Steve Pomerance

The  City of Boulder and University of Colorado Boulder are close to cutting a deal. CU gets to annex its flood prone property and then potentially make a pile of cash by selling most of it to a private developer, the residents of South Boulder get inadequate flood protection and the rest of us get none for the foreseeable future, traffic becomes a disaster, and the jobs/housing balance and affordable housing situation is made even worse. Here are the many facets to consider: It’s a non-solution to flooding:  The proposed detention pond on South Boulder Creek will fill up and overrun if the storm significantly exceeds the 100-year size, creating a shorter but still powerful flood. And that will definitely happen, given climate change and the huge increase in atmospheric water from global warming. That’s why detention ponds are the solution of last resort. Worse, once the land is developed, expanding the pond to 500-year capacity will not be realistic: there are issues with...

The University of Colorado, in what has been argued to be a possible violation of the First Amendment, successfully closed off its Boulder campus on 4/20 to prevent what have been for the most part peaceful assemblies. The explanations varied from concerns about CU’s reputation to worries about disruption to the academic process. Per the insignias on the car doors, apparently police from as far away as Jefferson and Adams counties helped keep the pot-smokers at bay. Now the CU regents and administration will have to do the same every year, or risk looking foolish, at least until pot is legalized. (Whether cops from across the Metro area will continue to be willing to participate is another matter.) The War on Drugs is widely acknowledged to be a failure, and our prisons are filled with users and pushers, supporting the emerging business of private for-profit incarceration. We should have learned from Prohibition and cigarettes; for the most part, it’s better to regulate, discourage...