Steve Pomerance

This year Boulder has three citizen initiatives in process. Two are ordinances: One requires the city government to pay for lawyers to represent renters that face eviction. The other diverts certain tax money currently collected on our electricity bills to subsidize renewables. The third amends the city charter: It requires the city to allow all housing units to be occupied by one person per bedroom plus one more, and units with fewer than four bedrooms to have four people. Given social distancing and that the online petition system is still not operational, the probability of these making the ballot is low. But it’s still useful to discuss some of the details and implications, so that people who are asked to sign petitions are aware of what might happen if these actually pass. I’ll take the “eviction” one on first, with the rest to follow in future pieces. The No Eviction Without Representation act requires that the city provide legal representation in any proceeding where a ten...

Recent months have been really scary. Everyone is threatened by the coronavirus. Testing is way behind where it should be. The stock market is dropping at record rates, and the economy as a whole is slowing dramatically. Many people are being pushed to the edge, both economically and health-wise. But within this bleak scenario, there are things to be thankful for. Our local and state governments are doing a very good job with the resources and technology that they can access. Walking in neighborhoods is a pleasure, with people greeting each other — at the appropriate physical separation. We have our open space, where we can get out and enjoy nature. I recently hiked the southern portion of the Mesa Trail and was greeted by truly spectacular views of the Denver skyline and the eastern plains. The air was clearer than I ever remember seeing in my 50-plus years in Boulder. I also had time to read a book that I’ve put off for years — “The March of Folly,” by Barbara Tuchman, first p...

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...

Some Camera readers have asked me questions about how regulated monopoly investor-owned utilities like Xcel work in practice. Here is some background information. Xcel Energy is a holding company that owns regulated monopoly utilities in eight states, including Public Service Company of Colorado, which is regulated by our Public Utilities Commission. Xcel makes money by investing their own cash equity (plus money derived from bond sales) in building power plants, power lines, etc. These investments are then added to the “rate base” on which Xcel is granted a rate of return by the PUC. This return is calculated based on the bonds’ interest rates and a rate of return on the equity, which, per the relevant case law, is supposed to be, “commensurate with returns on investments in other enterprises having corresponding risks.” The bonds are paid off as they come due. The invested equity is paid off in equal payments over the lifetimes of the power plants and other infrastructure. In r...

Colorado is now in a position to make a radical transformation of our whole system of generating electricity. Wind and solar have become so cheap that we can shut down all our coal plants, shift to more renewables, and still pay less for electricity, as recent studies by the Sierra Club and Vibrant Clean Energy confirm. The key is to dismantle our century-old model where the regulators (the Public Utilities Commission) operate in a reactive mode and so end up “captured” by for-profit investor-owned utilities. We need to replace this model with one where decisions are made independently and solely in the public interest. We have efforts in many states to learn from. We can see that going only halfway and leaving the investor-owned utilities with a significant decision-making role is guaranteed to perpetuate the struggles that we have here in Boulder. We will be shifting to more electric cars and heating systems, so demand for electricity will significantly increase. So we should...

Congratulations to the four new Boulder City Council members! You have a great opportunity to make a contribution to the Boulder community, but it will take a lot of work to do it responsibly; the learning curve is pretty steep. Here are some suggestions for you (and other Council members) that may help improve the process. Read the Charter. It is the document that governs how you, city staff, and board and commission members operate, and how you relate to each other. It defines the limits of your and their power, and can only be amended by a citizen vote. You don’t have to remember every word. But just knowing what’s there makes you more self reliant and less at the mercy of others’ opinions. For example, relative to the recent meeting discussion over diversity, the council does  not  have the power to suspend the rules as to when the mayor is selected. Charter Section 14 specifies, “The mayor shall be chosen by the council from its own number, upon the convening of t...

Why are we chasing Denver’s density? A friend asked me what I knew about Boulder’s plans for increasing density. She was concerned about the push for Boulder being “inclusive,” a catchall phrase currently bandied about that means pretty much whatever the person hearing or reading it imagines. Certainly there has been a lot of verbiage about “densifying,” like forcing neighborhoods to accept multi-unit buildings or high-rise developments right next to or replacing single-family houses, schemes that the current Boulder City Council seems to have abandoned, at least temporarily, because of public outcry and anger. So I can understand her concern. Since at some level this is a numbers game, I did a bit of research comparing Boulder to Denver. Obviously, Boulder is smaller than Denver, but I thought the ratios would be interesting: Per the 2018 Boulder Community Profile, our city occupies 27.3 square miles, had a population of 108,507 people, and had 100,148 jobs when the data was ...

As Boulder’s election season cranks up, there is a lot of noise around Boulder’s sacred cow of affordable housing. Fast-growth candidates seem to assert that building more market rate housing will somehow solve “the problem.” Slow-growth candidates seem to be more measured and consider other dimensions to the issue. But the problem is still ill-defined: Is this something that can actually be solved, or a concern that will persist irrespective of the actions taken, or a surrogate for other agendas, or what? Leaving aside this lack of clarity, the main difficulty we face is that our current affordable housing program relies financially to a large extent on growth of one kind or another. Each new housing development must provide 25% on-site affordable units or pay fees-in-lieu for off-site units. Business development pays jobs-housing linkage fees that cover a bit less than a quarter of the cost of providing housing for workers who need it. A minor portion comes from local taxes and ...

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 ...

Albert Einstein said, “ We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. ” Boulder is supposed to be one of the most educated cities in the country, so you’d think that we wouldn’t just commit the same follies as every other high tech town. But we’ve been headed that way for a long time. Boulder’s own Comprehensive Plan states that Boulder is an “employment center,” and for the last quarter of a century our government has encouraged jobs to be added as fast as the space could get built. Even Boulder Junction, started in 2004, would add about as many new jobs as new residents. Boulder has supported spending state tax credits to encourage companies to come to town. Boulder’s city manager unilaterally applied to have much of east Boulder designated an “opportunity zone,” which grants unnecessary huge tax breaks for developers in this supposedly “economically depressed” area. Affordable housing programs have been implemented, but they couldn’t keep u...