Steve Pomerance

The Boulder City Council is considering forming a Downtown Development Authority (DDA). This entity would be run by downtown property owners and have the power to use tax-increment financing (TIF) to fund improvements in downtown. The theory is that the DDA’s improvements would increase property and/or sales tax from this area, so it should be able to collect this increment to finance public improvements. The DDA’s board would make the decisions within the limits of Boulder’s zoning and other regulations, and state law. DDA’s are potentially useful in areas where there is a lot of development potential and attendant public infrastructure needs. But that is not the case in Boulder, where our downtown is mostly built out, and whose business success is more a function of the quality of the experience of residents, tourists and employees who come there but live outside of this area. A significant concern is that what the downtown property owners want may not be what the rest of Boulder...

Let’s start with the city budget. In the last 10 years, Boulder’s budget went up 85% — 39% after adjusting for inflation — mostly in the last 5-6 years. And we had almost no population growth. My first thought was that there must have been a backlog of capital projects to be done. But then a friend did an analysis of the city’s staffing levels. This is measured in “full-time equivalent” staff members, or FTEs. Here’s what he found: In 2019, Boulder had 1,252 FTE’s per 100,000 residents. In 2025, we had 1,493 FTE’s per 100,000. That’s an increase of 19% per capita in six years! And during that time, the city stopped running the library; that accounted for a decrease in need of approximately 78 FTEs. For comparison, Fort Collins has only about three-fourths as many FTEs per 100,000. Are our council members even aware of this massive increase in money spent and staff hired? For a test, some months ago, I sent my analysis to an apparently knowledgeable council member. After clarifyin...

The Boulder city council is considering putting the current General Fund 0.15% sales tax, which expires at the end of 2024, on this November’s ballot for renewal. There seems to be a general agreement among council members that they need the money. However, a citizen group gathered enough signatures for a ballot measure dedicating this tax renewal to the arts. The council authorized a survey to be done, allegedly to determine what level of support there is in the community for the renewal as undedicated funds. City staff hired a California firm to design and perform the polling. It was sent out in June via email and text.  I received the text and was concerned that it was spam, because the text just said it was from “the City.” So, I asked, and city staff said it was legitimate. But before I got started, someone read me some of the questions. The questions made it sound like the survey was a “push poll,” an attempt to influence the voters, as I believe occurred some months ago on o...

The Library District proposal, with its huge property tax increase, had serious problems with both its structure and funding. But worse, it has taken a relatively simple issue and turned it into yet another polarized debate. Yesterday I watched the video of Tuesday’s council meeting, I saw councilmembers struggling to come to agreement on even the basic LD issues. It became clear to me that there is no solid reasoning to support the creation of a Library District (LD). Every significant desire can be better or more easily met with actions that can be taken by the city on its own. What I find irritating is that these alternative actions have not been explored. It’s as if the “good idea” of a LD has taken over the thinking. What should have been done is to identify the actual policy goals, and then explore the options to achieving them, with both pros and cons fully analyzed. Here’s a start: Money:   Fundamentally, the advocates want the library to have more money to spend on providi...

As Boulder’s election season cranks up, there is a lot of noise around Boulder’s sacred cow of affordable housing. Fast-growth candidates seem to assert that building more market rate housing will somehow solve “the problem.” Slow-growth candidates seem to be more measured and consider other dimensions to the issue. But the problem is still ill-defined: Is this something that can actually be solved, or a concern that will persist irrespective of the actions taken, or a surrogate for other agendas, or what? Leaving aside this lack of clarity, the main difficulty we face is that our current affordable housing program relies financially to a large extent on growth of one kind or another. Each new housing development must provide 25% on-site affordable units or pay fees-in-lieu for off-site units. Business development pays jobs-housing linkage fees that cover a bit less than a quarter of the cost of providing housing for workers who need it. A minor portion comes from local taxes and ...

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...

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 ...

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...

The Boulder city government is proposing to promote the development of a new “boutique” hotel on the southwest corner of Broadway and University by building a two-story parking garage underneath it. Apparently the overall objective is to solve the Hill’s continuing problems, identified as lack of parking, lack of year-round business, and lack of an “anchor.” Here’s what I’ve found out to date: Currently, the site has 62 public parking spaces plus 26 private spaces, all of which will be eliminated. The underground lot will have 204 spaces. Three spaces are reserved for the University Hill General Improvement District, and 32 for the hotel. So there will be 169 left for the public, a net gain of 81 spaces. (If hotel patrons occupying the 173 rooms bring more than 32 cars, this net gain is reduced.) The public cost for the garage, including some sidewalk area improvements, is $20 million for construction, plus the $2 million UHGID Pleasant Street lot, which is being donated. So the ...

On Tuesday night the City Council had a useful discussion on possible sales tax ballot items for the open space and transportation departments and the general fund. Their discussions yielded significant improvements over the proposal that was floated at previous meetings. And many council members have finally acknowledged that there are some serious problems coming for the city’s transportation system that are not going to be solved by a few million additional dollars a year. Paramount of these is dealing with the impacts of growth and shifting funding to some form of user fee. But there was still the vestige of the idea that, just because Boulder voters re-approved in 1997 a 0.33 percent sales tax for open space, now set to expire in 2018, that they will meekly accept a new 0.33 percent sales tax that is partially for other purposes. Boulder voters are much more focused on how their money will be spent and whether there is real value to be gained, than whether the new taxes add up...