Steve Pomerance

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...