Opinion: Council’s first goal for 2019: Clean up 2018


I commend the Boulder City Council for having an ambitious list of projects to consider for its January 2019 retreat. But the first thing I’d like to see the council do is to correct some of what went awry in 2018. Their goal here should be to re-establish trust between the citizens, city staff, and council members so we all can work together to make Boulder a better place to live.
First on the list is the “opportunity zone” mess. It is simply unacceptable that the city staff did not immediately communicate with the Council and the public about the opportunity zone process when the state informed them about it in mid-February 2018. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to forward the state’s emailed request to the council Hotline. Then the Council members and interested citizens could have known about it. But instead, the city manager submitted the application without anyone knowing except some city Economic Vitality staff members and Chamber of Commerce folks.
The city staff could have found and disseminated the comprehensive Brookings Institution article on opportunity zones dated Feb. 26, a week before the application was submitted. That would have informed everyone about what these opportunity zones really were — a tax break for the rich. If the Council had received this, they might have called a special meeting and possibly nixed the application, or at least started making appropriate preparations.
Instead, for the next eight months, city staff transmitted no significant information or analyses to the Council and the citizens. But beginning in March there were plenty of additional online articles, papers and IRS documents written on opportunity zones, including discussions about how some cities were trying to withdraw their applications.
To their credit, on Dec. 18 six Council members voted to pass a hastily drafted moratorium, so as to prevent a huge rush of new development applications prompted by the exorbitant profits available in the opportunity zone. And they listened to citizen input on how to do this effectively. But what was and still is missing is a public apology from the city manager for how badly this was handled, and some commitment by the Council to ensure that there are consequences for such behavior. So far, it appears that the Council has passively accepted this as business as usual.

A second example is the “hotel on the Hill.” Again, I give the Council credit for finally abandoning the idea of the city paying almost $23 million for a parking structure under the hotel that would net, at best, a few more parking spaces for the public to use. But the staff work that led up to this point was full of holes. No on-the-ground study of parking space adequacy was done; the net increase in parking for this $23 million outlay was never calculated; and the alternative of adding second levels to existing street level lots was never priced. No real economic analysis of the supposed benefits of the hotel to the Hill merchants was performed; and the University of Colorado’s future property purchases, which could completely change the Hill’s makeup, were apparently ignored. To the extent any of this work was done, it was citizens who did it. And again, there have been no visible consequences for the lack of proper staff work.

The hotel is still under consideration, but there doesn’t seem to be any awareness that it will still need to provide a large parking structure for patrons and employees just to ensure that Hill parking isn’t made worse. Somehow this need, which was finally faced up to, has now apparently re-evaporated.
Another example is the flood work for South Boulder Creek. I give the majority of the Council credit for finally supporting a reasonable alternative. But it took almost five years of near-constant effort by citizens fighting poorly designed approaches and generating better alternatives. And in spite of all that, right at the end, city staff put forward a really dangerous option — lowering the U.S. 36 bridge to back up the water so that it would fill a deeper detention pond — even though both CDOT and the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District policies require adequate freeboard, because low bridges can be blocked by debris.

For 2019 to be successful, the Council needs to have some public accounting for what happened in 2018 on these and other issues, so that the citizens can regain their confidence in city processes. I hope the Council does not let these events fester and taint the good work that the Council, staff and citizens can do together this year.


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