Opinion: Let residents decide how big Boulder should be


According to the 2018 Boulder Community Profile, since 2000 job growth has been about 50% faster than residential. Excluding kids and retired folks, jobs likely grew at more than double the rate for resident workers. We now have well over 60,000 in-commuters. As a result, traffic congestion has dramatically increased. Unless we make some significant changes, it will just get worse faster, because we have exceeded the capacity of almost all our intersections. Even secondary streets are now heavily congested.
Water, Boulder’s prized resource, may finally come under pressure. We get a significant portion of our supply from the Colorado River via the Big Thompson project. Given the multi-decade drought induced by climate change and the Colorado River Compact constraints, at some point, probably sooner than later, we will be forced either to buy out farmers’ water rights or live with a lot less.
More people means more big buildings, more views blocked, more open opace trampled, more crowding in city facilities, more air pollution, higher home prices and rents, and so on.
So how do we avoid the dense, unaffordable, traffic-congested fate of other high tech areas? The key move is for the Boulder City Council to finally go to the citizens and ask us how big we want Boulder to be in terms of both population and jobs. And once there is a community consensus, which I expect will quickly emerge, the Council will need to implement the changes necessary to get there so as to actually make Boulder a better place to live and work and where citizens feel more positive about the future.
The Planning Board hearing of two weeks ago illustrated the likely outcome. The hearing was on the proposed ordinance to allow duplexes, triplexes and more accessory dwelling units in some of the less dense residential zones. Citizens who came to the hearing were quite angry and upset about this proposal to densify their neighborhoods. They were very clear that they had chosen to live there because they liked their neighborhoods the way they are. As a result, the Planning Board recommended that the city “work with the community involved to come up with a plan to obtain their buy-in from the beginning.” This is good advice, and should be the rule for all big planning projects.
Most Boulderites I know also consider Boulder as a whole to be in some sense their neighborhood. And they feel pretty much the same way as the folks who showed up at that hearing about what is happening citywide. But to get useful input on specifically where Boulder should be headed will require complete and unbiased analyses of what will happen if we keep growing as we have been versus what would happen if we were to change course in various directions. Example futures could be laid out, including varying numbers of jobs and population, scenarios of the amounts and types of development that would be required or eliminated, mock-ups of the buildings, projections of traffic, congestion, and delays, etc.
For this to be credible, there would have to be strong citizen involvement right from the beginning. Fortunately, Boulder has many citizen experts who would participate if the Council invited them. There would also have to be extensive outreach and polling, just as was done in the 1993 Integrated Planning Project. Every person in Boulder should be given a chance to provide meaningful input on real questions that allow a full range of responses.
Once the big-picture issues were resolved, this process would then be repeated at more detailed levels to do sub-area and neighborhood planning within the basic constraints that had already been generated.
All these results would be used to put some real focus to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan and to radically simplify the land use regulations as well as the site and use reviews. Because this process would create a high level of certainty as to what is wanted, the wordiness in Boulder’s land use regulations and excessive flexibility in the review processes would no longer be needed. The results would also influence our departments’ master plans, especially the Transportation Master Plan; in a low-growth future, the Transportation Master Plan could significantly improve our traffic situation.


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