant to Ordinance 8274 to allow the Boulder City Council to adopt ordinances that permit use of electronic petitions and to permit on-line electronic signing or endorsement of initiative, referendum, and recall petitions?” The city of Boulder’s Campaign Finance/Elections Working Group unanimously recommended this to Council, who unanimously voted to put it on the ballot. (The initiative, referendum and recall processes are the elements of direct democracy. The initiative is where a group of citizens gathers enough signatures to put a proposed piece of legislation on the ballot and asks the voters to ap...

The debate around allowing more accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in Boulder neighborhoods has ignored a number of fundamental issues, and so has unnecessarily turned into a pitched battle. First, the objectives are not clear. City staff cherry-picked from the endless list of comprehensive plan goals to target having a “variety of housing types.” Some council members want ADUs to be permanently affordable, in spite of the difficulties created by state law’s prohibition on rent control. Others argue that ADUs that rent at market rate will help keep people in their homes in the face of skyrocketing property taxes. (Boulder Valley School District and county commissioners could address this by matching tax revenue growth to inflation rather than property value increases.) And then there are the undercurrents — more people should have the “right” to live in single-family neighborhoods, Boulder is mainly “rich, white, and privileged,” Boulder should be a big, dense city, etc. What is una...

The situation is depressingly simple – new development imposes costs that it doesn’t pay for. So either the rest of us pick up the tab, or the situation gets worse. To unpack this a bit, every new employee requires housing, which pushes up housing prices. We are at the point now where over 50% of new employees would need a very significant financial help to live in Boulder, or even in the rest of the county. So you understand the math, if the average new employee in a particular type of business requires 100 sq. ft. of floor space, and it costs $100,000 to buy down the price of a new housing unit to make it affordable for that average worker, that’s $100 per sq. ft. And per Keyser Martsen Associates, a very well respected California firm that has done numerous such studies, the actual cost to provide affordable housing for new office workers in Boulder is $129.49 per sq. ft. (as of two years ago), with other types of uses varying from slightly higher to considerably lower. The cu...

The 2017 election was a wake-up call for citizens who thought that Boulder’s campaign finance reform laws would keep our elections open, transparent and not subject to excessive spending. These laws were put in place by a citizen initiative passed by the voters in 1999. They limit contributions to candidates’ official committees as well as to “unofficial candidate committees” (organized by third parties) to $100 per person, and provide matching city funds for candidates up to $10,000 if they abide by a $20,000 total limit. But this year, spending was dominated by “dark money,” paying for mailers, ads, phone banks, etc., in the name of Open Boulder and possibly others. These folks tried to avoid the city’s regulations by carefully avoiding the magic words of “vote for,” “vote against” and synonyms of these. These magic words are what are called “express advocacy” in federal case law, and Boulder’s laws regulate “expressly advocating.” So instead, Open Boulder used words like “endors...

When I came to Boulder in the ’60s, I was young and blissfully unaware of the huge efforts the current residents were making to keep Boulder a wonderful place, including the Blue Line, that protects our mountain backdrop from development, the 55-foot height limit that protects our views, and the open space program that protects us from sprawl. But eventually I came to realize that the very qualities that make Boulder great, and the kinds of people who care enough to try to preserve them, were what make Boulder such a desirable place to do development. So without carefully managed growth, including growth paying its own way, we would lose those qualities and become just another overcrowded, overpriced, traffic-congested “success” story, like Silicon Valley. I am supporting candidates that I think will continue this effort to keep Boulder a wonderful place with citizens who truly care about our “commons” — the qualities and amenities that make Boulder unique. Here they are in alphabe...

For the last 50 years at least, Boulder has had a “housing crisis.” Our housing has always been more expensive than in our neighboring cities. We started with a fantastic natural setting and a stable economy because of CU and the federal labs. Boulder’s desirability increased with the Blue Line preventing development on the mountain backdrop, our open space limiting urban sprawl, and our 55-foot height limit preserving views. But over that time period, we went from a town with 30th Street being dirt and a turkey farm at the Williams Village site, to a booming employment center with jobs growing faster than housing. The current high-tech craze, exemplified by Google, escalated the already rapid increase in housing prices, with multimillion dollar cash offers, and the scraping of modest single-family homes and local service businesses and replacing them with McMansions, high-rise apartments, and giant office and hotel complexes. The city’s studies have shown that new, market-rate h...

When I heard about the Attention Homes project at 1440 Pine, now under review by the Planning Board, something about the large size and high number of at-risk young adults that would be housed there didn’t ring true to me. Then I learned that this was the result of a “ density transfer .” I couldn’t remember ever hearing that term in my 10 years on the City Council, so I inquired as to what was being proposed. What I learned was, frankly, pretty bizarre. This proposed “density transfer” first calculates the amount of residential development that would be allowed on the whole block, including the 1440 Pine site, as if it were all bare ground, even though most of this block is already developed and so there is no space to build anything close to that amount. Then it “transfers” this block’s worth of development “density” rights to about one quarter of the block. So the existing buildings remain on three quarters of the block, and extra new residential development gets built on one co...

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...

I recently read through the latest draft of the co-op ordinance. Unfortunately, it is still a mash-up of ideas that sound good but have significant flaws. And it is still disorganized — general requirements are mixed with specifics, concepts show up in multiple places, and some terms, including “limited equity cooperative,” “certification,” and “privilege,” are undefined. One of the biggest problem areas is the “permanently affordable Group Equity Cooperative” (GEC). I’ll focus there, but it is not the only problem by any means. The ordinance allows up to 12 people to live in a co-op in low-density zones, and up to 15 in higher-density zones. But if the Planning Board so recommends, the city manager can increase the upper limit for a “permanently affordable” co-op like a GEC. The Planning Board must consider impacts, crowding, parking, and the co-op’s “mission,” but there are no actual rules for the board to follow to calculate their recommended number. So no one can challenge the ...