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Slow Growth!?
There are two surprises related to the Slow Growth! ballot initiative in Boulder.
First, despite widespread unhappiness with the impacts of rapid growth, the initiative did not get enough signatures to be placed on this year's ballot. There are enough signatures for the 1995 ballot, but voter frustration is less immediate than thought.
Second, compounding the first surprise, the initiative is a decidedly limited growth limitation proposal. Compared to early discussions (threats, some would say), Slow Growth! is downright tepid. If you take apart the grandly-named initiative, one piece at a time, you wonder why there is an exclamation point in the title.
The principal element of the proposal is a one percent annual limit on residential growth. Though it sounds dramatic, one percent is about the rate at which Boulder has grown since the 1970's boom petered out.
The second piece of the ordinance would limit new commercial construction to a quarter-million square feet of space each year, about a one percent increase over current inventory. This limit would cramp the style of job-creating construction, but as it is that style is not exactly free-wheeling. The current boom cycle is slowing quickly, layers of city "planning" already place severe limits on commercial development, and the vast increase in Boulder's job base is already in place. Early talking points had included head taxes, outright limits on new employee hires, mandatory employer-provided housing, and other draconian measures.
The third Slow Growth! provision gives voters the easier right to veto Area III annexations. There's no big change here, as the Integrated Planning Process (IPP) has made such annexations unlikely. It's strange that Slow Growth! didn't go for something revolutionary, like re-phasing Area II into a 30-year buildout, removing Area III from development altogether, or freezing the current city limits.
The fourth part of the ordinance is contained in five tortured paragraphs designed to make sure that future growth pays for itself through yet-to-be-designed "mechanisms." The ballot initiative kiss of death: "Figure out what I wanted and do something about it!" A wet one from Douglas Bruce.
Meanwhile, take a look 15 miles down the Turnpike.
Unnoticed by most Boulderites, on September 6 the City of Westminster passed a growth control ordinance. Remarkably similar to the original Danish Plan, but tailor made for Westminster, the ordinance will allow 2,850 single family permits from now through the end of 1995, and thereafter only 1,000 per year.
The 600 multifamily units currently approved may be built this year with some possibility of carryover into 1995; but if not built by then, the approvals are lost. After 1995 Westminster is out of the multifamily business. Permanently. A planning official there says: "We want the remaining 30% of our total land area to be built out in the highest possible quality." What about affordability? "The studies say Westminster is affordable."
Westminster's ordinance puts that city about where Boulder was in 1976. Westminster's population in 1970 was only 19,400, and is 81,000 today, a little bigger than Boulder in 1976, so it should have taken them a while to catch up.
Boulder's early ideas about residential growth control and land use have proven contagious, or at least exportable to other communities, but Boulder seems at a loss for the next steps. Boulder has labored through its IPP, inflicted a couple of moratoria, and adopted new master plan criteria, but the apparent immobility of the City Council is the motivation behind the Slow Growth! effort.
It's possible that Slow Growth! will pass next year, and likely that the residential component would make it if proposed by itself. However, if this ordinance is the best that the hard core growth limiters can produce, and even its relatively timid form has failed to capture the attention of the people, then additional rigid growth controls are not a workable path. Progress toward consensus sometimes comes in the negative. The Council seems right to proceed in its grinding, slow motion process of finding ways to ease the impact of growth. However, the Channel 8 faces look frustrated and tired as they endlessly chew on the matterÉ.and on each other, and are chewed on by the public.
Wish renewed energy to the Council, and good judgment, and good luck.
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