Opinion: Requiring new development to pay its own way


The policy that “growth should pay its own way” was in the original Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, approved in 1970. I’ve been a proponent since my first campaign for Boulder City Council in 1985. But the city’s implementation has been sporadic and incomplete. Our city utility tap fees are quite accurate, but the charges for general fund departments like libraries, and parks and recreation, are less adequate. The charges for transportation and affordable housing come nowhere near what’s needed to prevent increased traffic congestion and to provide housing for many of those who come here to fill the new jobs.
In my observation, the real profit in the development business comes from “privatizing the profits and socializing the costs.” An analysis I did of an annexation in a neighboring city showed that essentially all the profit came from avoiding paying just the costs associated with meeting the demand for transportation and schools; paying for affordable housing would have made the project uneconomic.
Unless Boulder takes action, new development will continue to push its impacts onto the current residents and businesses. Once things get bad enough, just as in other cities, the council will ask the voters for more money to try to solve the problems that growth creates. No surprise, there is talk about yet another transportation-related tax increase, even though Boulder voters passed one just two years ago. And the recent increase in the jobs-housing linkage fee is only a fraction of what is needed, so expect another tax for affordable housing. This is why, along with many others, I helped draft the “Development Shall Pay Its Own Way” initiative.
The initiative’s language requires the city’s actions to be consistent with state and federal law, and to use professionally-accepted standards and practices in setting fees. Such standards and practices ensure that the “lumpiness” of infrastructure (e.g. where a new library or fire station serves multiple new developments) is handled appropriately, with a fraction charged to each development. The initiative allows indirect revenues such as sales tax to be counted, and residential and commercial developments to be combined for analyses, so that impacts and contributions are considered together. No charges are levied on redevelopments that add no additional impacts, on permanently affordable housing, or on minor home additions.
This initiative, if passed, will ensure that our traffic won’t get worse because of new development, and that our affordable housing programs will be funded to deal with the demands from new development, all to the extent legally possible, so we won’t have to pick up the tab.

Why hasn’t this policy been implemented already? The Becky Boone incident provides some illumination. Boone identified her InciteBoulder talk as “a part of Housing Boulder’s propaganda machine” when she emailed a dozen city staffers, including the Housing Boulder project manager, to ask for feedback. The email replies did not dispute this characterization. (The May 29 on-line Camera story has a link to the emails. Her email also went to one non-staff person; his role is still unclear.)
Both Boone and city staff used the census data that “65 percent of Boulder is under 40” as their basis for claiming under-representation of younger folks. Did they really think babies, school age kids, and the thousands of out-of-state CU students would show up at meetings? Also, their renter-versus-owner analysis fails to acknowledge that many Boulderites (apparently nearly 9,000) live in CU housing that is not under city jurisdiction. And then there are the polls with obvious self-selection bias and group processes with unbalanced representation.
Adding co-ops to existing single-family neighborhoods has been pushed as a way to provide more affordable housing. But I was told (separate from my Housing Boulder participation) that the city spent nearly $1.5 million subsidizing the three existing “legal” co-ops. This cost, combined with the radical jump in housing prices from the thousands of new high-tech jobs on top of 60,000 in-commuters, makes this co-op financial model difficult to scale up for single-family neighborhoods. Why hasn’t this been discussed?
All this has resulted in a serious loss of trust in the staff’s ability to do unbiased work. Meanwhile, the schedule for the RFP for an updated study on the city’s impact fees was let slip, taking six months to be finalized after the first version appeared.
It’s time for our city manager to really shake up the planning department, eliminate this bias toward growth and density, and require that staff do proper quantitative analysis, including evaluation of the impacts of job growth on housing prices and transportation.

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