Where I stand.

I'm tired of hearing that we want affordable housing and then watching us make the economics of building affordable housing impossible. The whole process for building things here is just plain broken, and the fix is in the code underneath.

Simplify the municipal code around zoning and permitting, and reset the review thresholds so far more projects can proceed by right. Allow a genuine diversity of housing types in all of our residential areas. Strengthen the affordability programs aimed at the people who actually run this city: our teachers, our first responders, and our civil servants. Look seriously at community land trusts as a way to take land cost out of the price of a home, because land is most of the number on the sticker. And I want to look at other cities and counties that have found winning strategies. We shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel if we don't have to.

That said, none of it matters if the process stays the way it is. Chapter 4 of the BVCP is a vision for a map, not a change to the code. Title 9 is where the actual work lives.

Our budget is a bit of a black hole. When I wanted to understand it, I had to build an application to extract the data in order to recreate a balance sheet, and then build more extractors to map projects to line items. Humans have been building balance sheets for a very long time. There's no reason ours needs to be that inscrutable, and a resident shouldn't have to write software to read it.

So: work with staff to make the budget genuinely transparent and accessible to anyone who wants to look. Deal with the deferred maintenance backlog directly instead of letting it pile up for another decade. And judge our spending by tangible outcomes that benefit the city as a whole, before any new tax goes to the voters rather than after.

Above all, hire the City Auditor our charter already allows. A peer to the City Manager, not an employee of one: nonpartisan, small staff, and the standing to review expenditures and ongoing projects in public and give council a mechanism to unwind what isn't working. I spent the first years of my career doing that job. It is worth far more than it costs.

I'm tired of hearing that we have too many empty storefronts on Pearl and then hearing that somebody trying to open a restaurant is fourteen months into a maddening permitting process. Those two facts are the same fact.

Overhaul the code so changing the use of a space is straightforward, including turning a disused office into a nail salon without a year of review. Retract the ground-floor commercial requirements in mixed use, which have given us a lot of empty ground floors and not much commerce. Publish clear permit guides for every permit type, so an applicant can find out what's required before they've spent money finding out. And get the applications moving faster, which is a staffing and process question, not a philosophical one.

A vacancy tax is the wrong tool for this, because empty storefronts are a symptom of the code.

First, every resident, housed or unhoused, deserves respect, period. Second, we need to stop treating people who are unhoused as a single bloc; there are a lot of different stories and a lot of different reasons somebody ends up on the street, which means we need a diversity of solutions rather than one program we can point at.

That said, shared spaces require that all of us treat them responsibly. Pitching a tent along Boulder Creek is not sharing, it's claiming, and leaving trash behind or smoking meth in a public space is not treating it responsibly. I believe it's a minority of people doing these things, and I think we should be taking an active role in discouraging those behaviors in the heart of our town. That means enforcing the rules we already have, and partnering with Boulder Police on foot patrols in high-use areas like Pearl Street and Boulder Creek.

Our open space also needs far more wildfire mitigation than it's getting. It's the same land, and the same budget conversation.

Of cities in Colorado, we're at the top of the list for wildfire risk, and we're funding mitigation like an afterthought while spending more in an attempt to move a planetary system. Wildfire prevention and mitigation is the most effective and most immediate return we get from our climate dollars, and I want our money to go where the return to Boulder is immediate and visible.

We don't need a new tax to do it. We need to reallocate what the climate tax already brings in, partner with the county, and go get federal funds. The money is there. What we've been short on is strategy and willpower.

I also want to push for changes to private property on WUI1 and WUI2 lands. Getting residents genuinely on board is arguably more ambitious than our stated climate goals, since it means everyone pitching in, investing in changes to their own property, and talking to their neighbors about changes that affect all of them. That's where leadership actually matters.

I've spent twenty years in security, so I'll be blunt: every collection system ever built gets used for more than it was sold for, and every database ever built eventually leaks. That's the base rate. A camera network that reads every plate in town and collects every phone signature is a permanent record of where the people who live here go, and it's held by a vendor.

I'd oppose expanding Flock and I'd wind down the digital surveillance we've already got. Privacy should be the default, which means the burden sits on the proposal to justify the monitoring rather than on residents to justify being left alone.