Steve Pomerance

The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s stated core value is Sustainability. Other values include “identity and sense of place” and “great neighborhoods.” The question is whether the proposed densification of our single-family neighborhoods, allowing apartment buildings, business and retail development, etc. is consistent with these values. This densification involves making BVCP Land Use Map changes. Under the City-County agreement (see, for example, Appendix B, Exhibit B, pages 159 et seq, in the 2020 BVCP update), such Map changes must meet the following criteria: a) On balance, is consistent with the policies and overall intent of the comprehensive plan; b) would not have significant cross-jurisdictional impacts that may affect residents, properties or facilities outside the city; c) would not materially affect the land use and growth projections that were the basis of the comprehensive plan; d) does not materially affect the adequacy or availability of urban facilities a...

Last week, the  Boulder City Council voted 7-2  to proceed with looking at annexing an area of currently rural land north-east of U.S. 36, called the Area III planning reserve. It’s approximately 500 acres, part private and part owned by the Parks Department, bought decades ago for eventual use as playing fields, etc. The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan states that expanding the city into the Area III-PR “will only be considered if there are priority community needs that cannot be met within the existing Service Area.” Sensibly, the Planning Board voted 4-3 against looking further at this time. The basic argument being made is that we need more housing. More, more and more housing. A friend did a detailed look at coming housing growth inside the Boulder city limits. Here are the numbers: There are about 27 projects at various stages, totaling over 15,000 new units....

I recently read about the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s  discovery of uranium in the rocks in the just-completed Chimney Rock Reservoir .  For background, the Colorado-Big Thompson system (built by the Bureau of Reclamation) was started in the 1930s, some years after the 1922 Colorado River Compact was signed. The C-BT delivers water from the upper Colorado River to cities and farms in the northern Front Range, including Boulder. Much later, Northern built the much smaller Windy Gap reservoir on the Colorado, completed in 1985, which Boulder and other Front Range cities bought into. Windy Gap’s water rights are junior to the C-BT, which is junior to the Compact. Colorado River water constitutes about a third of Boulder’s supply. Northern apparently contemplated early on the idea of building a reservoir on the Front Range to store the water collected in Windy Gap and piped across the mountains. This led to the construction of...

From observing the recent city council discussions on water, I thought it would be useful to go over some of the basics. Boulder’s water comes from three sources: North Boulder Creek (the “Watershed” below Arapahoe Glacier), Middle Boulder Creek (flows into Barker Reservoir near Nederland), and the Colorado-Big Thompson project (from the Colorado River, includes Windy Gap reservoir). North Boulder Creek drains the east side of Arapahoe Peak; the water is stored in multiple small lakes/reservoirs within the Watershed. The water flows into the Betasso Pipeline, starting on the west side of the Peak-to-Peak Highway near Caribou Ranch, then to the Betasso Treatment Plant near Sugarloaf. Barker Reservoir water is piped to Koessler Lake, west of Green Mountain, and then down a pipeline to Boulder Canyon and up to the Betasso plant. Some of this water runs down to the hydro plant in Boulder Canyon. The C-BT water flows from the Colorado River headwa...

From 1950 to 1960, Boulder’s population doubled from around 20,000 to almost 40,000. This led to Boulder’s most important actions to preserve our natural surroundings: the Blue Line, which limited the City to providing water only below a certain altitude and thereby preserved our mountain backdrop; the Open Space program, which bought land to protect its natural qualities and the species that live there; and the 55-foot building height limit, which allowed us to see above our human-made developments and enjoy the views of the sky and the Flatirons. (Unfortunately, CU is not subject to Boulder’s zoning laws, and so builds as high as it wants.) We now have a population of over 108,000 people, almost triple the 1960 population level. And we are not alone. The Denver metro area has gone from just over 800,000 residents in 1960 to nearly 3 million now, over three and a half times as many. The earth’s population grew from around 3 billion in 1960 to over 8 billion, and could hit 10 billion i...

On Sunday morning, I hiked up to Anemone Point, about 1,000 feet above the west end of Pearl Street. On top, I could see the Arapahoe Peaks to the west and the horizon to the east. Amazingly, it was crystal clear. This was a delightful comparison to how it looks normally, with the horrendous yellow and brown smog that’s now endemic along the Front Range. So, I wondered: Why is Polis now pushing for Colorado to get $1 billion ( per the Denver Post ) in federal subsidies to support becoming the nation’s quantum tech hub? Why make things worse by encouraging yet more job growth, adding pressure on the housing market, while increasing traffic, CO2 emissions and air pollution, and further stressing our limited water supply along with the state’s budget with expected tax breaks from Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade? (They can’t seem to resist giving away our money.) This would be on top of the new Polis 2026 Roadmap that pushes again for massive market-pr...

