Opinion: Repeat performances


The Boulder City Council did the right thing last Tuesday night. They rejected another attempt to amend Boulder’s charter to allow executive sessions (meetings closed to the public), and considered a proposal to allow a committee of two council members to work in private on negotiating property deals, like the proposed purchase of Section 16, the southwest corner of Rocky Flats Wildlife Preserve.
Currently the city charter prohibits closed meetings of the council or any of its committees, except that it allows two council members to work together confidentially while doing the evaluations of the city manager, city attorney and municipal judge. This proposal would be a logical extension, and a reasonable way to explore allowing the council to participate in delicate negotiations, but without threatening Boulder’s invaluable open government requirements.
The council also correctly refused to put another attempt to alter Boulder’s 55-foot height limit on the ballot. This latest proposal was well meaning in part, in that it attempted to deal with some of the design issues created by developers trying to maximize their projects by taking full advantage of the current height exemption for rooftop equipment. But fundamentally, the issue is allowing more growth in Boulder, when our streets are already congested and our water supply will be maxed out if we keep on the current course.
A rather bizarre déj vu emerged earlier in the week. The idea was to give “density bonuses” for building more office space downtown. The “density bonus” notion emerged some years ago when the idea of having more people living in downtown was in vogue. Developers were allowed to exceed the by-right height limit if they added residences, thus the term “density bonus.” The whole notion didn’t make any sense then, because there are plenty of people living around downtown, and the number of people who could actually live in downtown condos would have been insignificant.
The condos were, of course, outrageously priced, both because of cost and because of scarcity/attractiveness. Many became vacation homes and stay unoccupied much of the year. Combine this with the push by some current owners to have more development allowed on their property, and what emerged was “density bonuses” for office space too. This would not only effectively have voided the original concept (not so bad), but would also make the land use code effectively irrelevant. It seems that the value of balancing development with carrying capacity (considering streets, parking, views, etc.) has to be learned over and over again.
The council’s latest proposal for a pay increase is very modest and deserves to go on the ballot. The notion is simple — allow the current pay-per-meeting attended, but without the four meetings per month restriction, since sometimes there are more. This is still consistent with the notion that the pay is an acknowledgement — Boulderites seem to want an essentially volunteer council.
A real “déj vu all over again” came in the mail some days ago in a letter from Xcel Energy to photo-voltaic system owners. It stated, “You’ll see the new RESA line on the electricity portion of your bill starting June 1, 2011.” This is yet another attempt to hit up those of us who have put thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars into cutting our carbon footprints. And once again it’s by changing the deal that we all thought we agreed to — we pay the same rates as other people, but get to net meter the output of our PV systems against our electricity consumption.
The excuse for this rate hike is the Legislature’s 2010 action that allows the Public Utilities Commission to require PV owners to pay their fair share, but without defining what this means, and without addressing the retroactivity effects on existing contracts. Worse, this new rate hike emerged just after the solar installers had negotiated a compromise with Xcel on the Solar Rewards program, partially negating their deal.
After reading the PUC’s order, this “fair share” seems just as arbitrary as previous attempts to get PV owners to pay more. It’s time for the Legislature to revisit Colorado’s clean energy goals, and define them based on reducing the level of greenhouse gas emissions rather than just on increasing the percentage of renewable energy. This would finally penalize coal plants appropriately and allow for a more intelligent set of (dis)incentives.
Unfortunately, sometimes Yogi Berra called it right.

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