Steve Pomerance

Let’s start with the city budget. In the last 10 years, Boulder’s budget went up 85% — 39% after adjusting for inflation — mostly in the last 5-6 years. And we had almost no population growth. My first thought was that there must have been a backlog of capital projects to be done. But then a friend did an analysis of the city’s staffing levels. This is measured in “full-time equivalent” staff members, or FTEs. Here’s what he found: In 2019, Boulder had 1,252 FTE’s per 100,000 residents. In 2025, we had 1,493 FTE’s per 100,000. That’s an increase of 19% per capita in six years! And during that time, the city stopped running the library; that accounted for a decrease in need of approximately 78 FTEs. For comparison, Fort Collins has only about three-fourths as many FTEs per 100,000. Are our council members even aware of this massive increase in money spent and staff hired? For a test, some months ago, I sent my analysis to an apparently knowledgeable council member. After clarifyin...

When the council decided to try to get the Sundance Film Festival to move to Boulder, there were obvious issues. One big one was that Boulder does not have the hotel and other lodging space of a resort community like Park City, Utah, where Sundance was located and grew for almost 50 years. But now we are faced with an ordinance that would allow a potentially massive increase in short-term rentals (STRs) to attempt to accommodate this influx. Here are the numbers: Per the Web, around 24,000 people attend the Sundance Film Festival from out of state. The staff memo says there are 2,900 hotel rooms in Boulder, with an additional 74,000 rooms within 40 miles. So, for additional STRs to make a difference in the number of people in-commuting to Sundance, we will need thousands more. Is that what you want for Boulder? The ordinance the council is considering allows many properties to become STRs for “festivals” by being issued special “festival lodging rental licenses.” This ordinance states ...

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...

In my last Camera piece, I said, “If all it takes is the council similarly claiming something is an ’emergency,’ then the council could pass most anything ‘by emergency’ and avoid public hearings completely.” Well, the council did exactly that at their next opportunity, abusing Charter Section 17 by passing “by emergency” the new rules for council meetings’ start times and schedules. Almost every definition of “emergency” I’ve found requires an event to be “unexpected” or “sudden,” and “demanding immediate attention” to prevent loss of life, property, etc. But the situation with “open comment” has been a mess since the war in Gaza got going. And after well over a year of failed attempts to fix the situation, it is hardly “sudden” or “unexpected.” If it is so serious, why weren’t these new fixes proposed two weeks sooner? Or why not wait one more meeting and get some public input? All this raises the serious question of why the council doe...

On July 1, the City of Boulder filed a motion in the lawsuit brought in early April by Boulder citizens regarding the bonding of the South Boulder Creek flood control dam. The City’s motion claims that the citizens’ lawsuit is “frivolous” and asks them to pay over $46,000 in attorneys’ fees. When I heard about this, I inquired of the city attorney, the mayor and councilmembers. The city attorney only said she “authorized the filing of the motion.” But councilmembers either didn’t respond or refused to even say whether they had discussed this with her. Apparently, no one wants to own what seems a blatant attempt to suppress citizens’ dissent. The fundamental legal issues in the citizens’ original lawsuit are clear, and in my opinion, the exact opposite of “frivolous.” Can the City charge fees based on the “impervious surface area” of people’s lots within the City to pay for this dam, when the floodwater being controlled comes (almost) totally from outside the city? Can the City pass the...

In Sunday’s Camera, I noticed the huge disparity in information content between the City and County meetings announcements. The City’s had only four column-inches, versus the County, which had 20 column-inches. The City’s had date, time and name of board or commission, but zero content as to what the meeting was about. The County’s, in contrast, were very detailed. Then I noticed a line in the City’s ad, in small print, saying that an asterisk indicates that the complete agenda is in the Public Notice part of the classifieds. Three of the six boards’ names had asterisks, so I went to the Public Notice section and looked. But there was only one agenda; two were missing. One of the two missing ones was Open Space, so I went online and, after some searching, found that meeting’s agenda outline, but the individual items had no content. I dug further but was frustrated by a notice that I needed to allow cookies, but provided no way to allow them. My second try, using a different set of page...

At the beginning of each regular council meeting, it is the tradition to hold open comment. This used to be a chance for citizens to raise issues or concerns they think the council needs to focus on. Unfortunately, it recently has become more of a forum for protests on various non-city issues. The good news is that the council will be discussing how to fix this. But I feel that some more in-depth consideration is needed to avoid just changing the format or timing without really addressing the underlying desires of citizens to really be listened to, versus the apparent lack of value that council members give to what is said. Supporting this perspective, the poll the City just did says that barely over half of respondents approve of the job the City is doing in providing services to residents. That low rating indicates a need for real change. Council members are not better or smarter or even many times more well-informed than the rest of us. And the council is not supposed to be separate...

Last Sunday, June 8, the Denver Post had an extensive article on the  “Data Center Boom”  in Colorado. Data centers can be small, in nondescript buildings, and support our use of internet and emails. Or they can be huge, like the ones supporting the use of artificial intelligence. Per the article, Xcel currently estimates that the current requests for data centers will increase electric use by 1,923 megawatts over the next 6 years. That’s enough to power 2.1 million homes; it is an increase of 31% above our current power supply. The total requests by 2031, not all of which will come online, is estimated to be 6,181 megawatts, which would nearly double Xcel’s current electric power needs in Colorado. Generating this massive increase in electricity requires either burning lots more fossil fuels, with attendant greenhouse gas emissions, or installing a huge number of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries for storage or building nuclear plants. Cooling the da...