Steve Pomerance

“The people’s representatives will reach their destination, invested with the highest confidence and unlimited power. They will show great character. They must consider that great responsibility follows inseparably from great power. To their energy, to their courage, and above all to their prudence, they shall owe their success and their glory.”  — Translated from decrees of the French National Convention, May 8, 1793. By now, most council members must have figured out that their notion that the whole council could design co-op legislation from scratch just using public hearings but without adequate problem definition, alternatives analysis, or data collection, was ill conceived. Prudence, as the French advise, would direct the council to own up to the mistake and take a different tack, as I suggest below. I believe it would produce a more satisfactory result in less time, even starting at this late date. Here are some parts: The council needs to consider other alternativ...

I recently read through the latest draft of the co-op ordinance. Unfortunately, it is still a mash-up of ideas that sound good but have significant flaws. And it is still disorganized — general requirements are mixed with specifics, concepts show up in multiple places, and some terms, including “limited equity cooperative,” “certification,” and “privilege,” are undefined. One of the biggest problem areas is the “permanently affordable Group Equity Cooperative” (GEC). I’ll focus there, but it is not the only problem by any means. The ordinance allows up to 12 people to live in a co-op in low-density zones, and up to 15 in higher-density zones. But if the Planning Board so recommends, the city manager can increase the upper limit for a “permanently affordable” co-op like a GEC. The Planning Board must consider impacts, crowding, parking, and the co-op’s “mission,” but there are no actual rules for the board to follow to calculate their recommended number. So no one can challenge the ...

From my perspective, many of the current hot political issues have angles that haven’t been adequately discussed. Here are a few: Amendment 71 is an attempt to make it extremely difficult for any but the most well-funded interest groups to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, much less get it passed. The argument by Colorado’s “We know best” power-brokers is that we need more stability. But in Switzerland, one of the most stable countries in the world, it’s easier to petition to amend their constitution than to amend Colorado’s. A far better fix for Colorado would be to better protect statutory initiatives by only allowing them to be changed with concurrence of two-thirds of both the Senate and the House and consistent with their stated purpose. This would make this type of initiative more attractive and thus limit the use of constitutional amendments, and the Legislature could fix any technical problems discovered after passage. Propositions 107 and 108 support open pri...

Given the controversy around the protest filed over the “Three Term Limit” petition, I thought Camera readers might find it useful to have a brief analysis of the charter amendment process for home rule cities like Boulder. The Boulder City Charter, Section 137, references the Colorado Constitution as the authority on charter amendments. The Constitution (Article XX, Section 9) provides the basics, and empowers the Legislature to set the procedures. These are in the Colorado Revised Statutes (mostly in CRS31-2-201 through 31-2-225). For citizen-initiated charter amendments, the CRS are very specific as to the form of the petitions (the documents that voters sign), including size (8.5″ x 11″), orientation (portrait, not landscape), and that the warning (requiring signers to be registered voters, etc.) must be printed in red on every page. Disassembly, such as removal of staples, is not allowed, to help prevent fraud. CRS 31-2-219 specifies, “Any such petition which fails to confor...

The Boulder City Council is setting up a working group to improve how the “public” participates in its governance. This will be a big undertaking, since the process is flawed from top to bottom. At the highest level, the lack of trust is evident. Citizens are asking, “Do the council and staff really work for us the citizens, or are they in it for themselves? Do they really value what we care about, or do they hold their personal goals and interests paramount?” This should not be an “either/or,” but the current unacknowledged tension makes many citizens feel irrelevant, whether they are testifying at a council meeting, or are invited to participate in a staff-managed process. I certainly have experienced this myself. There is an almost total lack of feedback when testifying at council or emailing the council on substantive issues. And even as an appointee to the city’s working group on impact fees (an area where I’m a relative expert), when I identified significant flaws in the st...

Boulder’s current draft ordinance for co-operative housing units (“co-ops”) has a very long way to go to balance the desires and concerns of the various parties while preserving Boulder’s neighborhoods. There are big problems with trying to allow co-ops to operate in rental units. It is almost impossible to objectively distinguish a co-op from an over-occupied rental. Saying, “I know one when I see one,” the current city mantra, does not provide a bright line for enforcement officers or the courts. Allowing a third party that promotes co-ops to “certify” them is crazy, because they are likely to approve questionable groups just to gain constituents. Requiring the co-op groups to be incorporated will just create a cottage industry to do the paperwork, no doubt funded by landlords interested in higher occupancies and rents, but providing no particular benefit to the neighbors. Finally, allowing rental co-ops will accentuate the conflicts between landlords and neighboring owner-reside...

My motivation for this piece came from attending the Planning Board hearing on the proposed annexation of the Hogan-Pancost property — 22 vacant acres near the East Boulder Community Center. Frankly, I was appalled at what the city staff were recommending — that the property be annexed and zoned without a detailed, binding site plan, and without full analysis of the off-site impacts. This is not the first time the staff has been off base. In 2013, the staff-supported annexation proposal was voted down 7-0 by the Planning Board. Under the staff-recommended approach, if the city and the developer cannot come to agreement on the site plan and appropriate mitigation, in particular for the apparently unsolvable groundwater issues, then the city would be in a serious bind: The city has no process for de-annexing the property, and so would have given all the leverage to the developer. This would put Boulder citizens at financial and hydrologic risk. Then, during the hearing, a consultan...

Boulder City Council is meeting on Tuesday to consider how to address the loss of middle-income households in Boulder. To make sense of their material, I needed to make explicit some implicit assumptions and conclusions: The council’s goal apparently is to try to have Boulder’s income distribution approximate that of the county or state, to keep from becoming more elitist. The proposed solution is to ensure adequate affordable housing for a large segment of the population. Boulder’s housing programs will no longer just be about providing for “low-” and “moderate-” income people; the target population will now include the “middle” — households of 80 percent to 150 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). So the housing programs will potentially serve the majority of residents. It would not be equitable to use general revenues for funding this middle-income program, since that would be taxing and then subsidizing people in similar financial situations. And because “median” means half a...

Five members of the Boulder City Council (Appelbaum, Brockett, Burton, Jones, and Shoemaker) are going on a trip to Portland, paid for by you and me, and accompanied by a number of locals, including many representing business/development interests. Why Portland? Maybe it’s because, as Patrick Quinton, the executive director of the Portland Development Commission, said in the Portland Mercury when discussing certain commercial areas, “It’s all gonna be about density. You’re going to see a sharp push to demolish things that are low-density.” The council members allegedly want to study how Portland, and Eugene which they are also visiting, deal with homelessness, affordable housing, transportation, and other policy concerns. The vast majority of the over two dozen additional attendees (over and above the multiple Boulder city government folks)are from Downtown Boulder Inc., the Chamber of Commerce, the Boulder Economic Council, the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Colorado ...

Last summer the previous council pushed for reducing lanes on Folsom and other streets to solve some ill-defined bicycling problems by making some untested roadway improvements. The result was a public relations disaster, ending in total reversal. The notion of allowing a large number of cooperative living units in single-family neighborhoods has equivalent potential for disaster, because it could create a high level of uncertainty and negative impacts for existing Boulder residents. The good news is that the council is actually asking for hard information first; the bad news is that there is far more research to be done and understood if the benefits are to be realized without most of the downsides. I’m not opposed to co-ops. In the early ’70s, I lived in a single-family house, owned by a friend, who allowed a number of his friends to live there. We called it a commune, in the style of the time. It worked well for a number of years, mostly because we maintained pretty good relat...