Steve Pomerance

Last Sunday, June 8, the Denver Post had an extensive article on the  “Data Center Boom”  in Colorado. Data centers can be small, in nondescript buildings, and support our use of internet and emails. Or they can be huge, like the ones supporting the use of artificial intelligence. Per the article, Xcel currently estimates that the current requests for data centers will increase electric use by 1,923 megawatts over the next 6 years. That’s enough to power 2.1 million homes; it is an increase of 31% above our current power supply. The total requests by 2031, not all of which will come online, is estimated to be 6,181 megawatts, which would nearly double Xcel’s current electric power needs in Colorado. Generating this massive increase in electricity requires either burning lots more fossil fuels, with attendant greenhouse gas emissions, or installing a huge number of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries for storage or building nuclear plants. Cooling the da...

The Legislature, the Governor, and Advance Colorado and Colorado Concern, the groups behind Initiatives 50 and 108, struggled to write a bill in the special session to reduce property taxes further than the 2024 session’s SB24-233. The stimulus was the increased property tax burden that resulted from rapidly increasing property values in many areas of the state. They accomplished that goal, a bill was passed and the groups pulled their initiatives from the ballot. That was good work. But unfortunately, there are still some fundamental problems with the tax structure that have not been addressed. So, I expect that these issues will reemerge down the road. Our local and state governmental entities are mostly funded in five fundamental ways: income/capital gains tax, sales tax, property tax, fees and Federal grants. Fees may be for operating costs (charged per unit and based on cost, like for water treatment and delivery) or for capital facilities needed because of growth (charged based o...

What will happen to us chickens if our lot is redeveloped? “We are chickens who live in a family’s backyard and supply them with eggs, to help them deal with rising costs. If the politicians have their way, their lot may be redeveloped with ADUs or condos or whatever. What will happen to us? And what will happen to the garden that they have so carefully nurtured that supplies them with clean, locally grown food?” “I’m a mouse that lives in the weeds at the edge of a flood channel. If the lots owned by people upstream are turned into buildings and concrete, making almost all the land surface impervious to water, flood levels could dramatically increase and the city’s flood control work will become inadequate, and my burrow will be washed out. Where will I go then?” “I’m a wise old owl and have suffered from the ever-increasing air pollution due to excessive traffic growth. I wonder how the humans I live near will feel when their taxes go up to cover RTD’s increasing costs of supplying m...

Proposition CC, on the ballot this November, would allow the Colorado state government to keep all tax revenues above the population-plus-inflation limit approved by Referendum C in 2005, which got rid of the ratchet effect of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR. The state forecasts that Prop CC would allow the state to keep about $310 million for 2019-2020 and $342 million for 2020-2021 that otherwise would be refunded to the taxpayers. House Bill 1257, which put Prop CC on the ballot, says this money is for public schools, higher education, roads, bridges and transit. As KC Becker, Speaker of the House and a Boulder representative, commented in The Colorado Sun, “Is this the long-term fix to any of the state’s long-term issues? No, it’s not,” but “I think it’s a necessary, important part of it.” But the real problem is that most of Colorado’s huge unfunded needs are caused by growth and development not paying its way, and Prop CC fails to implement any of the necessary fixes....

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...

This year Boulder will be updating its Transportation Master Plan, so now is the time to focus on what needs to be done. The key fact is that we are past the inflection point on the hockey stick-shaped graph of congestion versus traffic. In other words, we’ve used up the capacity of our roads, so a little more traffic produces a whole lot more congestion. Just look at the huge numbers of cars stacked up for long stretches on Colo. 93, U.S. 36, Arapahoe Road, the Diagonal Highway, etc., in the morning or evening, and the jams during lunch hour in many places around town. Also, many local interior roads that had no real congestion some years ago now have delays through multiple signal cycles at many times during the day. Having just reviewed the current 2014 TMP, and having been involved in the original plan and its updates, as well as having studied some innovative strategies in other places, here are some suggestions for the city council and staff: First, set standards that you...

This concept, popularized by Garret Hardin in the 1960s, discusses a community owned pasture that is becoming overgrazed because, although each additional cow on the land benefited that cow’s owner, the end result was damage to everyone. In other words, the cumulative effect of decisions that may benefit given individuals may irreversibly harm the whole community. This problem manifests itself in as many ways as we have “commons.” At the most global level, our common atmosphere has provided us with the stable climate that allowed humans to flourish. Yet our extra cows — our individual greenhouse gas emissions — are in the process of destabilizing our climate, threatening to extinguish much of life on Earth. Locally, we have many commons: wonderful open space, great mountain views, mostly non-gridlocked street system, lots of parks and recreation centers, good schools, multiple bikeways, some permanently affordable housing, accessible libraries, peaceful and uncongested neighbor...

