City government should clear the path, not stand in the way. Slow, confusing permits and a city code that's nearly impossible to follow have made it hard to try new things in Boulder. I'm running to make Boulder easier to build in, cheaper to run, and safer from the growing threats of climate change.
Hi there! I'm Ryan Jamieson and I am running for Boulder City Council because I believe it's time for us to take action and start making Boulder an easier place to build a home, open a business, and address the big issues our city is facing.
Today we have a city that doesn't say yes, we have a city that asks us to submit a form so they can conduct a study so they can get back to us, and that's not a city that's responsive to its citizenry. While many are frustrated with city staff, it's not their fault: our 900+ page municipal code is designed to make it hard to do things, so I want to join Council so we can make it easier for our town to say yes to the people with big ideas.
Beyond our code, we are a city that wants to do the right thing but often forgets the fundamentals while we do it. The $400 million hole of unfunded capital improvements and deferred maintenance speaks to this problem, as does the proceeds of a climate tax that only fractionally funds mitigations for our biggest collective climate risk: wildfires. I want to hire a full-time city auditor that's a peer to our City Manager and independent of the finance department to run through our books and projects to help us understand where our laudable goals are eclipsing the core functions of city government like maintenance, and where city projects have shifted to feel-good initiatives instead of giving us tangible wins.
We have lots to do here in Boulder and we shouldn't be afraid of making some changes to address our challenges. Let's give it a shot!
Our municipal code was written to prevent change. I'll work to modernize the code so Boulder can create the housing and small-business spaces we actually need, faster and with less red tape.
Read the full plan →Every dollar accountable. I'll push to hire a city auditor that's a peer to the city manager and fully independent to bring greater discipline to our budgets so your taxes buy results.
Read the full plan →Climate change is happening and Boulder is at risk. I'll shift our focus to mitigation programs first, because we can't be a climate leader if our city is burning.
Read the full plan →
I'm tired of watching good ideas like a new playground, another bedroom, or even a simple speedbump die in a maze of bureaucracy while big issues fester because we let perfect be the enemy of good.
Boulder doesn't lack for talent, ideas, or goodwill. It lacks a city hall that says yes: quickly, transparently, and within budget. I'll bring the patience to reform our municipal code, the courage to make hard decisions rather than create a new study, and the discipline to spend your money only on projects that have a real impact.
A five-year Boulder resident and U.S. Army veteran, Ryan has spent 20+ years understanding and fixing big, complex systems. He lives in North Boulder with his wife and their son, a BVSD student. Read more →
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A career spent taking complicated systems apart, brought home to Boulder.
I grew up outside Atlanta and enlisted in the United States Army at nineteen, partly to serve and partly because I wanted to become someone worth being. I spent my enlistment on active duty in Korea, Germany, Kuwait, and as part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where I was awarded the Bronze Star. My work was communications support for the intelligence community, making sure the right information reached the people in the field who needed it (nothing like getting sent to war to spark an interest in policy).
The Army taught me to work with the team I have. I didn't get to be picky about who showed up or what conditions I was handed, I just needed to accomplish the mission, and I've carried that forward ever since. I'll carry it onto council too: I'll work with anybody willing to do the work. It's also a relentlessly results-oriented organization, and that turns out to be the thread running through everything I've done since.
After my enlistment and a degree at Arizona State, I took my first real job as an internal auditor at American Express. People hear “auditor” and picture someone showing up to catch them. In reality, the job is to ask what a program was supposed to accomplish, find out whether it did, and write the answer down somewhere anyone can check my work. Good auditors help an organization catch its own mistakes and fix them, and they give cover to the people inside who are trying to change an entrenched habit and can't do it alone. American Express, like the Army, measured everything, and both of them taught me how to really measure whether the work we were doing was effective.
From there I moved into cybersecurity, which I've been doing in some shape or form for around two decades, and three years ago I started my own firm serving small and midsized businesses. A company is a big system made of people, processes, and technology, and my work is repeatedly deconstructing intricate corporate processes in order to rebuild them leaner, simpler, and more secure. The unglamorous word for the rest of it is operations: somebody has to answer for how long a request sat in a queue, whether a control actually held when it got tested, and what got fixed after the last incident. Most of my clients had never had a number to point at. So I built them one, and then we closed the gaps it exposed on a clock. That is most of what I do for a living, and it is not complicated work. It's just work that somebody has to sit down and do.
My family and I moved to Boulder nearly six years ago, and I've watched the local drama unfold with interest ever since. What I see is a city that genuinely wants to do the right thing and then gets mired in its own bureaucracy or tripped up on the fundamentals like maintenance. I've watched friends run into walls trying to open a business. I watched a North Boulder neighborhood spend years trying to replace a playground. I've sat through the meetings where a good idea gets talked to death by people who all agree with each other.
A city is a big system made of people, processes, and technology too. That's the thing I want to bring to bear here: take it apart, find out what it's actually doing, put a number on it, and rebuild it so it works. I'm not running because I think Boulder is a lost cause, and I'm not running to tell you we can cut our way out of this, because I don't believe we can. I'm running because there's a gap between the city we want to be and the city we are, and I know I can fix it.
Somebody on that dais should be the person who asks what this was supposed to do and whether it did it. I've had that job. I'd like to have it again.