Steve Pomerance

I just returned from the annual International Energy Economics and Finance Association conference, where people from all over the world gathered to discuss global warming and climate change. I was on a panel discussing “securitization,” a financial tool that uses borrowing to reduce the cost of paying off utilities to shut down coal plants. Interestingly,  an op-ed I wrote  in April on the Colorado securitization bill was referenced by some people to illustrate their various perspectives. Our discussion ended up boiling down to a fundamental choice: Are we willing to pay whatever it takes to get utilities to shut down their coal plants? Or are we going to force some utilities to take a financial beating, because they invested in coal in the face of global warming? What really amazed me was how many people were aware of and inspired by Boulder’s struggle to create a clean energy municipal electric utility. I also received reports about utilities that were shifting to clea...

Each of the first four acronyms in the headline above identifies some housing “solutions” that have become issues for the lower-density neighborhoods. STRs are “short-term rentals,” where a homeowner rents out part or all of his or her home on a short-term basis. ADUs are “accessory dwelling units,” where a homeowner has built a separate apartment as part of a single-family house, sometimes called a granny flat. OAUs are “owner accessory units,” a completely detached second residential unit, like a garage apartment, on a single-family lot. CHUs are “cooperative housing units,” commonly called co-ops, which may have 12 or more residents in a single-family house. The HAB is the Housing Advisory Board that the City Council is forming, presumably to provide some citizen oversight to all of the city’s housing efforts. So it’s clear, there are already a number of technical advisory groups working on housing. But what doesn’t exist right now is a board that represents the general citizenr...

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...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Originally electric utilities in the U.S. competed with each other by covering the streets with multiple sets of wires, but this competition lowered prices and cut profits. Then, roughly 100 years ago, these utilities realized that it would be a lot more profitable to not compete but rather to control their regulators. Thus was born the regulated private monopoly structure we now have. As new power plants got bigger, the unit price of electricity dropped, so customers could tolerate these excess profits. (Nonprofit public utilities also emerged as an alternative. Per the American Public Power Association, Colorado now has 31, and all 151 utilities in Nebraska are public.)  Recently, the for-profit private vertically integrated monopoly structure has begun to break up. Large sectors of the country(but not Colorado) now have competitive markets for electricity supply, independent system operators that match...

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...

Last summer the previous council pushed for reducing lanes on Folsom and other streets to solve some ill-defined bicycling problems by making some untested roadway improvements. The result was a public relations disaster, ending in total reversal. The notion of allowing a large number of cooperative living units in single-family neighborhoods has equivalent potential for disaster, because it could create a high level of uncertainty and negative impacts for existing Boulder residents. The good news is that the council is actually asking for hard information first; the bad news is that there is far more research to be done and understood if the benefits are to be realized without most of the downsides. I’m not opposed to co-ops. In the early ’70s, I lived in a single-family house, owned by a friend, who allowed a number of his friends to live there. We called it a commune, in the style of the time. It worked well for a number of years, mostly because we maintained pretty good relat...

Some municipalization supporters recently did an analysis of Xcel’s Colorado pre-tax profits, based on Xcel’s multi-state corporate filings: Colorado now accounts for nearly half of Xcel’s profits, although our customer base is far smaller than Xcel’s in Minnesota, and even a smaller fraction if you include the other six states where Xcel also provides power. In the eight years from 2004 to 2012, Xcel’s Colorado pre-tax profit more than doubled, even though sales and generation capacity were essentially flat. Amazingly, the same data was presented in a strong article in  redstate.com , a notorious conservative website. (Google “kyle forti xcel colorado” .) Apparently both the left and the right are upset about the increase in Xcel’s Colorado profits. Boulder, of course, is part of Xcel’s profit machine. The same local people calculated that Boulder contributes something like $35 million a year to Xcel’s windfall. This excess is, to some extent, a function of the exorbitant al...

The more detailed question is — should Boulder continue with its current policies that are mostly number driven, that have resulted in concentrating affordable housing in small areas of town, and that have effectively turned over major decisions to unelected people and entities whose interests are not necessarily aligned with the citizens at large? Both proponents and opponents of the proposed development at Lee Hill Drive to house homeless people have legitimate perspectives. The “housing first” concept has apparently worked well for Denver, and concentrating such services in one location improves administrative efficiency. But asking one part of town to absorb large numbers of affordable housing units, as North Boulder has, and now absorb yet another transient population, is both unfair and inappropriate given the city’s stated intent to spread affordable housing throughout the community. The reason this project is not subject to the more typical development review goes back de...

Since the first time I wrote on the financial crisis, I have read almost everything relevant I could find. What really got me going was a call I placed to the Treasury Department in the fall of 2008 during the midst of the crisis to get some very basic mortgage data for a column I was working on. The woman from their Office of Public Information first told me that the information was private, and when I laughed out loud at that ridiculous assertion, she told me that they didn`t have it and I would have to call the Mortgage Bankers Association. Apparently the Treasury was its subsidiary. As former Fed chair Alan Greenspan admitted, he operated as if Wall Street was self-regulating. Ben Bernanke is another case in point. In my opinion, his performance demonstrates how badly things work when financial officials think that little regulation is needed, and that the welfare of banks is more important than the welfare of the citizens. During the run-up to the disaster, both while acting...