Policy Documents: An Agenda for the Next Boulder City Council – Fixing the Site Review Process


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 10th 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 5th Amendment rights prohibiting the “taking of private property without just compensation” has left the planning board floundering as to what they can and cannot require.

The only times that this hasn't happened is when there already existed a plan (generally called an “area plan” or a “sub-community plan”) that the development had to fit into, like the North Boulder Sub-community Plan, or the Boulder Junction plan. These plans significantly limited the sizes, designs and uses of developments, while guaranteeing the property owners certain rights. Thus, the site review process was more of ensuring that the project fit the plan, and so was much less challenging and controversial.

But instead of getting on with doing this level of planning, the majorities of recent councils have let things slide, and substituted project by project ad hoc reviews for doing real planning. This is a total waste of staff time, of board members’ time, and has produced some pretty awful result, like the multiple monstrosities going up at Canyon and 28th.

Truly fixing this problem citywide would require, for the more static areas, actually putting in place zoning requirements that would yield acceptable outcomes. Site reviews would be limited to dealing sites that have significant complexities of difficult sites, and would not be excuses to give away massive increases in the total amount of allowed development. In fact, the fundamental rule should be that site review should not yield any net increase in development.

But where there is a lot of potential for change, like in the area around Community Hospital, detailed sub-community plans that the neighboring residents and businesses find acceptable would need to be generated.

To do these plans properly, the required fees, exactions, and other site based requirements would need to be integrated with a transportation plan that is actually implementable and funded and that ensures that congestion and emissions won’t increase, something that hasn’t happened to date.

These plans would also have to address preventing further imbalance in the jobs/housing ratio and maintaining our population’s income diversity. This would require, for example, increasing the jobs housing linkage fee, upping the percentage of permanently affordable units in both new rental and owner-occupied  buildings, and eliminating the current ridiculous breaks given to rental developments.

This is real comprehensive planning. But to do this, the Boulder government would have to face the implications of its past ad hoc decision-making process. And really owning up to what hasn’t worked requires high levels of integrity, honesty, and willingness to change.

But it would be worth it, because this approach has huge advantages — it creates certainty, actually solves problems, and prevents new ones. And in terms of overall work by planners and the planning board, in the end it wouldn’t require more time and workforce than that wasted with the current project-by-project review done under vague and ridiculously flexible rules.

To get there from here would require making some moves that the special interests will not like. For example, inor areas where there is significant development potential or expected change, and where the current zoning doesn’t work, put in place moratoria on on site reviews. Or make the fundamental site review criteria be that no significant increase in overall development potential may be granted above that allowed by the underlying zoning. In commercial areas, this could simply be setting a height limit that cannot be exceeded, like 35' or 38', together with set back and step back rules that cannot be varied.

No doubt there are other ways to skin this cat. But doing real planning is far better than continuing the current craziness.

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