Steve Pomerance

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...

I just finished taking the city’s latest online survey about accessory dwelling units. Right off, I found the information in the questions biased toward allowing more ADUs. Then I felt manipulated because I only could see the next question by answering the previous one, but once I got to the end I could see that the cumulative impact of all the proposed changes would be huge.When the city does its analyses of complex issues and asks the citizens to participate, the city staff’s job is to be objective, complete, and support the citizens’ ability to provide informed feedback, not to be advocates. Clearly, proper management and oversight are lacking. It became apparent that the survey’s underlying motivation was far broader than simply solving a few people’s difficulties with getting through the ADU regulations, probably more easily addressed through a zoning variance process. If all the staff’s proposals were implemented, single-family neighborhoods would become higher-density with l...

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 ...

I want to catch up on a number of Boulder topics where significant progress has been made, and to acknowledge the majority of the City Council for making this happen. I’m serving on the elections working group. In just two meetings we’ve resolved the basic issues around the municipal initiative process that was upset by ballot issue 2Q. It appears that we will have a process ready to be put on the ballot as a charter amendment this November. It will be similar to the one that existed prior to 2Q but with some significant improvements. We haven’t started on the effort to shine light onto “dark money.” But given the council’s clear direction to push the envelope on this one, I am confident that we can come up some good strategies that will reveal the big money donors behind the ads that push certain candidates but avoid saying the magic words “vote for” or “vote against” that would trigger their being regulated. The council majority has kept its promise to increase the jobs-housing...

The situation is depressingly simple – new development imposes costs that it doesn’t pay for. So either the rest of us pick up the tab, or the situation gets worse. To unpack this a bit, every new employee requires housing, which pushes up housing prices. We are at the point now where over 50% of new employees would need a very significant financial help to live in Boulder, or even in the rest of the county. So you understand the math, if the average new employee in a particular type of business requires 100 sq. ft. of floor space, and it costs $100,000 to buy down the price of a new housing unit to make it affordable for that average worker, that’s $100 per sq. ft. And per Keyser Martsen Associates, a very well respected California firm that has done numerous such studies, the actual cost to provide affordable housing for new office workers in Boulder is $129.49 per sq. ft. (as of two years ago), with other types of uses varying from slightly higher to considerably lower. The cu...

Each of the first four acronyms in the headline above identifies some housing “solutions” that have become issues for the lower-density neighborhoods. STRs are “short-term rentals,” where a homeowner rents out part or all of his or her home on a short-term basis. ADUs are “accessory dwelling units,” where a homeowner has built a separate apartment as part of a single-family house, sometimes called a granny flat. OAUs are “owner accessory units,” a completely detached second residential unit, like a garage apartment, on a single-family lot. CHUs are “cooperative housing units,” commonly called co-ops, which may have 12 or more residents in a single-family house. The HAB is the Housing Advisory Board that the City Council is forming, presumably to provide some citizen oversight to all of the city’s housing efforts. So it’s clear, there are already a number of technical advisory groups working on housing. But what doesn’t exist right now is a board that represents the general citizenr...

Here we are starting 2018. We have a highly educated and engaged citizenry, a smart City Council, and a hard-working city staff. Yet any number of people I know are worried about the next city project that will likely go awry and leave them, once again, feeling disenfranchised and stuck with a result that they know is far from optimal. Why are we still struggling with this sort of systemic failure? What is the missing piece? The city manager is responsible for the city’s operations and budget, and the city attorney is responsible for writing and enforcing the laws. But in Boulder we also spend a huge amount of time and energy pursuing new paths, dealing with new problems and opportunities, and attempting to be on the cutting edge in many areas at once. However, managing these types of activities is not really anyone’s primary responsibility, nor has there been any focused effort to consider what is required to do so successfully. The Public Participation Working Group touched on th...

The 2017 election was a wake-up call for citizens who thought that Boulder’s campaign finance reform laws would keep our elections open, transparent and not subject to excessive spending. These laws were put in place by a citizen initiative passed by the voters in 1999. They limit contributions to candidates’ official committees as well as to “unofficial candidate committees” (organized by third parties) to $100 per person, and provide matching city funds for candidates up to $10,000 if they abide by a $20,000 total limit. But this year, spending was dominated by “dark money,” paying for mailers, ads, phone banks, etc., in the name of Open Boulder and possibly others. These folks tried to avoid the city’s regulations by carefully avoiding the magic words of “vote for,” “vote against” and synonyms of these. These magic words are what are called “express advocacy” in federal case law, and Boulder’s laws regulate “expressly advocating.” So instead, Open Boulder used words like “endors...

2Q is by far the most dangerous measure that I’ve ever seen the city put on the ballot. Please vote “No” on 2Q! 2Q’s ballot title — which says that it removes some of the Charter’s conflicting requirements and obsolete provisions, and clarifies referendum and initiative requirements — makes it sound like it’s just housekeeping. But 2Q creates huge uncertainty for the municipal initiative process, and so will destroy this valuable aspect of direct democracy in Boulder. Initiatives are done because the citizens are not satisfied with the current city laws, or because they see an issue that has not been addressed by existing legislation. So initiatives are necessarily somewhat adversarial to the local power structure.Therefore, it is critical that the rules be clear and unambiguous, not add unnecessary delays, and not be subject to the discretion of the city staff or the City Council. Currently, Boulder’s municipal initiative process is carefully laid out in the Charter and works ...

When I came to Boulder in the ’60s, I was young and blissfully unaware of the huge efforts the current residents were making to keep Boulder a wonderful place, including the Blue Line, that protects our mountain backdrop from development, the 55-foot height limit that protects our views, and the open space program that protects us from sprawl. But eventually I came to realize that the very qualities that make Boulder great, and the kinds of people who care enough to try to preserve them, were what make Boulder such a desirable place to do development. So without carefully managed growth, including growth paying its own way, we would lose those qualities and become just another overcrowded, overpriced, traffic-congested “success” story, like Silicon Valley. I am supporting candidates that I think will continue this effort to keep Boulder a wonderful place with citizens who truly care about our “commons” — the qualities and amenities that make Boulder unique. Here they are in alphabe...