Steve Pomerance

The stimulus to write it came from a recent article in the Camera about how the developer of Pearl West – the huge, totally out of place office building at 10 th and Pearl – didn’t have the money to finish the theater that was promised when the site review was approved by the planning board. How is is that a developer could promise something but could not be held accountable?. The problem is that there is a fundamental flaw in Boulder’s planning process. Developers of almost all projects, other than the very small ones, are required to go through the “site review” process, where their project is supposed to meet thousands of words of incredibly vague criteria. But there are no minimum rights or maximum limits that would properly bound the project’s size and impacts. So the only guaranteed outcome is a giant fight. And the staff’s paranoia about violating someone’s 5 th Amendment rights prohibiting the “taking of private property without just compensation” has left the planning ...

The good news is that the Boulder City Council will begin discussing growth issues at the council meeting this Tuesday, Sept. 2, and there is talk about having a study session on development in October. Unfortunately, study sessions work only if city staff has sufficient direction beforehand to provide the needed information and analysis. But what direction should they go? Vic Fruehauf, a well-known Boulderite who started Fruehauf’s Nursery and was on the Boulder Planning Board, used to say, “If you don’t know your destination, any path will do.” He would frequently repeat variations on this theme during attempts to revise the land use regulations during the 1990’s. His point is even more applicable today: How can the city sort out all the growth-related issues when the big-picture goal is neither well-defined nor agreed upon? We don’t lack for advocates on all sides. For example, some are pushing for more and denser housing, arguing that it will be affordable even though the mar...

I went to the City Council meeting on Tuesday evening to ask the council to call up the decisions made by the Planning and Landmarks boards regarding the buildings that will replace the former Daily Camera offices. These buildings will occupy the block between Walnut and Pearl from 11th Street to roughly to where 10th Street would be. They will be precedent-setting for our downtown, but the decision process and the council’s struggles with whether to engage are symptomatic of the flaws in how we deal with our downtown. There were a number of other people who also asked that this project be reviewed and that the final decisions be made by our elected officials, and not just the appointed boards. The council spent three hours (unprecedented in my experience) making their decision, 5-3, to not call it up. One council member recused himself for reasons not revealed, and the mayor acknowledged that he was happy that he wasn’t the deciding vote. The board decisions were also close: The P...

The Boulder City Council did the right thing last Tuesday night. They rejected another attempt to amend Boulder’s charter to allow executive sessions (meetings closed to the public), and considered a proposal to allow a committee of two council members to work in private on negotiating property deals, like the proposed purchase of Section 16, the southwest corner of Rocky Flats Wildlife Preserve. Currently the city charter prohibits closed meetings of the council or any of its committees, except that it allows two council members to work together confidentially while doing the evaluations of the city manager, city attorney and municipal judge. This proposal would be a logical extension, and a reasonable way to explore allowing the council to participate in delicate negotiations, but without threatening Boulder’s invaluable open government requirements. The council also correctly refused to put another attempt to alter Boulder’s 55-foot height limit on the ballot. This latest prop...

Last Sunday`s Daily Camera lead story discussed many of the cutting edge initiatives that Boulder citizens have taken over more than half a century to protect the quality of life in Boulder from “What might have been.” These include the Blue Line that restricts water delivery and thus development to below 5,750 feet, the Open Space program that protects sensitive habitat, the 55 foot height limit that protects our views, the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan that limits most development to within the city limits, and so on. Because of these efforts, Boulder is a very desirable place to live. And the inevitable effect of this is that the price of land, housing, and commercial property is higher than in less desirable places. The pressure on housing prices is further amplified by the presence of the University of Colorado, whose growth is, to some extent, driven by the internal economic benefits of an expanding research agenda with the attendant desire to house even more students, ...