Steve Pomerance

  The “Christmas Wishes” expressed in last Saturday’s Camera by the Editorial Advisory Board were right on. Emily Walsh succinctly described our current situation: “I cannot understand why we have let difference, hate and fear encroach on every interaction we have.” Bill Wright concurred: “I wish for respect and patience with people we don’t agree with. Especially if the person you don’t agree with is me.” Former Boulder City Council member Andrew Shoemaker perfectly captured what’s needed: “Let’s work on the one wish that could be attainable in 2022, and which is the first step to any chance of resolving the rest of the list — collaborating with an open mind to tackle Boulder’s problems. You may have great ideas about how to solve our local problems, but so does your neighbor. Other citizens with different approaches also care about Boulder as much as you. Let’s consider checking our egos at Boulder’s door and recognize that it’s OK to change our minds.” In my experience of al...

“Bedrooms Are For People” lost at the ballot box, saving months or years in court attempting to resolve the disparity between the title and the ordinance. But many on the new Council want to take up the occupancy issue anyway.  That’s fine, but this is not a simple issue, and I hope the council recognizes this. The Council members need to start by discussing what they realistically want to achieve, and what they see as appropriate conditions and constraints on their goals. Having some reality in this discussion is critical, since the kind of one-liners tossed around during the campaign are not much use in doing good policy work. For example, there was the idiotic statement that, “Everyone who wants to live in Boulder should be able to.” But what if there are a million such people? We don’t lack for legitimate issues to be explored: For example, it seems reasonable that two single women with two kids apiece could share the house that one owns that is currently zoned for a family...

  In 1999, a group of citizens placed on the ballot and voters passed what might have been the most important reform of Boulder’s election laws ever. It limited donations to candidates’ “official candidate committees” to $100 per person. Donations to “unofficial candidate committees” (candidate advocacy groups other than the candidates’ OCCs) are also limited to $100 per person.  And coordination between these UCCs and the candidate’s OCCs is strictly forbidden other than cost sharing for advertising space. The initiative petition process has also been reformed. In 2018, the council-appointed election working group proposed, and voters approved, charter reforms that tied the number of signatures required for initiated ordinances to the actual number of voters rather than to the highly variable number of registered voters, limited council amendments after passage to those consistent with the “basic intent” of the measure, and gave the council power to implement on-line petiti...

  This year’s Boulder City Council election was unlike any other I can remember. Although roughly the same number of people voted, frankly I was surprised that it wasn’t more, given the hot button issues like the Bedrooms and CU South ballot issues. And then there was the name-calling, fake web postings, etc. I don’t ever remember seeing anything like this in past elections. It seems obvious that something is seriously wrong here. And I know people are disengaging, and from my observation, it’s because they think that they don’t count or the processes don’t work. In my opinion, the next council needs to start off with a bang, and not just repeat the last two years’ way of operating, which seems to have suppressed active participation in the process of policy formation, not encouraged it. So here are some suggestions for the first meeting and beyond: Return to calling the first part of the Council meeting what it should be — active Citizen Participation, rather than passi...

  By Lisa Morzel, Cindy Carlisle, Allyn Feinberg, Crystal Gray, Spense Havlick, Steve Pomerance, Gwen Dooley, BJ Miller, Phil Stern   We are former Boulder City Council members, who served from 4 to 21 years each on Council (85 years collectively). We also are knowledgeable about the issues and history of CU South.  We encourage Boulder citizens to vote YES on Ballot Initiative 302 in the upcoming city election. We read the recent guest opinion by five mayors regarding the recent annexation agreement of CU South between the City and CU. We, as they, want to ensure that our residents are fully protected from the risks associated with floods, want opportunities for a range of housing options that actually are affordable, and want to safeguard in perpetuity the unique ecosystems and species on our Open Space. In our view, the current annexation agreement is unacceptable and has many flaws, both from the process and content perspectives. Some major flaws include: The ...

