Steve Pomerance

I follow the Boulder City Council’s Hotline, so even when I’m staying elsewhere, like last week up in Dillon, I’m kept aware of some of what is going on at the city. For those of you who don’t follow it, the Hotline is the public email service that council members and city staff use to communicate with each other, and which anyone can sign up to receive. What has struck me over recent years is the almost total lack of substantive commentary by council members on the actions that the council is considering. The Hotline is not legal for the council members to use for detailed back-and-forth discussions; those are supposed to take place at open public council meetings. But, other than council member Mark Wallach, who does an excellent job of it, almost no council members ever raise substantive issues with the staff presentations, or bring up issues that were not addressed or need further discussion. The Council Agenda Committee used to do in-depth substantive reviews of agenda materials. ...

I’d like to acknowledge Boulder City Council members Bob Yates and Tara Winer for showing up at the discussion of the proposed homeless day center at 1844 Folsom. Per the Camera’s story on Wednesday, many residents of Horizon West next door raised a lot of legitimate concerns. What’s interesting to me is that the process for selection of the site did not involve talking to the residents of the various possible neighborhoods prior to the site selection. This put the city staff person in charge in the unenviable position of having to justify this lack of early input; that criticism should properly be directed at the council members who approve the site selection criteria as well as the process. This process will no doubt be repeated when some neighbors wake up one morning to find out that the house next door has been purchased to become an addict recovery home, with something like eight recovering addicts and five staff members, as the city was planning to do some months ago. I realize t...

 Many of us have been following the seemingly endless debate about how Boulder should treat the “homeless.” Unfortunately, the results of the judge’s recent decision in the lawsuit filed against the City of Boulder’s homeless policies were difficult to discern because the ruling was 35 pages long. I’m not a lawyer, but I did read it twice. Basically, the ruling was not on the substance of the issues, but on whether to dismiss the complaints. The judge dismissed two of the three complaints in full, and half of the third, leaving only the issue of homeless people’s legal ability to sleep in outdoor public spaces to be decided in the trial. In the process of reading it, I saw an angle that might get the city the freedom to do what I think should be done — to make a real effort to provide housing and other help for people who live here in Boulder and for whatever reason have become homeless, while, at the same time, not having to provide for more and more people who have become homeles...