Steve Pomerance

The 2017 election was a wake-up call for citizens who thought that Boulder’s campaign finance reform laws would keep our elections open, transparent and not subject to excessive spending. These laws were put in place by a citizen initiative passed by the voters in 1999. They limit contributions to candidates’ official committees as well as to “unofficial candidate committees” (organized by third parties) to $100 per person, and provide matching city funds for candidates up to $10,000 if they abide by a $20,000 total limit. But this year, spending was dominated by “dark money,” paying for mailers, ads, phone banks, etc., in the name of Open Boulder and possibly others. These folks tried to avoid the city’s regulations by carefully avoiding the magic words of “vote for,” “vote against” and synonyms of these. These magic words are what are called “express advocacy” in federal case law, and Boulder’s laws regulate “expressly advocating.” So instead, Open Boulder used words like “endors...

2Q is by far the most dangerous measure that I’ve ever seen the city put on the ballot. Please vote “No” on 2Q! 2Q’s ballot title — which says that it removes some of the Charter’s conflicting requirements and obsolete provisions, and clarifies referendum and initiative requirements — makes it sound like it’s just housekeeping. But 2Q creates huge uncertainty for the municipal initiative process, and so will destroy this valuable aspect of direct democracy in Boulder. Initiatives are done because the citizens are not satisfied with the current city laws, or because they see an issue that has not been addressed by existing legislation. So initiatives are necessarily somewhat adversarial to the local power structure.Therefore, it is critical that the rules be clear and unambiguous, not add unnecessary delays, and not be subject to the discretion of the city staff or the City Council. Currently, Boulder’s municipal initiative process is carefully laid out in the Charter and works ...

When I came to Boulder in the ’60s, I was young and blissfully unaware of the huge efforts the current residents were making to keep Boulder a wonderful place, including the Blue Line, that protects our mountain backdrop from development, the 55-foot height limit that protects our views, and the open space program that protects us from sprawl. But eventually I came to realize that the very qualities that make Boulder great, and the kinds of people who care enough to try to preserve them, were what make Boulder such a desirable place to do development. So without carefully managed growth, including growth paying its own way, we would lose those qualities and become just another overcrowded, overpriced, traffic-congested “success” story, like Silicon Valley. I am supporting candidates that I think will continue this effort to keep Boulder a wonderful place with citizens who truly care about our “commons” — the qualities and amenities that make Boulder unique. Here they are in alphabe...

For the last 50 years at least, Boulder has had a “housing crisis.” Our housing has always been more expensive than in our neighboring cities. We started with a fantastic natural setting and a stable economy because of CU and the federal labs. Boulder’s desirability increased with the Blue Line preventing development on the mountain backdrop, our open space limiting urban sprawl, and our 55-foot height limit preserving views. But over that time period, we went from a town with 30th Street being dirt and a turkey farm at the Williams Village site, to a booming employment center with jobs growing faster than housing. The current high-tech craze, exemplified by Google, escalated the already rapid increase in housing prices, with multimillion dollar cash offers, and the scraping of modest single-family homes and local service businesses and replacing them with McMansions, high-rise apartments, and giant office and hotel complexes. The city’s studies have shown that new, market-rate h...

Relative to  my last column  on the flaws in the site review process, on Wednesday  the Camera covered  the Boulder City Council’s “workshopping” of a ballot item to extend the current capital improvements tax. This tax funded, for example, the rebuilding of the civic center area between city hall and the library. What caught my eye was a failed attempt by council members Bob Yates, Jan Burton (who is running for re-election), and Andrew Shoemaker to remove $2 million of the funds targeted for replacing Fire Station No. 3 at Arapahoe and 30th, and instead spend the citizens’ tax money to make operational the “arts cinema” that the developer of the Pearl West building promised during site review, but allegedly does not now have the funds to complete. This hole in the site review process has been known about for years, so why hasn’t it been fixed? So it’s clear, Station No. 3 is undersized to cover all the growth in east Boulder, and is too close to the Boulder C...

The stimulus to write this came from a recent article in the Camera about how the developer of Pearl West — the huge office building at 11th and Pearl — allegedly didn’t have the money to finish the theater that the developer promised when the site review was approved by the Planning Board. What good is a promise if there is no requirement to deliver? The problem is that there is a fundamental flaw in Boulder’s planning process. Developers of projects, other than small ones, are required to go through the “site review” process, where the judgment of a majority of the Planning Board as to whether the project meets vague criteria is substituted for actual numerical rules about height, setbacks, density, etc. The bounds are much looser, and the Planning Board almost invariably approves structures considerably larger than the underlying zoning would allow. This size inflation generally has a negative impact on the neighbors, so the only guaranteed outcome is a giant fight. And because ...