Last Friday morning, I was asked by some folks to take a look at the details of Proposition 110, the 20-year 0.62 percent state sales tax increase that would fund transportation projects. In the portions of the proposed law that would give counties and cities 40 percent of the revenues (with half going to each) I noticed the following phrase, “(1) After paying the costs of the Colorado state patrol and any other costs of the department (CDOT) exclusive of highway construction, highway improvements, or highway maintenance, that are appropriated by the general assembly …,” followed by the allocation rules for the counties and cities. So it’s clear, this phrase is embedded in the current statutes, and the drafters of Proposition 110 simply included it and made it apply to Proposition 110’s revenues. Then I looked at the portion of Proposition 110 that allocated 45 percent of the proceeds to the state. I was surprised to find that this phrase was specifically removed. And it was not ...

Some seriously flawed initiatives to pay for transportation and schools are on the ballot: Proposition 110 raises our taxes for 20 years, but generates only enough money to meet a fraction of the growth-related transportation needs generated during that time. Proposition 109 borrows $3.5 billion for roads, to be paid off by diverting our existing taxes from other uses. Amendment 73 constitutionally changes our tax rates and raises an excessive $1.6 billion per year to fund education costs, yet completely ignores the almost half a billion dollars per year cost of building new schools to address our growing population. None of these initiatives makes any attempt to address the underlying cause of these huge funding gaps: Colorado’s growth is not paying its way. If we actually required new development to fully mitigate its impacts, most of the need for these tax-and-debt increases would go away. I realize that the idea of requiring developers to solve the problems that they create i...

In 1858, Chief Niwot, Boulder’s first real environmentalist (that we know about), told the European settlers the area was cursed: “People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty.” We are seeing Chief Niwot’s curse play out. The arguments for more and more, whether based on the specious need for continual growth and change or on the magical logic that more people means less total impact, drown out what should be obvious — there are fundamental constraints on how many people and jobs can be jammed into the Boulder Valley and still have it be a desirable place. Growth plus climate change have made our water supply much less secure. Boulder has three water sources: the Arapahoe Glacier area via the Lakewood Pipeline, the Middle Boulder Creek drainage via Barker Reservoir, and the Colorado River via the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT). Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Lower Basin states (CA, AZ, NV) are ent...

I want to catch up on a number of Boulder topics where significant progress has been made, and to acknowledge the majority of the City Council for making this happen. I’m serving on the elections working group. In just two meetings we’ve resolved the basic issues around the municipal initiative process that was upset by ballot issue 2Q. It appears that we will have a process ready to be put on the ballot as a charter amendment this November. It will be similar to the one that existed prior to 2Q but with some significant improvements. We haven’t started on the effort to shine light onto “dark money.” But given the council’s clear direction to push the envelope on this one, I am confident that we can come up some good strategies that will reveal the big money donors behind the ads that push certain candidates but avoid saying the magic words “vote for” or “vote against” that would trigger their being regulated. The council majority has kept its promise to increase the jobs-housing...

The situation is depressingly simple – new development imposes costs that it doesn’t pay for. So either the rest of us pick up the tab, or the situation gets worse. To unpack this a bit, every new employee requires housing, which pushes up housing prices. We are at the point now where over 50% of new employees would need a very significant financial help to live in Boulder, or even in the rest of the county. So you understand the math, if the average new employee in a particular type of business requires 100 sq. ft. of floor space, and it costs $100,000 to buy down the price of a new housing unit to make it affordable for that average worker, that’s $100 per sq. ft. And per Keyser Martsen Associates, a very well respected California firm that has done numerous such studies, the actual cost to provide affordable housing for new office workers in Boulder is $129.49 per sq. ft. (as of two years ago), with other types of uses varying from slightly higher to considerably lower. The cu...

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...

Relative to  my last column  on the flaws in the site review process, on Wednesday  the Camera covered  the Boulder City Council’s “workshopping” of a ballot item to extend the current capital improvements tax. This tax funded, for example, the rebuilding of the civic center area between city hall and the library. What caught my eye was a failed attempt by council members Bob Yates, Jan Burton (who is running for re-election), and Andrew Shoemaker to remove $2 million of the funds targeted for replacing Fire Station No. 3 at Arapahoe and 30th, and instead spend the citizens’ tax money to make operational the “arts cinema” that the developer of the Pearl West building promised during site review, but allegedly does not now have the funds to complete. This hole in the site review process has been known about for years, so why hasn’t it been fixed? So it’s clear, Station No. 3 is undersized to cover all the growth in east Boulder, and is too close to the Boulder C...