FairFAR.org

FairFAR (http://FairFAR.org) has endorsed 5 candidates for the 2009 Boulder City Council elections. We urge you to vote in the upcoming election–you will receive a mail ballot sometime after 13 October 2009. While we give details and rank all of the candidates below, the five candidates we endorse (listed in the order in which we have ranked them) are:

Download a PDF Version of the FairFAR Endorsements

• Fenno Hoffman
• Suzy Ageton
• KC Becker
• Barry Siff
• George Karakehian

Cream of the Crop:

Fenno Hoffman stands head and shoulders above the other candidates running for election this year. Fenno is the only candidate who consistently points out that our current zoning and building codes have “suburban DNA” in them that prevents us from achieving our other environmental goals: reducing carbon footprints by housing more of our workforce, creating a walkable city with nodes of density along its transportation corridors, and revitalizing and rezoning the city’s neighborhoods and commercial centers to be more humane. At the neighborhood forums FairFAR attended, we were also impressed that Fenno is also the fastest candidate to leave the podium to sit down at the table with the voters–and actually listen to them.

Suzy Ageton is the cream of the crop among the three incumbents running for reelection. Suzy is a tireless champion of good government who asks the hard questions that too many other council members would prefer not to have raised. True to form, Suzy has been a consistent voice of reason and moderation in the compatible neighborhoods debate. In particular, we share Suzy’s views on redevelopment and density: “Done appropriately where services and transit are available, and utilizing the most current green-building technology, we can achieve more energy-efficient, compact structures with transportation needs being met significantly by foot, bike or transit.”

Worth not just your Vote, but Volunteering for:

KC Becker would come to council with impeccable environmental credentials, but what FairFAR finds most encouraging is that she is someone who understands the difficulties that the compatible development ordinance would pose on ordinary families who struggle to buy and stay living in the city. That’s important because families stay in their homes an average of 2.5 times as long as other homeowners do (according to US census bureau data). We agree with KC: Whatever else Boulder should be doing about its housing issues, reducing the number of families in single-family housing is not one of them.

Barry Siff is a dynamo. FairFAR is drawn to Barry’s pragmatism on all the issues, but particularly on the compatible development issue. He has noted publicly that the compatible development ordinance affects far too many ordinary-sized homes, and will discourage families from moving to distinctive neighborhoods like University Hill. We feel that he will bring a level of energy, dedication, and expertise to council work that will rival Suzy Ageton’s. As a candidate, he has immersed himself in the last year of council work, regularly attending hearings to hear from the general public and examining the budget line by line. This proficiency and attention to detail will be particularly valuable during the fiscally constrained period in which Boulder now finds itself.

George Karakehian reminds us of the voice we see missing from council debates–Tom Eldridge. That’s not just because George owns a business downtown, but because George is always asking whether our priorities are sensible priorities. George is smart enough to see compatible development for what it is and call its advocates out on it–a misplaced priority at a time the economy is falling apart and our libraries, parks and even public safety funding is being cut.

Didn’t Make the Cut:

Matt Appelbaum is a dedicated and intelligent public servant who wants Boulder’s example to lead on a national and international stage. We respect that Matt brokered a transition in the compatible development ordinance which moved it out of the “terrible” category and into the “merely bad” category–and the difference between “terrible” and “bad” is always a much sharper line than that between a “good” and “bad” regulation. Ultimately, and unlike Matt, we do not share the PLAN-Boulder vision for Boulder that the compatibility ordinance is designed to produce: middle-class neighborhoods divided on a block-by-block basis between run-down rentals and owner-occupied starter homes.

Valerie Mitchell’s candidacy doesn’t have a strong enough voice yet.  While she positioned herself first as an advocate for renters and later for landlord-renter relations, we never heard a clear position emerge on the compatible development ordinance, let alone many other issues in the city. She did say that compatible development ordinance was perhaps appropriate for some neighborhoods and not others, which is a position for which we have some support. We look forward to hearing more from her in future elections.

