Steve Pomerance

Sept. 17 was a great day. At 5 a.m. my climbing partner and I left Boulder to climb Navajo Peak via Niwot Ridge. After some hours of hiking, we started on a mile long section of rock scrambling along the steep, exposed ridge. The route finding was complex, and the views toward the Boulder watershed, the plains, and the Continental Divide were great. Conditions were perfect — sunny, warm, and not too windy. Some hours later, we finished by descending Airplane Gully, passing wreckage from a post-World War II small plane crash. We then hiked out, also beautiful, but more hours on top of an already long day. We got to the car tired and thirsty, but satisfied and no blisters. This wonderful day followed a not-so-good Tuesday evening at the City Council meeting, which started with a study session on growth and development. Many of council members’ initial comments were seemingly directed at convincing those who came to ask for action on controlling growth that there was no problem. Accor...

The good news is that the Boulder City Council will begin discussing growth issues at the council meeting this Tuesday, Sept. 2, and there is talk about having a study session on development in October. Unfortunately, study sessions work only if city staff has sufficient direction beforehand to provide the needed information and analysis. But what direction should they go? Vic Fruehauf, a well-known Boulderite who started Fruehauf’s Nursery and was on the Boulder Planning Board, used to say, “If you don’t know your destination, any path will do.” He would frequently repeat variations on this theme during attempts to revise the land use regulations during the 1990’s. His point is even more applicable today: How can the city sort out all the growth-related issues when the big-picture goal is neither well-defined nor agreed upon? We don’t lack for advocates on all sides. For example, some are pushing for more and denser housing, arguing that it will be affordable even though the mar...

“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all of the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all these people.” So reads the 1971 amendment to Article I, Section 27, of the Pennsylvania state constitution. This amendment defines the balance of power between the state and local governments with regard to fracking. As John Dernbach, who runs a Pennsylvania environmental law center, put it, “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the state says how, and the local government has the right to say where.” (See Mark Jaffe’s article in last Sunday’s Denver Post and Monday’s Camera.) This balance is in marked contrast to Colorado, where the state government, supported by the courts, seems to appropriate local powers wh...

Recently a friend told me that the Boulder city government is going to use “working groups” to provide input to its long term housing plan. “Working groups” are useful to design and implement programs. But for housing, working groups would be putting the cart before the horse. The first step, and it’s a big one, is to have a vision for the future of Boulder, one that addresses housing, but as a part of whole. And it needs to be a vision that has the support of the vast majority of Boulder citizens, not just of a few elected officials and city staffers. The “working group” concept came from a 2009 meeting of some 40 Boulderites who were not satisfied with the progress being made in the use of Boulder’s carbon tax, passed in 2006. The most important recommendation from the meeting was to form groups to work on specific aspects of the energy efficiency programs. These groups were to be open to whoever wanted to participate. The point was to include citizens who had expertise but not m...

Boulder’s latest “Community Profile” has both commercial and residential growth continuing at exactly the same percentage rate per year from now through 2035. Currently Boulder has almost 60,000 in-commuters. Given these matching growth rates and the current large surplus of jobs over workers, the number of in-commuters will continue to increase as we add at least another 60,000 jobs and 20,000 or so more residents to what the planning department calls “reasonable build-out.” Is adding more and more employment where we should be headed? It increases traffic congestion and drives up the price of housing, resulting in decreased “diversity.” The spillover effects of adding housing to try to catch up to jobs are equally pernicious — city and school district facilities are overcrowded, services are stretched thin, traffic is made even worse, and finite resources like water and open space are stressed. None of this is desirable, so why are we going there? The excess of in-commuters can...

I just returned from a trip to Bhutan. Religion there is fully integrated with government; the fortresses called dzongs serve both as religious and civil centers. But perhaps because it’s Buddhism, which is nontheistic, it doesn’t come across as oppressive. That’s unlike the Supreme Court’s recent decision that allows governmental entities to begin their public meetings with openly sectarian prayers. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” But Justice Kennedy wrote in support of this decision, “In the general course, legislative bodies do not engage in impermissible coercion merely by exposing constituents to prayer they would rather not hear and in which they need not participate.” So Kennedy would consider it “permissible coercion” to have a minaret on the Capitol lawn broadcasting calls to prayer on loudspeakers every morning and evening? I don’t think so. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes got it right when he sa...

In a recent presentation, the City of Boulder’s planning director identified sustainability and resilience as two concepts critical for defining Boulder’s future. But is there a real commitment to take the necessary actions? I suspect that the full implications of these concepts will be ignored, and that our future will be business as usual — more and more growth and development without any requirement to maintain the qualities that make Boulder great. The Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined sustainability well: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It’s obvious that “meeting the needs of the present” cannot mean continually allowing conditions to deteriorate. But that is just what we are doing. For example, continuing to allow more residential development without adequate funding to provide libraries, parks, recreation centers, and schools is not...

Building the U.S. 36 HOV lane is important, but the privatization approach is a huge mistake. CDOT is setting up a no-win situation: the goals of private business are to maximize revenues (from tolls); to minimize costs (on snow removal and maintenance); to limit risk (by financing its investment by selling bonds, and thus reduce its exposure); and to avoid downsides (by eliminating free HOV2, and obstructing innovation that might reduce toll revenues). The public’s goals are exactly the opposite. This arrangement is nothing like a multi-year lease for a restaurant, where the terms are pretty standard, good deals can be struck because competition is strong, and the leased space is not a critical public asset. This is a one-time 50-year no-exit monopoly on essential infrastructure. Worse, the concessionaire is collecting tolls on one lane but doing the maintenance on all lanes, creating an inherent conflict. With a 600-page Concession Agreement plus numerous side agreements (guarant...

In a number of states, the incumbent utilities are challenging the “net metering” that makes rooftop solar attractive to homeowners and businesses. A photovoltaic solar system generates energy when the sun is shining, but the owner may not consume all these kilowatt-hours as they are generated. So the excess energy goes onto the local circuit and is used by other buildings that don’t have solar. Net metering allows the owner to take credit for this energy by subtracting it from their total energy consumption, even thought it occurs at different times. The owner pays only for electricity used in excess of what is generated. Remember that vertically-integrated investor owned utilities are not like regular businesses. They make money by investing their capital in power plants, transmission lines, etc. and receiving an almost-guaranteed return (Xcel/PSCo’s is 10-plus percent.) They make additional profits on energy sales into the spot market. These two reward structures incent them to ...

This column was stimulated by a recent city of Boulder newspaper ad. It said, “Now Showing on Boulder’s Channel 8 — Is Building in Boulder Over?” The ad goes on to discuss Longs Gardens, a 25-acre parcel of agricultural land near Broadway and Iris Avenue, and asks whether this site is appropriate for “the ‘right kind of development’ that is not car dependent.” The show itself was basically a discussion about some of the more recent iterations of “new urbanism” (dense, mixed use areas that in theory promote alternatives to driving) versus the value of green space and urban agriculture (including its value to children as a learning experience). I found the presentations, which involved a sitting council member and a member of the Transportation Advisory Board, rather troubling. First, neither participant provided any context. Discussions about growth in Boulder need to start with the numbers: Under its current zoning, Boulder has the potential to add something like 60,000 more jobs t...