The stimulus to write it came from a recent article in the Camera about how the developer of Pearl West – the huge, totally out of place office building at 10 th and Pearl – didn’t have the money to finish the theater that was promised when the site review was approved by the planning board. How is is that a developer could promise something but could not be held accountable?. The problem is that there is a fundamental flaw in Boulder’s planning process. Developers of almost all projects, other than the very small ones, are required to go through the “site review” process, where their project is supposed to meet thousands of words of incredibly vague criteria. But there are no minimum rights or maximum limits that would properly bound the project’s size and impacts. So the only guaranteed outcome is a giant fight. And the staff’s paranoia about violating someone’s 5 th Amendment rights prohibiting the “taking of private property without just compensation” has left the planning ...

Back almost 30 years ago, when I was on the City Council, we engaged in a very detailed study of the major drainages that flow through Boulder, and the likely damage that could result from floods. Our objective was to come up with appropriate risk mitigation standards. Council member Spense Havlick and I even went to CSU and tried to walk across their artificial flume at various flow rates and depths to test our ability to walk through a flood. Out of this study came Boulder’s regulatory standard using the 100-year and 500-year flood maps and also the high hazard areas, which were based on such flows. The “100 year flood” is a statistical notion that uses historical data to attempt to indicate what areas would have a 1 percent probability of flooding in a given year. The “500 year flood” has an annual probability of 0.2 percent. Setting the rules based on these standards was a compromise. The council did end up requiring some buildings that were at very serious risk to be torn do...

When I heard about the Attention Homes project at 1440 Pine, now under review by the Planning Board, something about the large size and high number of at-risk young adults that would be housed there didn’t ring true to me. Then I learned that this was the result of a “ density transfer .” I couldn’t remember ever hearing that term in my 10 years on the City Council, so I inquired as to what was being proposed. What I learned was, frankly, pretty bizarre. This proposed “density transfer” first calculates the amount of residential development that would be allowed on the whole block, including the 1440 Pine site, as if it were all bare ground, even though most of this block is already developed and so there is no space to build anything close to that amount. Then it “transfers” this block’s worth of development “density” rights to about one quarter of the block. So the existing buildings remain on three quarters of the block, and extra new residential development gets built on one co...

Xcel is a for-profit monopoly that was created in 1998 to take advantage of outmoded, non-competitive, but highly profitable regulated utility systems in multiple states. Xcel wants Boulder to give up its chance for freedom in exchange for a new franchise that effectively locks Boulder to Xcel for 20 years, guarantees nothing of substance in return, and from which the escape terms are so expensive or painful that they could not ever be used. As Camera readers, I suspect you’ve already read about the flaws in Xcel’s proposal. But just to reiterate some important points: Practically everything would have to go through PUC review, and so could easily be stopped. The renewable energy programs offered are either already available or overpriced. And giving Boulder what it doesn’t offer to others would put Xcel at risk in all sorts of ways. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that Boulder could not really enforce the terms. It was clear going into discussions over a year ago that it would be a ...

Much of what has made Boulder such a great place to live has been the work of people half a century ago. These people recognized what I call the “ ratchet effect ,” that bad development decisions cannot be undone, so policies needed to be put in place to prevent, or at least limit, the damage that a growth-at-all-costs majority of the council could do. These policies include charter limits, like the Blue Line that prevents city water for development from being supplied above a certain altitude, the 55-foot height limit that has prevented high-rise development from cutting off our views, and the open space referendum process that allows a 60-day window for citizens to challenge disposals of open space. Other constraints include the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan’s requirement for Planning Board agreement for land-use changes in the area inside the city limits (Area I) and additional agreement by the county commissioners and county Planning Commission for urban development further...

Because the discussions on this subject are all over the map, I thought it would be useful to summarize what I think would be an appropriate approach. A reasonable goal would be to maintain some level of economic diversity in our community. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who wants to live here and every business that wants to expand here can do so. We have finite resources: our streets, our water supply, our views, and our Open Space are limited in their carrying capacity. Besides, trying to build more market priced housing won’t work. The market has already priced this housing out of range of anyone even somewhat above the area median income . So just adding market rate housing will just add more people with high incomes or net worth, and leave out the middle and lower income folks. Also, the demand is so huge that it cannot be reasonably satisfied: There are over 60,000 workers that commute in every day, and together with their families, they would double Boulder’s pop...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Originally electric utilities in the U.S. competed with each other by covering the streets with multiple sets of wires, but this competition lowered prices and cut profits. Then, roughly 100 years ago, these utilities realized that it would be a lot more profitable to not compete but rather to control their regulators. Thus was born the regulated private monopoly structure we now have. As new power plants got bigger, the unit price of electricity dropped, so customers could tolerate these excess profits. (Nonprofit public utilities also emerged as an alternative. Per the American Public Power Association, Colorado now has 31, and all 151 utilities in Nebraska are public.)  Recently, the for-profit private vertically integrated monopoly structure has begun to break up. Large sectors of the country(but not Colorado) now have competitive markets for electricity supply, independent system operators that match...