Opinion: Boulder’s way forward


The issues that were brought up in the recent Boulder election still need to be addressed. In spite of a hugely expensive and well-orchestrated campaign against 300/301, almost 40 percent voted for these ballot issues. And no doubt many other voters supported the concepts but were concerned with the details, or with the commitments involved in charter amendments. Also, during the debates the opponents of 300/301 generally supported the principles that “growth should pay its own way” and “neighborhoods should have a voice;” I know, because I was a participant. Finally, the two current council members that diverted last year’s effort to address growth issues are now gone; one was not re-elected, and another declined to run.
It’s now up to the council to take on the big, interrelated concerns of excess job growth, pressure on housing prices, increasingly congested traffic, and the side effects of huge buildings and additional demands on already stressed city facilities and services. This will require strategic, integrated thinking and a willingness to consider solutions on a scale sufficient to address the size of the problems. What the council must avoid is a retreat into the “silo” thinking that has characterized the recent past — these issues are inextricably linked. The council needs to prioritize its time and become directly involved in policy development; just turning these crucial projects over to city staff has simply not worked.
The mayor needs to pay more attention to local matters so that real progress is made. The city manager and city attorney need to actively support this effort, and the council needs to manage them to this end. Goal setting cannot be the usual long list of projects; it needs to start from (repeating myself) an integrated look at job growth, affordable housing, and transportation systems. Projects in process need to be prioritized, modified, or discarded based on their ability to make a real difference. The Council Agenda Committee needs to take responsibility for the schedule and agenda items so that council meetings can produce good decisions and citizens can productively interact.
The council needs to acknowledge the realities of our situation — like it or not, continued rapid job growth pushes up housing prices and exacerbates traffic; we’re at the inflection point in the hockey stick curve, where a little more traffic will cause a giant increase in congestion. So we need to refine the Transportation Master Plan so that it focuses on the most practical, cost-effective, and large-scale measures that can actually prevent traffic increases while still maintaining mobility. It will also require adequate financing, which will almost certainly have to include parking pricing citywide as well as impact fees and other means to insure that new development takes appropriate mitigation measures.
And irrespective of the half-truth that dense development cuts auto use, half as much traffic from twice as much development is still the same impact, so more density won’t solve our traffic problems. Besides, more housing requires funding for the additional parks, rec centers, libraries, etc. This means actually setting impact fees at the real cost.
Boulder’s affordable housing needs won’t be solved by building more market-rate units, or by up-zoning neighborhoods. As we’ve seen, prices are skyrocketing even with massive, rapid residential development. So it’s time to bite the bullet and consider big solutions that will work long term. First, this means stopping making the situation worse: We need full cost jobs-housing linkage fees for commercial development, and a real 20 percent (or more) inclusionary zoning requirement for rental housing development to match that for owner-occupied units, not the current de facto 15 percent. But even with those requirements, Boulder’s economic diversity will deteriorate. So if the council is serious, what is needed is a buy-down program to fix the prices of a significant portion of Boulder’s housing. This won’t improve affordability immediately, but over the long term, it could make a huge difference at a relatively low cost.
We’re talking real money here, as well as some very dramatic changes in the jobs, housing, and transportation areas, so meaningful involvement of the citizens is critical. Although the current Comprehensive Plan questionnaire is far superior to anything that has been done in the last decades, it will need to be expanded in the next iteration to include more context information so that people can make informed trade-offs. I go back to my suggestion for an enforceable comprehensive plan, where the leaders put their growth plans forward for voter approval before more growth is added. Then we would actually have some resolution.

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