Steve Pomerance

 As I write this, there are two competing bills in the Legislature regarding data centers. One promotes them by providing massive tax breaks, while the other tries to address at least some of the impacts.  This conflict exposes the underlying weaknesses of our way of providing infrastructure to serve new development and our failure to use basic economics to make development more self-regulating. The underlying problem that we face is the unwillingness to fully acknowledge and quantify the impacts of more development, and then to charge new development the costs of mitigating those impacts. For example, last year the PUC gave permission to Xcel to pursue massive new investments in renewable energy, including wind, solar and battery storage (and a small gas plant, presumably for additional backup), so as not to miss out on the federal tax credits. Allegedly, two-thirds of this is needed for data centers, with only a small portion because of...

Last week, the  Boulder City Council voted 7-2  to proceed with looking at annexing an area of currently rural land north-east of U.S. 36, called the Area III planning reserve. It’s approximately 500 acres, part private and part owned by the Parks Department, bought decades ago for eventual use as playing fields, etc. The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan states that expanding the city into the Area III-PR “will only be considered if there are priority community needs that cannot be met within the existing Service Area.” Sensibly, the Planning Board voted 4-3 against looking further at this time. The basic argument being made is that we need more housing. More, more and more housing. A friend did a detailed look at coming housing growth inside the Boulder city limits. Here are the numbers: There are about 27 projects at various stages, totaling over 15,000 new units....

I recently read about the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s  discovery of uranium in the rocks in the just-completed Chimney Rock Reservoir .  For background, the Colorado-Big Thompson system (built by the Bureau of Reclamation) was started in the 1930s, some years after the 1922 Colorado River Compact was signed. The C-BT delivers water from the upper Colorado River to cities and farms in the northern Front Range, including Boulder. Much later, Northern built the much smaller Windy Gap reservoir on the Colorado, completed in 1985, which Boulder and other Front Range cities bought into. Windy Gap’s water rights are junior to the C-BT, which is junior to the Compact. Colorado River water constitutes about a third of Boulder’s supply. Northern apparently contemplated early on the idea of building a reservoir on the Front Range to store the water collected in Windy Gap and piped across the mountains. This led to the construction of...

On Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate to look back and try to appreciate the good things that have happened, while at the same time looking forward to what might be. When I was in college, my worst skill was writing, and all through my youth, I really disliked listening to people talking politics. Now, I really appreciate that I have mostly gotten past both those blocks and have the chance to write about our local political scene, though I’m still more interested in policy than politics. For example, I appreciate that Boulder now has its own fiber network, and we won’t have to rely on private providers with their own systems for internet. But regarding the recent contract signed to give ALLO-Communications a 20-year lease, I note that, per a person at the Institute for Local Self Reliance, some of the best systems are municipally operated and are right here on the Front Range, in Loveland, Fort Collins, Estes Park. Maybe next time… On a larger scale, I really appreciate the work of...

What got me started on this topic was a July 21 Hotline from Boulder’s deputy mayor Nicole Speer to the council, city staff and citizens of Boulder discussing the Denver Regional Council of Government’s draft Regional Housing Needs Assessment. This is DRCOG’s attempt to provide a quantitative picture of future growth in the Denver Metro area. Per the quotes that Speer pulled, it says that the region will need 511,000 more housing units by 2050 to accommodate current needs and projected future growth, and that 300,000 of these will need to be affordable to households earning 60% or less of area median income. When I read this email, the first question that came up was, where did these numbers come from? In particular, how does DRCOG know that 511,000 new units will magically meet demand? So I read the full report to see how these numbers were determined. As it turns out, DRCOG hired a consulting company to do the work, and they based their analysis on data provided by the Colorado State...

