Steve Pomerance

The idea of putting a 55-foot building on the southwest corner of Broadway and University Avenue in Boulder is a terrible idea, plain and simple. It will destroy one of Boulder’s iconic views and make that area just another overdeveloped, unpleasant, unattractive place in our city, where unpleasant, unattractive overdevelopment is becoming the norm. Drive, bike, or walk up from downtown, or just look from across the intersection, and see if you don’t agree. The city finally commissioned a study to evaluate the economic benefits of a proposed hotel at that location. It compared the Hill hotel versus office/commercial and affordable housing development. Conceptually this makes sense — compare scenarios and see which one does the best. But the chosen scenarios were not comparable. Each of the non-hotel development scenarios only looks at redevelopment of the 20,000-square-foot Pleasant Street parking lot. In contrast, the Hill hotel would take up that lot plus the whole rest of the ar...

I commend the Boulder City Council for having an ambitious list of projects to consider for its January 2019 retreat. But the first thing I’d like to see the council do is to correct some of what went awry in 2018. Their goal here should be to re-establish trust between the citizens, city staff, and council members so we all can work together to make Boulder a better place to live. First on the list is the “opportunity zone” mess. It is simply unacceptable that the city staff did not immediately communicate with the Council and the public about the opportunity zone process when the state informed them about it in mid-February 2018. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to forward the state’s emailed request to the council Hotline. Then the Council members and interested citizens could have known about it. But instead, the city manager submitted the application without anyone knowing except some city Economic Vitality staff members and Chamber of Commerce folks. The city ...

This spring, I wrote an op-ed entitled ”  Parking garage on the Hill — boon or boondoggle? ” I have learned more about this, and it’s become clear that this proposal is a far worse deal than I had envisioned. The following is based on readily available data, but everything is still fluid and so may change. The notion that a proposed 201-space underground garage is going to solve the Hill’s parking needs is simply not true. A new hotel above the garage will displace 88 existing spaces (62 in the Pleasant Street University Hill General Improvement District lot, plus 26 other spaces) leaving a net gain of 113 new spaces. But the hotel could use all these up. Here’s how: Assuming only half the hotel patrons drive and a 20 percent vacancy rate on the 189 rooms, that’s 75 cars, leaving 38 net new spaces. The hotel employees (about 38 per shift) and restaurant and shop employees (maybe another 42, depending on what actually gets built on site), even if only half drive, will use up...

On Tuesday night,  the Boulder city council chose the best approach to mitigating the risk of future flooding on South Boulder Creek . But, given our situation, there are no perfect solutions. First, Boulder is one of the most flood-prone cities in the country. We have numerous creeks that run through the city. And being up against the foothills allows sudden storms to dump rain into the drainages that flow directly into town with almost no chance to dissipate. Second, some of Boulder’s drainages are huge. For example, the South Boulder Creek drainage above Colo. 93 is about 100 square miles. One inch of rain throughout that area would drop over 5,000 acre-feet of water, about five times the storage capacity of the measures under consideration Tuesday night. (An acre-foot is one acre covered with one foot of water, or 43,560 cubic feet.) Third, much of Boulder was built without serious consideration of the flood risk. South Boulder is not the only area subject to severe i...

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 ...