I’ve been thinking about what the next Council members should focus on so that their term is satisfying and productive, both for the citizens and for themselves. I’ve already written about the critical importance of gaining good citizen input and actually engaging the citizens, as well as the value of ensuring that Council materials are complete and accurate so that everyone is on the same page about the facts of the situation and good debates can occur. But in addition to these activities, I have recently have been observing the importance of the Council culture that underlies all this. For example, having a council dominated by one member or one point of view, or by a clique that marginalizes council members who don’t go along with the majority, is really very detrimental — it leads to bad decisions and bad feelings. And, because the decisions that get made do not include real consideration of alternatives, when appropriately criticized for this, the majority just “circles the wago...

In my almost 40 years in Boulder politics, I have never seen a project create such controversy, and it’s no surprise: CU South is the size of downtown Boulder both in acreage and development potential. The proposed “100-year design” flood detention pond is inadequate given climate change and the limited pond size, which cannot reasonably be expanded once CU develops the nearby area. The deal was negotiated without investigating a land swap with city-owned land north of the city limits. Condemnation of the needed property was apparently not even looked at. And it was done without a proper flood control master plan to evaluate the costs and benefits of projects on Boulder’s many creeks, determine which ones were worth doing, and then prioritize them based on the most benefit (including life/safety) for the least cost. Boulder’s politics have worked best, and created the least conflict, when the processes are open and the citizens can observe and engage as matters proceed. Sometim...

When I first ran for Boulder City Council in 1985, I learned an important lesson by knocking on doors and talking to all sorts of Boulder citizens: Being on Council was not about me, or my opinions. It’s about representing the citizens of Boulder, like the ones that I met and talked to, and what they think and value. This was a very profound experience, and really changed the way I thought about the role. Once on Council, I came to further appreciate the intelligence and interest of the citizens in what happens in Boulder. On any topic, there were always a few people in the meeting audience who knew more than any of us on Council. So when we established the Council agenda committee, one of our jobs was to invite those citizens to testify, so that we could ask them questions and learn what they knew. (Incidentally, this also saved time, because the mayor would ask others to not repeat what had already been said, but just say they agreed.) Our Council debates were pretty freewheeling wit...

It appears that no one has really examined what the proposed CU South development would look like. Would it be an open park-like setting, or dense like downtown, or what? The current annexation agreement would allow CU or a private owner to build up to 750,000 square feet of non-residential development. Then to meet the annexation agreement’s 2-to-1 minimum residential-to-non-residential floor area ratio, 1,500,000 square feet of residential development would be required, for a total of 2.25 million square feet. And much more residential is allowed. Compare this to downtown Boulder. The Downtown Boulder Inc. website indicates that the downtown Boulder Improvement District (BID) has about 2.5 million square feet of development. So the square footage of development would be about equal. Downtown Boulder is about 125 acres. That’s the area from 8th to 20th Street, and from Canyon Boulevard to Spruce Street, with a few additions and subtractions. The CU South Development Zone, where all th...

A few weeks ago I made a request under the Colorado Open Records Act for all records of non-public closed door meetings on CU South that were attended by councilmembers Sam Weaver and Rachel Friend and city and/or University of Colorado Boulder staff. These meetings resulted from the Feb. 16, 2021, council discussion at which the council anointed Weaver and Friend to take on the role of advising the city manager and staff during the CU South negotiation process. I got the results back about a week later. I was astonished to discover that these two councilmembers had 19 closed door meetings, about one per week from March through July, with, variously, five city staff members, six CU staff members, and (bizarrely) a couple of CU’s PR consultants from the Trestle Strategy Group, and even some facilitators. Boulder Charter Section 9 states, “All meetings of the council or committees thereof shall be public.” Section 13 states, “Except for purposes of inquiry, the council shall deal with th...

The  City of Boulder and University of Colorado Boulder are close to cutting a deal. CU gets to annex its flood prone property and then potentially make a pile of cash by selling most of it to a private developer, the residents of South Boulder get inadequate flood protection and the rest of us get none for the foreseeable future, traffic becomes a disaster, and the jobs/housing balance and affordable housing situation is made even worse. Here are the many facets to consider: It’s a non-solution to flooding:  The proposed detention pond on South Boulder Creek will fill up and overrun if the storm significantly exceeds the 100-year size, creating a shorter but still powerful flood. And that will definitely happen, given climate change and the huge increase in atmospheric water from global warming. That’s why detention ponds are the solution of last resort. Worse, once the land is developed, expanding the pond to 500-year capacity will not be realistic: there are issues with...