Steve Pomerance

The Library District proposal, with its huge property tax increase, had serious problems with both its structure and funding. But worse, it has taken a relatively simple issue and turned it into yet another polarized debate. Yesterday I watched the video of Tuesday’s council meeting, I saw councilmembers struggling to come to agreement on even the basic LD issues. It became clear to me that there is no solid reasoning to support the creation of a Library District (LD). Every significant desire can be better or more easily met with actions that can be taken by the city on its own. What I find irritating is that these alternative actions have not been explored. It’s as if the “good idea” of a LD has taken over the thinking. What should have been done is to identify the actual policy goals, and then explore the options to achieving them, with both pros and cons fully analyzed. Here’s a start: Money:   Fundamentally, the advocates want the library to have more money to spend on providi...

Given the push for more development dominating the Opinion Page lately, I thought Daily Camera readers might find it useful if I laid out some of the numbers related to Boulder’s growth, since they provide a quantitative basis for evaluation. But these numbers also need to be embedded in a long-term historical perspective, especially in this age of rapid climate change, with its serious questions about the sustainability of human life at our current population level. As I said in  my March 16, 2021 column about humans being the most invasive species , it’s worth looking at a graph of human population over the millennia ( https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth ). Human population grew very slowly from 10,000 BCE until 0 BCE, averaging around 0.04% per year. It then averaged around 0.09% per year until 1800. Since then, we humans have been growing at an average of almost 1% per year, increasing by around eight times to almost 8 billion humans on the planet. So it’s no s...