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_________________________________ Rob Kaplan InterviewBoulder Action had the opportunity to sit down recently with Boulder City Council candidate Rob Kaplan for an informative interview delving into issues from fire safety to public safety. Rob impressed us as a well-prepared candidate who would uphold the standards that the people of Boulder expect of their city leaders on current relevant topics of importance. On homelessness, Rob supports many of the ideas citizens have been urging for years: move outreach services out of Central Park, enforce a residency requirement, reallocate and support the police, involve neighboring municipalities. He feels that we can’t silo off the different issues regarding homelessness as they are all interconnected. If elected to Council, he will strive during the January Council retreat (during which Council determines future priorities) to introduce steps that will move the needle instead of just creating more housing, such as doing more sweeps of encampments later in the day, allowing improved public safety measures to make the downtown area more welcoming to visitors and our community members, and working with the City Manager so that the police have more control, autonomy and authority and are not being told what they can and cannot do. Rob’s idea is that we’ve tried the soft touch; now we need to make it a little less comfortable. He’s not afraid of not looking liberal enough; he wants to solve the problem for residents, business owners and visitors. He is determined to exert strong leadership on Council and be a strong, non-threatening voice on issues like this if elected. Rob recognizes the income gap exemplified in our housing supply. There is a lot of market-rate housing and a lot of subsidized low-income housing, but little to accommodate middle-income families. He feels that quality and adequate size must be part of new builds to attract the families that we’ve been losing. He sees infill and the Area III Planning Reserve as avenues to future development. He recognizes that Area III is difficult as it would require completely new infrastructure, including water treatment, water pipes, electric facilities, sewer and wastewater treatment, police annexes, fire stations and so on. The city’s own study put this cost at ~$1 billion, so Area III, particularly if dedicated to middle-income housing, would have to be subsidized in the same way that we now subsidize low-income housing. Infill is not a productive solution and will not move the needle Rob claims since it would represent a rather insignificant number of units. Boulder’s 8% vacancy rate, some of which is due to second home ownership, is something that should be examined. Rob finds trying to affordably house 60,000 in-commuters a fool’s errand and has a different idea: get people here in a less impactful way. Many people who live in outlying cities prefer to live there, but transportation is an issue. If the enormous amount of money required to house in-commuters was focused on transportation, this could change. Parking fees could also contribute to this effort. In terms of city procedure, Rob noted that, as a member of the Parks & Recreation Advisory Board, he has found it hard to access budget and planning information. As an outsider to politics, he has found this treatment has made it difficult to do a good job representing community interests. Rob feels that staff information should be easily accessible to board and council members and would also like to add input from his network of people and the many citizen experts of Boulder. When the budget question of what cuts should be made the Parks & Recreation Advisory board was told to ask staff. Rob also mentioned that current Council members Matt Benjamin and Nicole Speer claimed recently that they had “closed the budget gap” despite the fact that Parks & Recreation had not yet submitted their budget. Rob is unhappy with this lack of transparency and open discussion and will encourage better communication. The trend toward more and more density is not appealing and is eliminating families from our mix Rob finds. Our current change to the occupancy limits has resulted in a family with one or two cars being replaced by a houseful of students with many cars. Recent measures increasing bedrooms and density have not gotten people out of cars and have contributed to more density, more cars and fewer families as well as added to parking difficulties and fire danger. Rob feels that the city should place more emphasis on encouraging small, local businesses. As it is, many of our small businesses are forced out by development. The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan should take care to not displace small businesses in order to build luxury apartments. We eliminate community in so doing. Boulder Action also asked Rob about a couple of troubling procedural tactics reportedly employed by City Council of late: voting by consensus and voting by emergency. With voting by consensus, Council members have agreed that if several members find themselves in the minority, they vote with the majority to achieve unity. This effectively results in many Boulder residents not having any representation in City Council votes. Voting by emergency occurs without any public input; Council discussion and voting occurs during the same meeting, bypassing Open Comment or Public Hearings and effectively silences the public. Rob is emphatically against these tactics. As an example, the vote to annex CU South was done by “emergency,” for a flood that happened in 2013. Years later, the City still doesn’t have any of their permits, and many of the simple, cost-effective measures to protect the public safety in a flood event have never been implemented. According to Rob, there should be less total reliance on staff positions and that questions of importance should include a variety of sources including expertise of the knowledgeable citizens of Boulder. He has re-examined an earlier position on the reconfiguration of Iris Street, feeling he was misguided by staff on the plan. Boulder Action pointed to the City’s study showing 20,000 cars/day and 30 bikes/day on Iris Street. With bikes representing only 0.15%, a minuscule proportion of the traffic on Iris along with other information, Rob now thinks other solutions are more appropriate such as an east/west bicycle route further south on Valmont and Balsam. He mentioned the bottleneck of traffic on a reconfigured Iris Street as impeding the ability to evacuate residents west of Broadway in the case of a wildfire. Staff’s claim that 2 lanes with turn lanes is superior to 4 lanes without turn lanes is unfounded as there are turn lanes at several of the intersections already. On spending and budget issues, Rob feels it is important to maintain what we have, such as the South Boulder Recreation Center. We should forget about the complete revision of North Boulder Park and figure out how to actually spend less and result in more, that is, actual outcome-based budgeting. At present, it’s no more than a catchphrase and is not happening in a way that is visible to the taxpayers. We need to figure out what we’re spending on and what the citizens’ budget priorities actually are. Rob suggests employing community work groups rather than the large numbers of highly paid consultants. He finds that policy development is unclear, typically thrown to staff with inadequate direction. All in all, it was a satisfyingly productive session with Rob Kaplan, who seems more than ready to take on the position of Boulder City Council member.
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