FairFAR.org

So the City has spent $273,000 of our tax dollars to develop the ordinance that they are now contemplating.

That is a heck of a lot of money spent considering that the study upon which the proposed ordinance is based seems to have failed to capture the opinions of even a simple majority of the single-family homeowners in Boulder.  One would have hoped that the City Council (or the planning staff, or the Council's consultants) would have realized that the response rate to their survey was inadequate (to say the least) and tried some other approach to gathering the opinions of the majority of people who would be affected by the decisions they made.  Instead they glossed over the poor response to the survey and presented the results based on the number of people who actually responded to the survey.  Why?  I suppose that saying that about 65% of the respondents agreed with the “problem statement” looked a lot more compelling than saying that about 21% of the single-family homeowners in the City agreed with the “problem statement”, especially to a City Council whose minds were seemingly made up before the study was even initiated.

It is also a heck of a lot of money spent on a process that has culminated in the proposed adoption of specific numerical criteria (FARs and areal built-space coverage) whose technical bases are at best obscure.  What is the technical basis for a FAR limitation of 0.45?  A built-space coverage of 0.30?  The publically-available documentation is strangely devoid of explanations of how these criteria were derived.  Why is that, do you suppose?  Are they perhaps imaginary numbers concocted based on that failed survey? 

What is most interesting to me is that the structure of the study and the “buzz-words” used by the City's consultents to describe that structure suggest to me that their process was based at least in part on a planning process template developed by USEPA quite a while ago (around 15 years ago).  That process was intended to improve the effectiveness of the USEPA's decision-making process.  And properly implemented, it worked.  It worked well.  I should know….I was involved in its creation and also was the first to test it in my region. 

Sadly, though, in the current situation application of that process is flawed…deeply flawed.  There is no apparent consensus amongst the single-family homeowners in the City that there is a problem worthy of the City Council's attention.  That is the first step in the process: to identify a problem that is worthy of the attention of those involved in the process.  Without such consensus, the entire process should have been stopped, or at least delayed until consensus had been reached.  Without such consensus the proposed ordinance seems to be at best arbitrary and capricious….and completely undefensible.

To the opponents of the propose ordinance I would say that your opposition is reasonable and rational: please keep it up in as vocal a manner as possible.

To the proponents of the proposed ordinance, I would ask you to ask yourselves why it should be passed given the apparent lack of consensus amongst the affected homeowners,  And I would ask you to ask yourselves whether the proposed criteria really are technically sound and supportable. 

As for the money spent by the City, is it reasonable and justified based on the results?

I would say no.