Serious Deficiencies:

Tim Plass has represented Mapleton Hill citizens on the Landmarks Board and has consistently voted for the smallest FAR and building coverage numbers on the table. We like Tim’s even tone and statesman-like qualities, but we think that he suffers from a myopic vision of the city that does not include South Boulder, East Boulder, densification or city-wide concerns. Tim strikes us as a candidate who is interested in protecting the status quo, and the fact that his strongest supporters include the city’s political elites does nothing to dissuade us of that. Ultimately, we see Tim as continuing the trend of well-intended but devastating housing policies that will continue to drive working families out of the city and into the surrounding communities, ironically creating an ever-larger carbon footprint for Boulder.

Jyotsna Raj is likeable enough, but has neither the experience nor the fiscal tough-mindedness for FairFAR to consider her as a serious candidate. This was particularly true with respect to the compatible development ordinance, where Jyostna on one hand supports tighter FAR and building limits than were in the ordinance that passed, but also called for more Accessory Development Units (e.g. alley houses and garage apartments) to house the “artists” and other young people who make our city so vibrant. But the latter cannot be built without city codes that allow their construction, and the compatible development limits will make small alley houses a relic of Boulder’s past. To us, Raj’s candidacy represents what has gone terribly wrong with the present leadership at PLAN-Boulder and the Sierra Club Indian Peaks Group: these groups say they want livable, walkable cities with appropriate levels of density, but they promulgate policies that are diametrically opposed to bringing about livable and walkable city blocks anywhere but in Central West Boulder.

Macon Cowles has consistently been among city council’s two most extreme advocates of the compatible development ordinance, so it should come as no surprise that FairFAR cannot support his re-election bid. Macon has repeatedly failed to listen to divergent points of view, at one point even declaring that the city was already so polarized that he saw no use in listening to others. While we respect Macon’s boundless energy and do not question his intelligence or his deep commitment to council work, Macon’s priorities are just backwards. Great cities are not built by council members with misguided but good intentions; they are built by the citizens on a solid foundation of good libraries, good schools, good jobs, good neighborhoods and good government.

FairFAR has no comment on the Seth Brigham or Rob Smoke candidacies.

Our endorsement process:

FairFAR evaluated the candidates by attending and/or watching several candidate forums, council meetings, neighborhood candidate-meet-and-greet parties, corresponding and/or speaking personally with the candidates, and listening to the audio interviews that David Thielen made with each candidate.  We were primarily interested in their positions on the compatible development ordinance and its relation to other city policies, such as increased population density along transportation corridors, a walkable and bikeable city built to a human scale rather than an automobile scale, and reducing our carbon footprints.  However other issues, especially our sense of the candidate’s budgetary priorities and prowess, were also factored into our decisions due to the severe economic challenges the next city council will face.

As most of you are aware, the city council passed the house size limit regulations on third reading late Tuesday evening (6 October 2009). The regulations were essentially unchanged from the 17 September meetings–a 35% building coverage ratio, a .5 floor area ratio, 45-degree side yard bulk plane standards, wall articulation standards and a host of other revisions to the code. They will take effect on 4 January 2009, after a 90-day implementation period has passed. To be considered under the existing rules, a building permit needs to be considered complete by the City prior to that date.

We still see several difficulties with the regulations, including:

• The building coverage ratio still makes no sense, particularly for majority of the city’s neighborhoods which do not have alleys.  It will encourage popping up rather than bumping out, and the increased building heights will actually work against several of council’s goals (perceived mass/or bulk, reducing the height of tall “looming” walls, the loss of rear-yard privacy, and the impact on views).  A better regulation would have focused on limiting the amount of second story coverage.
• For single-story ranch homes, the building coverage of 35% is equivalent to the .35 FAR that was floated by council as an interim measure–and was roundly rejected by the public.  So after 2 years of debate, ranch home owners are in only a marginally different boat than they were when this process started.
• There remain substantial issues with sloped lots, including counting toward the FAR significant portions of basements with no exterior access due to the fact that a lot slopes from side to side.
• There are similar problems resulting from how the bulk plane standard interacts with sloped lots, particularly in that they work to push the building upslope by measuring the building envelope from ground level at the side property lines, rather than averaging their elevations together.  Buildings that are off-center on their lots and lean upslope will be perceived as taller and more massive due to being situated higher on the hill.
• The interactions between the existing solar plane standard and the bulk plane standard on sloped lots have still not been adequately studied.  In many cases, these standards will interact with slope to produce a building envelope that forces homes to be off-center on their lots, with second stories and above crammed into a narrow corner nearer to one of property lines than the other.  Not building the upper floors centered on the lot could result in a loss of privacy for the neighbors and contribute to their sense of looming walls.
• Significant increases in both the document preparation costs and permit fee for homeowners preparing even modest additions.

