Steve Pomerance

Seth Brigham’s recent journey through the legal system points out some of the essential conflicts in how confrontations are dealt with in our society. To briefly and incompletely summarize Brigham’s situation, he was tossed out of a Boulder City Council meeting a couple of years ago for appearing in his underwear and raising issues about council members’ behavior. He sued over his treatment; the city settled and paid $10,000. This year, some council members apparently felt that Brigham was a threat because of some other incidents, so the city attorney asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order against him. On Aug. 6, Brigham had his court date about whether the restraining order was to be made permanent. Per the statute (CRS 13-14-102) and as practiced, a temporary restraining order can be issued “ex parte,” meaning that only one side is present to provide information. The real debate is at the permanent order hearing; in this case the judge delayed his decision so th...

In an excellent Daily Camera article entitled, “Boulder mayor: Financial disclosure, conflict-of-interest rules need review” (June 13, 2012), Mayor Matt Appelbaum said, “It’s really important that people see the council as transparent and that they see us as transparent because we are.” I certainly support Matt’s goal, but the current rules need a whole rewrite, not just a look-over. For example, suppose a Boulder council member said, “I think that the legislation before us would be great for Boulder, but my business will likely be hurt by it.” Most people would say that this council member has a fundamental conflict of interest and probably should not be voting on the matter. But under Boulder’s current laws, assuming that the business is not unique, this would not even be called a conflict of interest, and the council member could participate in discussions and vote. Governments have conflict of interest laws to provide the citizens some measure of assurance that their official...