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by Steve Pomerance; May 4, 2006

Last Tuesday night the Boulder City Council passed a motion that, in effect, violated the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan which the Council had passed only months before, thereby breaking an agreement with Boulder County, and more importantly with Boulder’s citizens.

On May 2, 2006, the Boulder City Council, during their discussions of their Retail Strategy, passed the following motion: "Move to keep the 2005 major update to the comprehensive plan open for the purpose of initiating a community dialogue on desired community needs and preserve the opportunity to consider a service area expansion prior to the 2010 major update to the comprehensive plan." For those who aren't familiar with the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, a service area expansion is equivalent to moving land from Area III, rural land that previously was not available for urban development, to Area II, where the land could be annexed to the City and then developed with full urban services (and associated costs.)

Only six months before, on October 18, 2005, the Council, with full awareness of the interest of various parties in having land in the Area III Planning Reserve (north east of the current city limits across US 36) and other Area III parcels annexed and developed, passed the BVCP 5 Year Major Update. This update includes procedural rules that only allow Area III to II changes of the sort contemplated in the Council’s 5/2/06 motion to occur during such a 5 year update, with the next one occurring in 2010. And the same procedural rules define what minor III to II changes can occur at interim times, so that there is no ambiguity in the BVCP as to whether the Council intended to restrict such major changes to every 5 years.

Now, with their latest action, the Council has somehow decided to leave the major change process "open" indefinitely until at least the next major update in 2010. This clearly violates the 5 year procedural requirement that they approved 8-0 only six months before, at least as any normal person would understand it. What the Council fundamentally did was break an agreement with the citizens.

There is good reason to restrict such changes to every 5 years -- it focuses people on these major issues at one point in time and resolves them one way or the other, so that there is not an open-ended debate and dispute as will inevitably now occur. Also, and this is important, the 5 year restriction puts the issues in the spotlight for what they are -- decisions that affect what Boulder will be for hundreds of years and are not to be made lightly or based on somebody's latest and greatest idea that in a few years will prove to be irrelevant.

It isn’t as if the particulars of this situation warrant leaving the process open-ended. If 29^th Street is wildly successful, there will little immediate reason to even think about putting a big box in Area III. And if it isn’t, its actual success will be impossible to gauge without waiting a few years. As for other vague proposals that are floating around, it will be years before any of them are close to the point where the City and the County might consider them for Area III. The only wild card is whether the Council, having purchased the Valmont Butte in 2000 and then decided in 2005 that they didn’t want it, will want to annex it and sell it off for private development to retrieve some of the financial losses that they themselves created. But since the Council abandoned the Butte because of neighborhood and Native American resistance to development, annexing it would be the ultimate slap in the face, and not just to Boulder citizens.

What is the point of going through all the struggles about updating the BVCP if Council members are quite willing to ignore their own unanimous agreement with the County of six months ago and vote to unilaterally change the rules just because they can't come up with a way to decide what to do? And will the ill-defined process that they intend to start actually produce some resolution, or will it go on essentially forever? Based on past performance, I put my money on the latter.

What will the County Commissioners, who are the other party to the BVCP Inter-Governmental Agreement, do to hold the Council to their agreement? Will they too let the BVCP gradually slide into oblivion, as recent Councils seem bent on doing, given the loss of safeguards that have already been endorsed? It would be more than a shame, it would be tragic, if one of the political actions that has defined Boulder and on which Boulder's reputation for good planning is built were to be discarded with so little thought and respect.

Check pages 54-60 of the final version (PDF) of the BVCP for the amendment process language.

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