As Macon Cowles noted, FairFAR did not attend the public hearing at the third reading to reiterate the same objections we have been making for months.  However, he was wrong to assume that our absence meant that we felt the “compromise” regulations were fair or even adequate.  Rather than seeing little to nothing change again at a public hearing, we have chosen to focus our time and energy on making endorsements in the upcoming City Council Elections.

We have updated the FAR and building coverage calculator to reflect the house size limit ordinance language that Boulder City Council has passed on second reading on 17 September 2009 and on thrid reading on 6 October 2009.  The ordinance will take effect on 4 January 2010.  For comparison purposes, the former versions are still available as the Staff Memo and Planning Board versions.

After the Council seemed to settle on a 35% building coverage and .50 FAR at Tuesday night’s meeting, several people have written to ask whether we will be posting an updated FAR calculator.  The answer is yes, but not until Council actually passes a reading on the ordinance, which would happen tonight.  While it seems unlikely to fail, strange votes are always possible–for example, a house-size limit proponent like Cowles could decide to vote against it in hopes of forcing a more restrictive set of numbers later.  And since it is a bit of work to tune the calculator, we’ll wait and see if they actually pass the revised numbers on second reading.

The first thing to note is that there are now a plethora of complex variations contained in the 70+ page 4 September 2009 staff memo that would interact with each other in even more complex ways, as well as a highly questionable “analysis” of how the proposed bulk plane ordinance would work on sloping lots.

Highlights:

• The staff recommendation has increased to a 35% building coverage and a .50 FAR.  The bulk planes remain unchanged, and would still force the mass of a home on a slope uphill (see our previous articles for illustrations).
• The report contains a number of alternative tradeoffs, including a small 240 sf exemption from the FAR for a one-car garage (but not for building coverage).
• There are two options for recommended starting points for Council to start redrafting the ordinance.  Option 1 uses the old numbers (30% and .45) as a starting point, while Option 2 uses the new staff recommended numbers.
• At the last Council meeting, Council asked for analysis of a building coverage/no-FAR/tighter bulk planes ordinance as proposed by Mayor Appelbaum.  There is an analysis in the last 20 pages of the staff memo.  However, we have discovered that the analysis that was performed by Winter and Company and staff may have failed to apply the proposed bulk plane ordinance correctly for sloped lots.  Hence, we still have no idea how well the Mayor’s alternative proposal would work.  Moreover, we don’t have a sound analysis of how the staff’s bulk plane ordinance would work on sloped lots either.

We would like to see council pursue further and more accurate information about how the bulk plane standards would interact with slope before taking any action.  We also strongly oppose the building coverage limit at 30%, and while 35% is a more reasonable number, we would suggest instead that council seek a different way to restrict the impact rear detached garages have on the effective building coverage after setbacks.  We would suggest that the current effective building coverage limits of just under 40% on a suburban 7000 sf lot and 42.5% on the old Boulder 6250 sf lots are just about right; the problems come in when–especially on the narrow old Boulder lots where alleys are common–rear detached garages occupy another 7 to 8% of the lot.

We have proposed two ideas to address this issue.  First, a rear yard setback of 25% instead of 25′ would increase the overall size of the rear yard on the narrow and deep (50′x125′) old Boulder lots, so a large two-car garage in the rear setback would cover around a third rather than nearly half of the rear yards.  Second, and alternatively, we could simply require those with detached rear garages to preserve that much open space within the primary building envelope on the lot–that is make detached garages count against the size of the building envelope that your main home must sit within, just as having an attached garage already does for suburban homes.