The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan is an agreement between the Boulder City Council and the County Commissioners that lays out the allowed development across the whole Boulder Valley, including the city of Boulder, the unincorporated areas of Gunbarrel, and the surrounding rural prairie and foothills. The BVCP is updated every five years to reflect the current vision for future growth and development. The Plan includes basic levels of density, use, etc. But the details of city zoning are set by the council, and the county’s are set by the commissioners. The Plan divides the Boulder Valley into four parts: Area I, the actual city of Boulder; Area II, adjacent parcels that are designated for possible annexation once services are available so they can be developed at an urban level; Area III Planning Reserve, about 500-plus acres north of town, including 200+ acres bought for parks, that may be “moved” into Area II; and Area III Rural Preservation, all the rest of the land, which is in...

“1.7 million more people are projected to move to Colorado by 2050. … Yes, you coming here will not make it less affordable for everyone else,” said Rep. Steven Woodrow, in Tuesday’s Denver Post. Woodrow is a Denver Democrat and sponsor of HB24-1313, the transit corridor densification bill that just passed. But survey results indicate that 1.7 million is just a tiny fraction of the demand. And Woodrow apparently doesn’t understand who pays for the costs of such growth. One of the arguments for HB24-1313 is that almost all these new people will move into its transit areas and use rapid transit, like RTD, instead of driving to work. The problem is that RTD’s 2024 budget of $1.246 billion is paid for mostly by sales and other taxes. These taxes are paid by all residents; only 5% of RTD’s budget is paid by fares from the actual riders. Worse, these riders constitute only a very small portion of all commuters.  What happens when a lot more people are added, and instead of a tiny fractio...

House Bill 24-1313, or Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities , which is now at the state Senate, is the successor to the pro-growth bill that failed to pass at the end of last year’s session. That bill generated a lot of substantive objections, especially over the loss of local control over how much and what kind of growth Colorado communities wanted. Unfortunately, this 70-page bill is not much better. And it’s so complicated that just the administrative costs will be substantial. Here’s my attempt to identify some of its many issues. This bill basically attempts to leverage communities with significant transit service to allow massive densification, up to 40 units per acre, of areas within a half mile of certain transit stops. That’s way above the typical low-density neighborhood with maybe four to six units per acre. It threatens to cut off certain federal highway funds or legally force communities to comply if its goals are not achieved. The bill exempts many areas from its h...

Colorado’s “housing crisis” is essentially unsolvable by simply building more market-rate housing, at least if we care about our quality of life here in Colorado. According to a 2023 survey of 1,000 Americans, discussed in a recent Forbes story, Denver took first place as the most desired place to live. Seventeen percent of the respondents picked it first; that represents 58 million people nationwide. Even if only 1 in 5 had the means to move here, that’s 11.6 million people, nearly tripling Colorado’s population. Do we want 2-3 times as many people in Colorado, with the attendant crowds, traffic jams, air pollution, water shortages, etc.? How about mandatory reservation systems requiring weeks-ahead planning just to visit mountain areas? Rocky Mountain National Park, Brainard Lake, Mt. Blue Sky, and Quandary Peak already require reservations. Great Sand Dunes may soon, as visitation has about doubled in the last 10 years. What about going skiing, but with even longer lift lines and bi...

After my column on the Zenzinger/Kirkmeyer land use bill appeared two weeks ago, those legislators told me that the draft they sent me was just for my review and was not for publication. This was not clear to me in their original communication. Anyway, I apologized to them. And, whatever their bill’s flaws, it was way better than the latest “housing crisis” bill that I discuss here. Representatives Steven Woodrow and Iman Jodeh’s bill, HB24-1313, sets housing density standards for “transit areas,” those within a half mile of a transit corridor station. It first incentivizes this increase in density, but if the community doesn’t comply, it forces them to do it anyway. All of this will be supervised by Polis’s Department of Local Affairs. Their bill starts with the state demographer making a precise forecast of Colorado’s growth — “ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED (more) PEOPLE BY 2050.” That’s about a 30% increase, around 1% per year compounded. This is obviously based on ...

