Opinion: Why Boulder’s grand schemes don’t work


Last week, after getting my workout biking up Lee Hill Road, I checked out the alternatives to Iris for biking between Broadway and Folsom. I rode east on Kalmia and Linden (north of Iris), and then west on Hawthorne and Grape (south of Iris).
I saw only four moving vehicles, total, in the 2-plus miles of neighborhood streets.
Thanks to council member Lisa Morzel for pointing out these routes and for bringing the “right-sizing” discussion back up. I’ve also ridden the multi-use path along 63rd Street multiple times. These alternate routes make “right-sizing” irrelevant for both Iris and 63rd as far as bike safety goes, so why were these alternates ignored?
I believe that an important reason is because the focus was on an abstract concept — this grand scheme called “right-sizing” — rather than on the needs and issues of the specific situations. Other similarly overly-broad grand schemes include Housing Boulder, Design Excellence, the Civic Center redesign, Envision East Arapahoe, and of course the Comprehensive Plan update, which contains its own list of big issues that the council didn’t want to take on separately. In contrast, the municipal utility effort came about because of many years of failed negotiations with Xcel, and because Colorado law only allows two options for Boulder — stick with Xcel’s for-profit monopoly or create a muni. Plus, unlike with “right-sizing,” the analyses have been in-depth and subject to years of scrutiny by both advocates and detractors.
Further, Boulder’s grand schemes lack a clear context. We, as a community, have not been given the opportunity to actually resolve the big growth questions of “how much, how fast, what kind, and who pays.” So these grand schemes are being considered within an uncertain future. The result is that we, the ordinary citizens, are being exhausted by being asked to participate in an ongoing string of endless, unfocused public participation processes, which feel more and more irrelevant, because the big-picture questions are still being avoided.
The head tax ballot proposal turns out to be another grand scheme that exposes a large set of complex issues that deserve serious thought. (Search “Denver occupational privilege tax” for good info.) For example, do you charge employers, employees, or both? What about businesses located elsewhere but that have people working here? What about temporary workers, or contractors from out of town, or the self-employed? Or people with two jobs? Who has to file returns? How often? What are the penalties and interest for late payments?
Then there is the critical question of how the money will be spent. Will it be focused on funding transit, as originally discussed? Or is it for some vaguely defined employment-related needs?
If the head tax is for free EcoPasses, there are major strategic issues that can’t be ignored. The big one is how much RTD wants to charge. You’d think that RTD would charge based on actual cost, but past discussions have been about charging based on lost revenue, a much higher number whose calculation is extremely squishy. The tax should not go on the ballot before those negotiations are resolved. You don’t show your cards before you bet.
Should this be a tax or a fee? It’s difficult to tax the University of Colorado or the federal labs. Then what about other nonprofits? Fees are much easier to assess on all entities, but they need to be related to costs. Taxes provide no behavioral incentive, whereas citywide commuter parking fees, for example, could provide a significant incentive to reduce driving. They also could substitute for general taxes, and integrate Boulder’s various parking programs, solving multiple problems at once.
As should be clear, a head tax is a complex issue with many details to be worked out and big-picture implications to be considered. The council should learn from its previous grand scheme failures, take this seriously and not just jump on the head tax bandwagon without doing the work, which will take much longer than a few weeks in August.
All this brings me to the proposal to increase council pay. I don’t buy the argument that this will improve performance. Pay has gone up over the decades since I was on the council (originally we got paid nothing), but performance has not noticeably changed. In my opinion, what counts is who is elected, not how much they’re paid. But if people want to create a real financial incentive, pay council members a minimum base amount, and then at each election, let the citizens vote on whether the council should get a performance bonus.

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