Lastly, we would like to point out that should council adopt a FAR of .50 or .45, as still seems likely, having a larger building coverage limit means that if first story construction is maximized, there will necessarily be a smaller second story and above.  In other words, if a home were to be built out to the limit of 35 or 40% on the first floor, the second floor would be limited to just 10 to 15 % of the size of the lot.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, most of the neighborhood compatibility concerns result from mass contained in the second story and above; the upper stories are what contribute most to perceived bulk and mass, generally require taller and looming walls, block neighborhood views, and decrease the neighbors’ rear yard privacy.  If instead Council persists in ratcheting down the building coverage limit, those problems will become worse, not better, as a result of an action that forces anyone expanding their home to build up and not out.

At the 18 August 2009 meeting Council asked staff to carefully examine the differences between no-FAR/building coverage/more bulk planes proposal and the planning board proposal, and the recommended staff proposal. But we have found what appears to be an error in how our highly paid consultants, Winter and Company, and city staff have applied their own proposed regulation. Look closely at the following diagram, which is from p. 69 of the 4 September 2009 staff memo to council on the proposed house size regulations.

The problem with this diagram is that the lower right hand leg of the building envelope is taller than the lower left hand leg of the building envelope, but the proposed bulk plane standards clearly state that they are to begin from 12′ above the side property line.  In other words: If a lot slopes from side-to-side, the ordinance as proposed clearly states that the bulk plane would begin lower on the lower side of the lot than the higher side.  This is exactly how we diagrammed the interaction of slope and bulk planes in our previous article Why the proposed ordinance doesn’t work.

The error here illustrates the gap between what the drafters of this ordinance think they are doing and what they are actually doing.  The proposed ordinance language will push the center of mass and bulk for homes upslope, causing them to lean uphill just as current homes now lean to the south under the bulk plane of the solar ordinance.  In fact, what their diagram illustrates is something closer to what FairFAR proposed as a revision to the bulk plane ordinance over a month ago–averaging the elevations across the side property lot lines.  We would actually like to see Council change the ordinance’s bulk plane measurement procedure to something that actually does do this, because centering the mass of the home on the lot using bulk planes would actually be helpful.

More importantly though, we have to wonder how profoundly this has affected the rest of the “analysis” done by Winter and Company and staff, and how it may have driven their conclusion that we should stick with their flawed two-dimensional proposals.  FairFAR would simply note that this just another illustration of the lack of objectivity in the process–had the Technical Advisory Group really been composed of geographically diverse and ideologically open-minded Boulder residents, we would have spotted this a long time ago.

We’ve notified the City staff of the issue and are awaiting a response.

FairFAR Note: We did not receive a response to this question before the 9/15 council meeting.  However, in examining the related “models” in the same scenario with a magnifying glass, we did see that it is possible that the problem results from unevenly distributed side setbacks (setback distances do not appear to be indicated in any of the diagrams).  This is a highly technical issue, but there is a strange odd arbitrariness about how one could choose to draw the building envelope as defined by the side yard bulk plane ordinance.  Because the side yard setbacks must total 15′ added together with a minimum of 5′ on either side, the building envelope intersects the bulk plane limit at varying heights (e.g. one side of the building envelope would be 17′ tall at a 5′ side setback, and 22′ at the other 10′ feet side setback, while if the side yard setbacks were assumed to be distributed equally as 7.5 feet each the bulk plane intersects the side setback at 19.5′ on each side).

We won’t know for sure whether this was an error or an unfortunate choice of example until we request and the city sends us the sketch up files used to draw those models.  So it is at least theoretically possible that the models were in fact correctly drawn–but in our judgment still unlikely, given what appears to be bulk planes which start at the same elevation despite trying to model a sloped lot condition.  At the very least, choosing a slope which essentially drops the same amount as the difference in height between the two sides of the building envelope provides a singularly unusual, “not-lopsided” case in an ordinance which would ordinarily result in lopsided building envelopes–and thus yields a very uninformative and misleading graphic.  In any case our point about the unintended consequence of the bulk plane ordinance on lots which slope from side to side remains unchanged–this ordinance will cause the mass of our city’s houses to lean to the uphill side of a lot, just our solar ordinance now causes the mass of our city’s houses to lean to the south side of a lot.

