Steve Pomerance

W ith Boulder voters approval of Ballot Issue 2B by more than a 2-1 margin the exploratory process got started at the Dec. 21 City Council study session. In brief, the proposed energy strategy focuses on local integration of supply and demand so as to maximize the value and minimize the cost of renewable energy. There seem to be two possible legal/regulatory strategies to support this outcome — either have a fundamentally new arrangement with Xcel, that would not be a standard franchise, or create a municipal electric utility that would be independent of Xcel and the PUC. The reasoning is simple — the city does not have the authority to do most of what is needed without pursuing one legal strategy or the other. For example, the only obvious way around the objections by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to imposing liens on properties for bond-financed energy improvement loans is to collect through the utility bills, but that requires a special agreement with Xcel. Or if the city invested ...

The Boulder City Council and Boulder county commissioners were offered a deal by the Jefferson county commissioners to get these two governments to not oppose the Jefferson Parkway (JP), the proposed highway between Broomfield and Golden. As with most offers, the right thing to do is to counter-offer. The Jefferson county commissioners say they will put $5 million toward the purchase and preservation of Section 16, a square mile of land, owned by the State Land Board, on the east side of Colorado 93 at the south-west corner of the federal Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge. Section 16 is a valuable wildlife corridor; it connects the Refuge to the City of Boulder Open Space land west of 93. The Boulder governments would probably have to invest $2 million apiece, with an additional $900,000 coming from other cities. The JeffCo deal importantly requires the Boulder governments to not oppose construction of the JP, and to support transfer of a right of way from the east edge of Rocky Flats to...

Last Sunday`s Daily Camera lead story discussed many of the cutting edge initiatives that Boulder citizens have taken over more than half a century to protect the quality of life in Boulder from “What might have been.” These include the Blue Line that restricts water delivery and thus development to below 5,750 feet, the Open Space program that protects sensitive habitat, the 55 foot height limit that protects our views, the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan that limits most development to within the city limits, and so on. Because of these efforts, Boulder is a very desirable place to live. And the inevitable effect of this is that the price of land, housing, and commercial property is higher than in less desirable places. The pressure on housing prices is further amplified by the presence of the University of Colorado, whose growth is, to some extent, driven by the internal economic benefits of an expanding research agenda with the attendant desire to house even more students, ...