Opinion: Boulder’s flexible future — not much certainty for citizens


The majority of the current Boulder City Council is pursuing a set of policies that will provide them with increased flexibility, but will cost the citizens of Boulder most of our certainty about our future.
For example, the council is debating whether or not to permanently reduce the amount of water committed to Thunderbird Lake to keep it from becoming a marsh. This raises the larger issue about Boulder’s having enough water for a future of a hotter climate, earlier runoff, less forests to hold water, and large amounts of new development. A recent Camera article documented the near term development boom; this is only a small fraction of what will occur with build-out. Numerous forecasts predict our mountains becoming semi-deserts after beetle kill and/or massive fires. This year’s drought almost triggered the second watering restriction in just over a decade; this would have violated Boulder’s supply standard of no more than one such restriction in 20 years. So unless some long-term commitments are made to limit growth, the drying up of Thunderbird Lake is just the first step in the process of drying up Boulder.
Boulder’s water needs will be further increased if the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s essential feature is abandoned — the requirement that the Boulder County Board of Commissioners and Planning Commission and the Boulder City Council and Planning Board all sign off on any annexations from the Area III Planning Reserve. This land is part of Boulder’s rural buffer, which has made Boulder’s planning such an example for others to emulate. Apparently the council wants more flexibility so that it can reactively approve development proposals for this area, rather than figuring out what is really needed and designating land for those purposes ahead of time.
Had this four-body review requirement been abandoned a few years ago, we might already have huge big-box stores, gigantic sports complexes, mega housing projects, etc. But if the commissioners won’t go along with giving the council this flexibility, then the threat is to allow the comp plan to expire. And then, if five council members vote wrong, the whole of Boulder Valley could be annexed and developed. Worse, if three compliant open space board members are appointed, even land currently designated as open space might be built upon. So the iconic land use plan that has made Boulder famous, and which we all count on, would have vanished.
This attempt to gain flexibility at the expense of certainty for the citizens is paralleled by the current proposal to un-earmark and indefinitely extend the current parks tax, which was put in place for a specific time period to fund specific projects. The sales pitch is that it still will be used for parks, except in an “emergency.” However, we just observed the council approve an “emergency ordinance” for the bike race with inadequate justification, so this supposed commitment provides no certainty whatsoever.
If more money is needed for parks, the first step should be to increase the parks impact fee, which is way too low. Also, there is already more than sufficient undedicated money in the general fund to provide adequate flexibility. Finally, removal of dedication for revenues will lead to even more useless infighting at budget time. A far better approach would be to have each general fund department received a fixed fraction of general tax revenues, with the remainder given to the council to be “flexible” with. Then departments could do long-term planning, and citizens would have some certainty that the council would not go off the rails.
Another open-ended process is the major planning effort for the “Civic Center,” the area along Canyon where the city buildings are located. Again, there is too much flexibility and no certainty at all as to where this is going. The cynic/realist in me says that the hidden agenda is to pump new life into the idea of a conference center, which has already been shown to be an economic loser. And given recent planning failures, like the north side of Canyon and the Transit Village aka Boulder Junction, way more up-front work is needed to give us citizens some certainty about what the real game is.
Simply put, the council’s pursuit of flexibility is going way too far, and has too much potential for short-term mischief and long-term real damage.


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