Steve Pomerance

 Given the pressing need for real change and reform in how Boulder’s government runs, here are some specific recommendations for how to vote. The budget situation is a mess — way too many staff hired over the last decade, using up financial resources that are necessary for long-term maintenance of our buildings; overly expensive projects like Alpine-Balsam and the South Boulder Creek dam; etc. The policy process is also in need of real reform. The current approach of using staff memos that have had no critical review plus lengthy council member comments with no real integration leaves the decisions under-informed. This is because the council’s agenda committee provides essentially no input to structure the information ahead of time. The public input process is fatally flawed. Surveys are hopelessly biased; public comments at meetings are ignored; and community experts are almost never invited to participate directly. All this (and much more) demands that we get new blood on...

Colorado’s “housing crisis” has been a rallying cry for more and more development over the last few years. But looking at the reality yields a much more nuanced picture. I finally found the underlying document produced by the state’s Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), where the “housing crisis” was discussed in detail. Published in September 2025, it’s called “Colorado’s Housing Shortfall: An Estimate and Review of Existing Studies.” There’s no direct link, but it can be found at “Colorado’s Housing Shortfall 9/2/25,” and then downloaded per the link at the bottom of this article. It’s worth the look, in my opinion. It points out that there has been a definite increase in the cost of housing, and argues that this is due to a “shortfall” in construction rates, elevated interest rates and rising construction costs. Interesting, what’s ignored is the almost total lack of regulatory efforts to control prices, as well as the obvious constraints on water, road capacity, open space, neighbor...

Note: This column has been updated to reflect that six cities are a part of the lawsuit against the state to protect local authority. A key story in Monday’s Camera was about Lafayette having joined Aurora, Arvada, Glendale, Greenwood Village, and Westminster in a critically important lawsuit that will decide whether home rule cities, including Boulder, get to determine their own land use, or if the Legislature and governor can dictate how to zone and manage our cities. I’ve put a fair amount of time into researching this issue; here’s what I’ve found to date: The Colorado Constitution allows cities to become “home rule” and in effect, self-governing by the citizens passing a charter defining their form of government, with certain basic structural rules. Article XX, Sec.6 provides that the laws of home rule cities “supersede … any state law in conflict therewith.” The case law refining this system started in the late 1800s on topics relevant to all cities, like how courts operated. The...

I read  Proposition 131  for the first time many weeks ago. The concepts in it were very appealing: open primaries and ranked choice voting (RCV) for candidates. But something didn’t feel right. I understand that no voting system is perfect. But identifiable problems should be fixed. Here are my thoughts on the major ones. Prop 131 creates open primaries by allowing the candidates selected by political parties and qualifying unaffiliated candidates to be listed on a single primary ballot. In June each voter gets a single vote, and the top four vote-getters go on the November ballot. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that a particular party’s candidate will make the general election.  Then in November, voters get to rank these four candidates. Using the standard RCV process, the one with the fewest first-place votes is dropped, and those voters’ second choices become their first choices, and the process is repeated until there’s a winner. ...

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...

“1.7 million more people are projected to move to Colorado by 2050. … Yes, you coming here will not make it less affordable for everyone else,” said Rep. Steven Woodrow, in Tuesday’s Denver Post. Woodrow is a Denver Democrat and sponsor of HB24-1313, the transit corridor densification bill that just passed. But survey results indicate that 1.7 million is just a tiny fraction of the demand. And Woodrow apparently doesn’t understand who pays for the costs of such growth. One of the arguments for HB24-1313 is that almost all these new people will move into its transit areas and use rapid transit, like RTD, instead of driving to work. The problem is that RTD’s 2024 budget of $1.246 billion is paid for mostly by sales and other taxes. These taxes are paid by all residents; only 5% of RTD’s budget is paid by fares from the actual riders. Worse, these riders constitute only a very small portion of all commuters.  What happens when a lot more people are added, and instead of a tiny fractio...

House Bill 24-1313, or Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities , which is now at the state Senate, is the successor to the pro-growth bill that failed to pass at the end of last year’s session. That bill generated a lot of substantive objections, especially over the loss of local control over how much and what kind of growth Colorado communities wanted. Unfortunately, this 70-page bill is not much better. And it’s so complicated that just the administrative costs will be substantial. Here’s my attempt to identify some of its many issues. This bill basically attempts to leverage communities with significant transit service to allow massive densification, up to 40 units per acre, of areas within a half mile of certain transit stops. That’s way above the typical low-density neighborhood with maybe four to six units per acre. It threatens to cut off certain federal highway funds or legally force communities to comply if its goals are not achieved. The bill exempts many areas from its h...

I recently read about a group in the Denver area called Citizens Against Utility Abuse (CAUA). Their immediate focus is on the deal that cities that have granted Xcel franchises have received regarding undergrounding their power lines. All such franchises apparently have essentially the same terms as Boulder’s franchise does, which states, “The Company (Xcel) shall budget and allocate an annual amount, equivalent to one percent (1%) of the preceding year’s Electric Gross Revenues (what Boulder ratepayers paid Xcel for electricity), for the purpose of undergrounding its existing overhead electric distribution facilities located in City Streets…” plus details. The group’s complaint is that equivalent undergrounding is not available in areas that don’t have franchises. (A franchise gives Xcel exclusive rights to serve electricity for periods up to 20 years.) Xcel makes money from undergrounding; the funds Xcel invests earn the same high return as if invested in power plants or transmiss...

