[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: Short Term Rentals and the Livable Boulder Neighborhood Initiative

[cmosupport at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Cowles, Macon

Dear colleagues:

Regulation of STR’s presents a good example of how the Livable Boulder Neighborhood Initiative, if passed, would work. 

STR’s are currently illegal in every zoning district in the City. To the extent Council passes an ordinance allowing STR’s, it will be authorizing a change in use in all residential and mixed use zoning districts. This change in use invokes the
 Livable Boulder (LB) Initiative. See lines 24-25 of the Neighborhood Initiative, attached.

The impact of the LB Initiative is that it would permit 10% of the voters in any neighborhood to halt STR’s in that neighborhood for a period of two years (until the next City municipal election) until the City held, at City expense, an election in that neighborhood on the new STR ordinance. The two year delay can be seen in lines 37-38 of the attached Initiative, and in its reference to Charter Section 47 which requires elections under the Initiative to occur only at municipal elections that occur in odd numbered years.

To the extent that one approves of the LB Initiative, perhaps final action on the STR ordinance should be deferred until after the election. If the LB Initiative passes, it will give each neighborhood the right to hold an election in two years
 on whether STR’s should be authorized in that neighborhood. And perhaps that is as it should be.


So a threshold question for Council is whether to await the adoption of the ordinance until the Initiative is voted up or down. Because if the Initiative is passed, it will give each neighborhood the right to delay for as much as two years and
 then veto land use legislation enacted by Council.


The other side of this coin is interesting too: if prior to the November 2015 election, Council authorizes STR’s in every Boulder neighborhood AND if STR’s hollow out certain neighborhoods as we have heard from, for example, Whittier people, then no restrictions on STR’s thereafter could be enacted without going through the LB Initiative which 1)  permits 10% of voters in any single neighborhood to delay a land use change in that ‘hood for up to two years, followed by 2) an election in that ‘hood which will determine the outcome. And while people with economic interests at stake in the outcome will campaign heavily on one side of this issue, who is going to run a campaign on the other side, for the people who are not making money from the practice, but instead merely want their neighborhood to pull back from being a hotel district? 

Interesting questions, no?

Macon Cowles
Boulder City Council Member
1726 Mapleton Ave.
Boulder, Colorado 80304
CowlesM at bouldercolorado.gov
(303) 638-6884
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