Author Archive
Boulder’s Culture of Public Participation Needs to Be Changed
The Public Participation Working Group was commissioned by the Boulder City Council in 2016 as a result of concerns by members of the public that public processes that led up to many important city actions had just served as facades to legitimate [...]
Council Candidates Fora Reveal Divisions over Familiar Issues
Although the typical Boulder electoral tendency to try to blur policy differences in public with gauzy happy-talk was on full display at three recent PLAN-Boulder fora for Boulder City Council candidates, clear distinctions could nonetheless be [...]
Paradise Lost: Big Changes Are Proposed for CU’s South Campus
Two related occurrences—a proposal to build a massive berm to control flood waters and reconsideration of land use designations as part of the current Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update process likely leading to an annexation [...]
The City’s Current—And Even Proposed—Development Fees Fall Far Short Of Paying for the Impacts of Growth
Although the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan declares that new development should pay for its impacts on municipal facilities and services, including affordable housing, the City of Boulder currently assesses on new development only a small [...]
Is City of Boulder Ballot Issue 302 Necessary? Would It Cause More Harm Than Good?
At a debate on October 7, 2016 sponsored by PLAN-Boulder County about the merits of Ballot Issue 302—which would limit the number of terms that a Boulder City Council member could serve, proponent Andy Schultheiss contended that it would tend to [...]
Boulder County Commissioner Candidates Clash on Issues
At a PLAN-Boulder County election forum for Boulder County Commissioner candidates on September 30, 2016, Republican challengers clashed with Democratic incumbents most starkly on the subjects of roads and buses, the Twin Lakes low-income housing [...]
More Market-Rate Housing Means More Market-Rate Housing, Not Cheaper Housing
By Timothy Vollmer from Ann Arbor, USA - noe valley looking to mission/bernal heights, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3334964 At PLAN-Boulder County’s annual dinner on September, 23, 2016, San Francisco community [...]
Save Bears by Keeping Them Away From Boulder
At a PLAN-Boulder County forum on Friday, April 8, Kristin Cannon, district manager of the North Boulder district for Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), stated that to her knowledge no humans in the City of Boulder had been injured by bears since [...]
Let’s Sequester More Carbon in Our Soil
At a PLAN-Boulder forum on Friday, March 18, 2016, Boulder artist, mini-farmer and environmental activist Elizabeth Black informed the audience that agricultural land in the United States has the capacity to sequester 11 percent of American [...]
Check Out the New “Boulder Data Hub”
2013 flood extents(image capture from the Boulder Data Hub, data source: City of Boulder) At the end of the PLAN-Boulder County forum on Friday, December 4, 2015, Jeff McWhirter, a former PLAN-Boulder Board member who is also a computer whiz and [...]
