Steve Pomerance

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...