So … what do we do with Gov. Jared Polis’s land grab bill? A friend told me that to influence some of the politicos, I need to put forward fixes to this horrible, damaging bill.  So, I’ll try. But first, a critical point: For those who think this bill’s overly loose state-imposed rezoning of single-family areas will lead to only incremental changes and only over a long time, think again! Once the first house on a block goes on the market, the big-money speculators will be making offers “too good to refuse.” And when it’s converted to a multi-plex built to the bill’s ridiculously excessive 125% of the currently allowed maximum size, the rest of the neighborhood’s residents will be running for the hills. Then the neighborhood could quickly convert to dense, almost treeless development since anything not built on will be needed for parking spaces because there will be none left on the street. Back to the bill:  The fundamental problem with this bill is that it is structured backw...

Our governments, both state and local, are suddenly freaking out about the “housing crisis.” Given the level of hype, you’d think that we were in Turkey, with earthquake-collapsed buildings in all directions. But no one seems willing to dig into the underlying causes. Instead, as has occurred many times before, they just push for more growth, while ignoring critical concerns: Coloradans actually want less or no growth; continuing to grow indefinitely is not sustainable; and the COVID “bump” was just that — people shifted to working remotely in more desirable living situations. Recent surveys say most Coloradans don’t want lots more people moving here. To quote one article, “Rasmussen Reports surveyed over 1,000 ‘likely to vote’ Coloradans to gauge their feelings on the matter. Overwhelmingly, the answers showed they want to limit population growth. In recent years 92% feel that the state has become more crowded. 90% desire a future where far fewer people move to the state. 59% prefer a...

It should be obvious, but apparently isn’t, that the doubling of the number of humans on the planet, from 4 billion in 1974 to 8 billion now, has overstressed our planet’s ability to support our presence in all sorts of ways, from the rapid increase in greenhouse gases leading to likely runaway climate change, to wiping out other species on a massive scale, to droughts threatening our ability to thrive. For example, arctic temperatures are rising almost four times as fast as the global average, potentially releasing hundreds of billions of tons of methane and carbon dioxide, according to some estimates, as permafrost melts. But our governments keep promoting more growth, as if that is magically going to solve our problems.  Locally, the latest is the push by both our governor and our city council for more and denser housing to allegedly help with the affordability issue. But at the same time, our state government’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) subs...

In June 2022, Rasmussen Reports did a poll of 1,024 Colorado voters regarding their attitudes toward growth and development. Per their summary, 61% of voters say Colorado has developed too much, and only 8% say too little. That’s pretty overwhelming. The Legislature should take note. I’ve pulled a few quotes from their survey statement below, with the response statistics. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that Colorado, over the last four decades, has turned more than 1,250 square miles of Open Space, natural habitat, and agricultural land into housing, shopping malls, streets and other urban development.” 62% of voters say that, on balance, this has made Colorado a worse place to live, with only 14% saying it is better. “If recent trends continue, Colorado demographers project that the state’s human population of 5.8 million will grow by another 1.8 million by 2050, joining Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins together into a single “mega-city.” 76% see this as negat...

I’m part of a group of citizens helping Boulder city staff on the master plan for stormwater and flood protection work for Boulder’s waterways, other than South Boulder Creek. Just last week, we had some interesting discussions about whether we should focus more on how to prioritize the many projects that would cost in total hundreds of millions of dollars, or focus more on increasing the near-term funding for these projects to reduce the need to prioritize by doing more projects concurrently rather than sequentially. To give this some scale, current funding is approximately $7 million annually. City staff predicts that it may take more than 50 years to complete the work, and that upping funding to $11 million per year would allow completion in around 30 to 35 years. The total cost is estimated at roughly $350 million for about 30 projects. Per the 2014 Flood Impact Survey of those drainages impacted by the 2013 flood, damage was over $176 million in 2014 dollars, about $215 mill...

I’m not a professional water supply engineer. But I’ve learned enough over my decades of involvement in our city government to be very concerned about our future ability to keep providing adequate water for existing residents and businesses, much less the significant amounts of additional development being approved. Boulder’s water comes from three sources: The city-owned watershed  is on the east side of the Continental Divide, from South Arapahoe Peak to Niwot Ridge. It feeds many small reservoirs, and then comes via pipeline from above the Peak-to-Peak Highway to the Betasso treatment plant on Sugarloaf Road. We also own water  coming down Middle Boulder Creek, stored in Barker Reservoir near Nederland, and delivered via the Boulder Canyon gravity pipeline past the Boulder Canyon hydroelectric plant to Betasso. About a third comes  from our shares of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (managed by the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District), piped from th...

According to the 2018 Boulder Community Profile, since 2000 job growth has been about 50% faster than residential. Excluding kids and retired folks, jobs likely grew at more than double the rate for resident workers. We now have well over 60,000 in-commuters. As a result, traffic congestion has dramatically increased. Unless we make some significant changes, it will just get worse faster, because we have exceeded the capacity of almost all our intersections. Even secondary streets are now heavily congested. Water, Boulder’s prized resource, may finally come under pressure. We get a significant portion of our supply from the Colorado River via the Big Thompson project. Given the multi-decade drought induced by climate change and the Colorado River Compact constraints, at some point, probably sooner than later, we will be forced either to buy out farmers’ water rights or live with a lot less. More people means more big buildings, more views blocked, more open opace trampled, more ...

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...