Steve Pomerance

This November, Boulderites will vote for mayor. It’s important to remember that the whole city council, including the mayor, will still vote on all ordinances, resolutions and motions. The mayor’s most visible role will still be running the meetings. But an elected mayor could make a big difference in how meetings are prepared for and how outreach is handled. Improving both processes would improve both how Boulder’s government is perceived by the citizens and the quality of the council’s decisions. An example is the recent decision by the council to allow e-bikes on certain Open Space trails. The vote was 8-0 to allow e-bikes. From council members’ lack of response to the strong majority of speakers who testified against allowing e-bikes, it appeared that council members had made up their minds before the meeting. So, testifying was apparently a waste of time. (I spoke, and the experience was like talking to a wall.) What difference could an elected mayor have made? For example, he/she...

How should we elect our mayor? The current Boulder City Council is likely to push for charter changes to shift our city elections to even years, so it makes sense to also rethink the process of electing the mayor that was voted on in 2020. That change necessitated altering councilmembers’ terms to address the shift from nine to eight councilmembers. But it also required indicating how the mayor would be elected. The charter language now specifies, somewhat generically, that “The election shall be conducted by ranked choice (instant runoff) voting.” I suspect that most people voting for the change to direct election of mayor had not thought about what this language really means or what the alternatives are. Besides, it was clear at the time that the proponents of the direct election of mayor had not thought this through; their ballot issue ended up being completely rewritten by the city. Therefore, in my opinion, it makes sense to look at the alternatives as to how this voting wil...

  By Lisa Morzel, Cindy Carlisle, Allyn Feinberg, Crystal Gray, Spense Havlick, Steve Pomerance, Gwen Dooley, BJ Miller, Phil Stern   We are former Boulder City Council members, who served from 4 to 21 years each on Council (85 years collectively). We also are knowledgeable about the issues and history of CU South.  We encourage Boulder citizens to vote YES on Ballot Initiative 302 in the upcoming city election. We read the recent guest opinion by five mayors regarding the recent annexation agreement of CU South between the City and CU. We, as they, want to ensure that our residents are fully protected from the risks associated with floods, want opportunities for a range of housing options that actually are affordable, and want to safeguard in perpetuity the unique ecosystems and species on our Open Space. In our view, the current annexation agreement is unacceptable and has many flaws, both from the process and content perspectives. Some major flaws include: The ...

A number of people have asked me about this year’s bumper crop of ballot measures. Here’s my brief take. The big money ones are Amendment B, repealing the Gallagher Amendment; Proposition 116, reducing the state income tax; and Proposition 117, requiring voter approval for certain new state enterprises. The argument for repealing Gallagher started with some small districts that are predominantly residential and where property values have not risen like in the majority of the state. So Gallagher’s mechanism, which lowers residential property taxes to keep a statewide balance between residential and commercial taxes, has cut into their revenues. But eliminating Gallagher will just raise everyone else’s residential property taxes even faster. The solution needs to be focused on solving the small districts’ problems, not just throwing out what has worked so well in keeping residential and commercial taxes in balance. Prop 117 requires voter approval for many fee-funded “enterprises.” This ...

The “Our Mayor, Our Choice” ballot measure failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. But the Boulder City Council voted 5-4 to put it on, anyway. The council fixed a number of problems that both the petitioners and city staff had ignored. But the council failed to address the fundamental problems that a directly elected mayor will face within our governmental structure, as well as the serious flaws with this measure’s mandated “ranked choice voting.” Ranked choice voting (RCV) is a system where the voters rank order the candidates using a grid on the ballot that has the candidates’ names down the side and first, second, third, etc. across the top. Voters fill in the ovals in the grid to “rank” order the various candidates. Obviously, this could get tedious and mistake-prone with lots of candidates, which we’ll likely have, because there are no restrictions on who can run. Worse, we could easily end up with a mayor who is not the people’s optimal choice. Imagine a ra...

The role of the mayor in Boulder’s government has undergone some significant changes over the 30 years I’ve been involved in local politics, even though the basic form of government has remained the same — the weak mayor-strong city manager system. Although the structure generally works well, sometimes it needs a few fixes. Many of the current concerns over the selection of the mayor stem from people thinking that the mayor has a strong (or sometimes excessive) influence over what the council works on and the outcomes of the meetings. Similar concerns existed when I was elected to the council. Our solution was to create the three-member Council Agenda Committee (CAC) to work with the city manager on the agenda, a job previously relegated to the mayor, with help from the deputy mayor. You might not think that simply adding one more person would make any difference, but at least for a number of years the CAC worked very well. The reasons our CAC worked were multiple: First, the thi...