Based on the Council discussion at the 4 August 2009 meeting, we have again reverted the calculator to reflect the staff recommendations in the earlier, more restrictive proposal given to the Council and the Planning Board.

We’ve finally updated our online FAR calculator to match the latest version of the draft ordinance language proposed for in Attachment A (pp. 20-41) of the City Council Agenda for 4 August 2009. As with the previous version, Please note that we cannot model the newly proposed bulk plane and wall articulation standards with the calculator.

For the mathematically inclined, what follows is the key part of the source code for the planning board recommendation: Read more…

You can’t easily find the new language of the draft FAR ordinance–the city published it on their website late Friday, but they’ve buried it as Attachment A of the city council’s agenda packet for next Tuesday the 4th of August–and the city’s website does not yet even mention that the agenda contains a new version of the ordinance!

But here’s a link to the agenda, which contains the newest proposed ordinance language.  The ordinance language is attachment A, which starts on page 20 and runs onto page 41.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks that you can find the facts about the FAR process from just the city “Compatible Development” website:  There is no link yet to the draft ordinance or even to the agenda packet on the city’s “Compatible Development” website.

[FairFAR note: Reposted from the Compatible Development in Single Family Neighborhoods Mailing List]

Planning Board documents available; City Council dates have changed

The documentation provided to Planning Board at its July 9, 2009 meeting is now available on the Compatible Development project Web site. Also posted are Planning Board’s draft action minutes and summary of recommendations. See links below:

* Summary of Planning Board Recommendations;

* Draft Planning Board Action Minutes;
* Comparison between existing and proposed floor area ratios;
* Planning Board Recommendation Building Coverage and Floor Area Ratio;
* Landmarks Board Recommendation Motion (July 1, 2009); and
* 2008 New Residential Construction Comparison of FAR on a Sliding Scale.

City Council is scheduled to host a public hearing on the proposed code changes and Planning Board’s recommendation at its meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009. The first hearing [FairFAR note: I think the city means first "reading" of the ordinance], which was previously scheduled for July 21, 2009, was moved to Aug. 4 to be combined with the public hearing. Council will continue its discussion of the proposed code changes and is expected to make a decision at its Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009 meeting. The public is welcome to speak to City Council at the Aug. 4 public hearing. (The public hearing may be continued to Aug. 18 if necessary.) These meetings will be held in the City Council chambers, 1777 Broadway, and will also be televised on Municipal Channel 8.   City Council agendas are posted on the city’s Web site the Friday before the meeting, visit www.bouldercolorado.gov and click on “Council General Info and Agendas” toward the bottom of the page.

For more information, visit the Compatible Development project Web site or contact Julie Johnston at 303-441-1886.

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Please note that we’ve updated our calculator to reflect the latest draft ordinance language.

We’ve just completed our online calculator for the proposed new FAR and building coverage standards.  Please give it a whirl, though we recognize that determining the actual figures that go in the different boxes is beginning to resemble doing your own taxes!

But remember, the online calculator doesn’t try to model the effects of the new bulk plane ordinance on your home, and that may immediately put many existing homes in violation of the new standards.  Frankly, only an architect and land surveyor could model the effects of that part of the ordinance with any certainty.

The formulas we use come straight from the proposed draft ordinance language in the 26/30 June 2009 staff memo, attachment A.  We observed that there are numerous other formulas scattered throughout the various attachments to the current staff memo, and we suspect there are some errors in those tables, but that is the current proposal and we’ve implemented it faithfully.

One of the more interesting findings that we observed in building the online calculator was that even modest homes can easily run afoul of the new building coverage standard.  Try the default figures to see an illustration of how it can catch even small homes.

If you’d like to check our mathematics and logic for accuracy (hey, it was just written by a couple of guys with PhD’s who write software for a living), here is the relevant part of our source code.

Read more…