My thanks to both the Daily Camera and the Denver Post for publishing my opinion piece in last Sunday’s editions. It was quite long; their indulgence was much appreciated. Also, apologies to former Denver Mayor Hancock; I misspelled his name. I received many emails on this, almost all in support of limiting growth in Colorado. One raised the concern that the “buy-down” program (exchanging down payment assistance for limiting future price increases) would add more housing units. I should have made it clear that this program targets existing units, so it won’t add more.   I thought I’d expand on what the 1,024 Coloradans said in the survey I discussed. The full survey is at  https://coloradosprawl.com/ polls/  and the article on it is at  www.snowbrains.com  entitled “Survey finds majority of Coloradans are unhappy with the state’s rapid population growth.”   Here are some of the survey’s questions:   “The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that C...

Colorado’s “housing crisis” is essentially unsolvable by simply building more market-rate housing, at least if we care about our quality of life here in Colorado. According to a 2023 survey of 1,000 Americans, discussed in a recent Forbes story, Denver took first place as the most desired place to live. Seventeen percent of the respondents picked it first; that represents 58 million people nationwide. Even if only 1 in 5 had the means to move here, that’s 11.6 million people, nearly tripling Colorado’s population. Do we want 2-3 times as many people in Colorado, with the attendant crowds, traffic jams, air pollution, water shortages, etc.? How about mandatory reservation systems requiring weeks-ahead planning just to visit mountain areas? Rocky Mountain National Park, Brainard Lake, Mt. Blue Sky, and Quandary Peak already require reservations. Great Sand Dunes may soon, as visitation has about doubled in the last 10 years. What about going skiing, but with even longer lift lines and bi...

After my column on the Zenzinger/Kirkmeyer land use bill appeared two weeks ago, those legislators told me that the draft they sent me was just for my review and was not for publication. This was not clear to me in their original communication. Anyway, I apologized to them. And, whatever their bill’s flaws, it was way better than the latest “housing crisis” bill that I discuss here. Representatives Steven Woodrow and Iman Jodeh’s bill, HB24-1313, sets housing density standards for “transit areas,” those within a half mile of a transit corridor station. It first incentivizes this increase in density, but if the community doesn’t comply, it forces them to do it anyway. All of this will be supervised by Polis’s Department of Local Affairs. Their bill starts with the state demographer making a precise forecast of Colorado’s growth — “ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED (more) PEOPLE BY 2050.” That’s about a 30% increase, around 1% per year compounded. This is obviously based on ...

The Denver Post recently carried an opinion column by state Senators Barbara Kirkmeyer and Rachel Zenzinger discussing their “response to Colorado’s housing crisis.” Their commendable bi-partisan effort put in more thought than much of the discussion to date. But they ran into the same problems that others have: What is the source of the problem? How big is it? What should we require to be done? How do you respond to Coloradans who don’t want a lot more growth? Their draft Bill hinges on how to define “housing needs.” The problem is that the various legitimate possible definitions are very far apart numerically. For example, per a Forbes survey, 17% of respondents nationwide said that the Denver area would be their first choice to move to. That’s around 57 million people. Even if only one in ten of them had the resources to do it, they would about double Colorado’s population. Should we immediately double our housing supply? Colorado’s births over deaths statistics paint a much differe...

By the time you read this, the City Council will have decided whether to repeal Boulder’s Residential Growth Management System. This piece of our city code addresses how many housing units are allowed to be built in a year. It has significant exemptions, like for affordable housing units and whole projects with at least 35% affordable units. Thus, it provides an incentive for developers to include more affordable units. The reason this is an issue is that the Legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the “housing crisis” required them to pass a law last session that forbids local governments from limiting the annual number of residential building permits. They called such restrictions “anti-growth laws.” But the council’s concern is misguided: Boulder’s RGMS is NOT in violation of this state law, simply because our current RGMS exempts affordable housing units. According to BRC 9-14-8 “Exemptions,” the City can approve an UNLIMITED number of permanently affordable units by righ...

The Colorado Supreme Court recently ruled that Trump cannot appear on the primary ballot because he “having previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States…engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same…” Whatever the history of this third clause of the 14th Amendment, its real value is to help prevent our democracy from turning into a dictatorship. If the person wanting to be the next president engages in insurrection, this allows us to prevent them from occupying our democracy’s most powerful position, knowing that they might do it again. If it was their second time around, that president would have learned from the first experience and would proceed with more careful strategic planning. And (s)he would have over three years to appoint fellow conspirators to gain an irreversible lock on power. Democracies are not immune from takeovers.  “Why Democracies Collapse,”  by Diskin, Diskin and Hazan evaluated the collapse of 30 democracies, iden...