[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: Tuesday council meeting

[cmosupport at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Appelbaum, Matt

Colleagues – Hi everyone.  I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about tomorrow’s council meeting since there has been considerable email traffic regarding two of the agenda items.  And,
 of course, the full Council Agenda Committee tomorrow morning will further consider these items.
 
First, regarding the Comprehensive Housing Strategy: I believe this needs to remain on our agenda although at least one councilmember has requested that it be pulled.  It may well be that
 council will decide to reconsider the suggestions and recommendations we made at our study session of only three months ago.  But any such decision should be made by the council at a public meeting, which will clarify which, if any, of the proposed next steps
 will be pursued.
 
Second, regarding the Matter of possibly scheduling a study session or other meeting related to planning policies: this is meant to give council a chance to decide if, when, and how we
 might have a discussion about a variety of planning policies.  No specific decisions should or can be made other than to schedule a subsequent meeting, indicate the focus of that meeting, and determine which questions we want staff to work on.  While the many
 questions to staff regarding recent and potential development projects are obviously relevant, remember that any work by staff that totals more than an hour or so requires council action at a public meeting.
 
Finally, since there has been a request for various data related to development, I did a bit of exploring today on some population and employment data I thought might be relevant.  Please
 note that I did this very quickly and may well have inadvertently gotten some values wrong.  The data comes from the US Census, American FactFinder, DRCOG, and Colorado’s Division of Local Affairs – and these sources don’t always agree with each other, although
 typically the differences are fairly small.  I know we also have estimates from other sources and given a bit more time I’ll try to round those up and see how they compare.
 

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Census data claims that Boulder’s population grew a total (not annually) of 2.86% from 2000 to 2010.  Other data suggests that total population growth was more like 3.4%. From
 2010 to 2012 (last year that I can find data for) the population growth has accelerated to approximately 1.5%/year.  However, for the nine years from 2004 to 2012 that total population growth has been in the range of 5.3% to 6.4%, or well less than 1%/year
 (actually, it’s about 6/10% to 7/10% per year).  Note that if our population grew at 1%/year since 2004, then our 2014 population would be about 105,700, which is unlikely (the best 2012 estimates range from 100,800 to 101,800).  Also note that from 2000 to
 2012 it appears that something like 4000 additional college-age residents were added to our population (and are included in the totals), which makes up about half of the total population gain.  And a not-insignificant portion of the total gain presumably came
 from permanently affordable housing units.

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Employment numbers seem to me to be a bit less certain, and I’ve never really understood where we get our 100,000 jobs estimate from.  I also can’t quickly find data as to how
 many of those jobs are part-time.  However, based on the data I could find, it appears that in the ten years from 2002 to 2011, jobs in the city increased by 3,600 to 6,400, or a total (not annual) increase of from 4.4% to 8.1%, again well under 1%/year, ending
 with 85,300 jobs in 2011 (and presumably more now in 2014).

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A final interesting piece of data involves work-related commuting.  In 2002, 74% of the jobs in Boulder were apparently being filled by people who live outside the city.  In
 2011 that increased a bit to 77%, and a total of about 65,000 (I’ve also always wondered how we calculated the estimate of ~60,000 in-commuters, and would like more information on that).  Also in 2002, of city residents who worked, 40% of them worked outside
 the city and 60% inside.  Interestingly, in 2011, while about 3,000 more city residents were in the workforce, 47% of them worked outside Boulder and 54% worked in the city, suggesting that as our population grew a higher percentage of those new residents
 worked outside Boulder.  Also of interest is that 45% of in-commuters travel less than 10 miles.  I should add that I don’t know if CU students commuting to school count as work-related commuters or not.  And it was quite interesting that, as part of the TMP
 update, we were told that total in-city VMT has remained essentially flat over the past ten years or so
another piece of data worthy of additional review.
 
We could easily drown in data
so the trick is to find the information that is both relevant, of practical use, and not inadvertently misleading.  Clearly getting up-to-date information
 would be helpful, although I think that five- and ten-year moving averages are far more important than any one or two year period, whether that period indicates faster or slower than expected/desired change.
 
--Matt