Participate in Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan - Update
Do you wish that the city planners would let us in on how many more people we are going to pack into our Boulder?
Do you wonder how we will know if we have enough water in the future for all the sinks, tubs, and toilets we are approving with such mis-named adventures as “Family Friendly Vibrant Neighborhoods” zoning changes?
Are you down with the city solving our traffic nightmares by the wishful thinking of 15-Minute Neighborhoods or down-sizing important major streets like Iris?
Then the 2025 update of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan (BVCP) is the venue for all of us to interrogate the city planners and advocate for rational answers. If you aren’t familiar with the BVCP, it is the overarching 150-page city planning document that “provides a general statement of the community’s desires for future development and preservation of the Boulder Valley.” It can be found here in it’s entirety. But you might also want to visit the Boulder County website as the county partners with the city of Boulder in the creation of the BVCP.
The current outreach to the public for our views and opinions is being undertaken through a variety of dog and pony shows that is revealing the typical wishes for unicorns and rainbows, with an interesting new twist being that we have a company called MOTUS acting out the musings of participants. So far, the really challenging questions about the future of Boulder that are supposed to be guided by the comprehensive plan are missing in action.
A major piece of the public outreach has been started, with the actual public involvement starting soon. 10,000 sort of randomly selected Boulder Valley citizens have been mailed a solicitation to volunteer for something called the Community Assembly. 48 people will be selected to examine and discuss different locations and ways of implementing 15-minute neighborhoods in the Boulder Valley. If you think 15-minute neighborhoods are the most pressing matter for the next 20 years, this effort is for you; however, you will be limited to being an observer if you aren’t one of the 48 people selected. If you have input, you can send it to the city planners along with the many thousands of comments being submitted and leave it to the planners and the city council to divine what the community wants.
An alternative that Boulder Action and others are advocating is using Scenario Planning based on current and projected data to create possible future pictures of what Boulder could be and then let the community select the one or a composite that we think is the best option. This injects some reality into this important process, and would allow some real voice for our future. The city has excellent data on current conditions on its web page https://a-boulder-future-boulder.hub.arcgis.com/pages/a-boulder-today. Click on the icons to access the data.
The current comprehensive plan is full of fluffy aspirational policies on almost any topic, but they provide no real actionable direction. These policies are used to argue for and against pretty much any city action. Recently, the same neighborhood preservation policies cited for passage of Ordinance 8666 that changed residential zoning districts to allow more density could easily be turned around to argue that the ordinance was destroying neighborhoods. With so many policies, many of which conflict with each other, none of them mean anything and do not provide any real guidance.
Boulder can do much better than this! Let us know if you want to join with so many of us who are organizing to make our voices heard in the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update.