The Denver Post recently carried an opinion column by state Senators Barbara Kirkmeyer and Rachel Zenzinger discussing their “response to Colorado’s housing crisis.” Their commendable bi-partisan effort put in more thought than much of the discussion to date. But they ran into the same problems that others have: What is the source of the problem? How big is it? What should we require to be done? How do you respond to Coloradans who don’t want a lot more growth? Their draft Bill hinges on how to define “housing needs.” The problem is that the various legitimate possible definitions are very far apart numerically. For example, per a Forbes survey, 17% of respondents nationwide said that the Denver area would be their first choice to move to. That’s around 57 million people. Even if only one in ten of them had the resources to do it, they would about double Colorado’s population. Should we immediately double our housing supply? Colorado’s births over deaths statistics paint a much differe...

From 1950 to 1960, Boulder’s population doubled from around 20,000 to almost 40,000. This led to Boulder’s most important actions to preserve our natural surroundings: the Blue Line, which limited the City to providing water only below a certain altitude and thereby preserved our mountain backdrop; the Open Space program, which bought land to protect its natural qualities and the species that live there; and the 55-foot building height limit, which allowed us to see above our human-made developments and enjoy the views of the sky and the Flatirons. (Unfortunately, CU is not subject to Boulder’s zoning laws, and so builds as high as it wants.) We now have a population of over 108,000 people, almost triple the 1960 population level. And we are not alone. The Denver metro area has gone from just over 800,000 residents in 1960 to nearly 3 million now, over three and a half times as many. The earth’s population grew from around 3 billion in 1960 to over 8 billion, and could hit 10 billion i...

By the time you read this, the City Council will have decided whether to repeal Boulder’s Residential Growth Management System. This piece of our city code addresses how many housing units are allowed to be built in a year. It has significant exemptions, like for affordable housing units and whole projects with at least 35% affordable units. Thus, it provides an incentive for developers to include more affordable units. The reason this is an issue is that the Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the “housing crisis” required them to pass a law last session that forbids local governments from limiting the annual number of residential building permits. They called such restrictions “anti-growth laws.” But the council’s concern is misguided: Boulder’s RGMS is NOT in violation of this state law, simply because our current RGMS exempts affordable housing units. According to BRC 9-14-8 “Exemptions,” the City can approve an UNLIMITED number of permanently affordable units by righ...

On Sunday morning, I hiked up to Anemone Point, about 1,000 feet above the west end of Pearl Street. On top, I could see the Arapahoe Peaks to the west and the horizon to the east. Amazingly, it was crystal clear. This was a delightful comparison to how it looks normally, with the horrendous yellow and brown smog that’s now endemic along the Front Range. So, I wondered: Why is Polis now pushing for Colorado to get $1 billion ( per the Denver Post ) in federal subsidies to support becoming the nation’s quantum tech hub? Why make things worse by encouraging yet more job growth, adding pressure on the housing market, while increasing traffic, CO2 emissions and air pollution, and further stressing our limited water supply along with the state’s budget with expected tax breaks from Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade? (They can’t seem to resist giving away our money.) This would be on top of the new Polis 2026 Roadmap that pushes again for massive market-pr...

I guess that, with my math and engineering background, I’m always looking at the numbers. These recent news stories got me going: On Dec. 2, The Denver Post covered RTD’s report on its July/August  “Zero Fare for Cleaner Air” program.  Allowing people to ride for free in July and August cost RTD $15.2 million in lost fares and other expenses. It reduced emissions by more than 6 million pounds (3,000 tons). But Colorado’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Roadmap calls for a CO2 emissions reduction of 12.7 million tons per year by 2030. The Zero Fare program’s reduction, if done for a full year, would reduce emissions by only 0.14% of what’s needed. This reduction cost is around $5,000 per ton, about 27 times the social cost of carbon dioxide, currently $185 per ton, according to  Resources for the Future’s 2022 report .  Zero Fare reduced vehicle miles traveled by 145,000 miles per day, almost unnoticeable compared to the Denver area total of around 84 million miles per...