Opinion: The Portland junket – ‘pay to play’ or real work?


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 Enterprise Fund, and (bizarrely) Xcel Energy, plus some local architects who do projects in Boulder.
These people are not fools. I strongly suspect that, whatever else their interests include, they know that they will get a kind of access that they would not otherwise get in Boulder — the ability to talk to multiple council members for lengthy periods of time away from public scrutiny. And if Xcel has a paid representative going, well, you can figure that one out.
Our city attorney has opined that, “In Boulder we tend to err on the side of openness…” and that, “the trip…would be included in the list of things that the (Colorado) Supreme Court has said are excluded from the Open Meetings Law [OML].” Maybe he sees openness as an error, but the Costilla County case that he referenced actually supports the view that most of what the council members would be doing would be subject to open meeting requirements. The Colorado Court of Appeals laid it out quite clearly in the recent IREA v. Colorado PUC case: “In Costilla County, the supreme court held that, ‘[i]f the record supports the conclusion that [a] meeting is rationally connected to the policy-making responsibilities of the public body holding or attending the meeting, then the meeting is subject to the OML.’ ” The City Council has already asserted that this trip is about addressing very specific policy issues that Boulder faces. Besides, if this jaunt is not connected to the council’s “policy-making responsibilities,” then why are they spending our money on it?
Boulder’s Charter is even more demanding than state law: Section 9 states unequivocally, “All meetings of the council or committees thereof shall be public.” The citizens have approved only very limited exceptions — one temporarily allows executive sessions to discuss legal advice about the municipal electric utility; the other allows a committee of two to deal with employment issues related to the city manager, city attorney, and municipal judge.
No group of three or more council members would ever try to meet privately in Boulder with the Chamber, Downtown Boulder, etc. The basic rule is well known: If more than two council members meet to discuss city business, whether simultaneously or sequentially, then it’s open to the public, and must be noticed. But somehow this trip has acquired a “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” mentality.
Don’t count on the attending Camera reporter to police the council members; it’s not her job to keep them in line. The city also hasn’t been very forthcoming; this trip has been in the works for months but only really went public last week.
Underlying all this is a critical question: Does it really make sense for these council members to go to Oregon to have meetings in cities some 1,000 miles away? Irrespective of the legality, this seems like both an inefficient and ineffective process.
If the council wants to be educated about Portland and Eugene, it makes a lot more sense to invite their staff, elected officials, critics, neighborhood group reps, etc. to come here, as council member Lisa Morzel has suggested. That way both council members and Boulder citizens can come to the presentations, hear what is said, ask questions, and form their own conclusions as to whether what is being done there is appropriate for Boulder. And the concerns around what looks like a “pay to play” lobbying event would disappear.
By the way, the feedback I’ve gotten is that Portland’s housing and homelessness efforts aren’t all that great, and that their trolley/light-rail service probably wouldn’t work in Boulder. But they have good bike paths.


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