New Year’s resolutions for city
Let’s see: Exercise more, spend more time with friends, sign up for a class, volunteer … Oops, talking about myself again. But maybe some of my personal goals might translate. What are a few things Boulder can do to be the healthiest, happiest version of itself?
A top resolution should be taking care of and connecting with one another. This might look like individuals finding a new non-profit to support, or facilitating more partnerships like the one between Frasier Retirement Community and BMOCA (recently profiled in the Daily Camera). I’d also love to see an expansion of Boulder’s pilot program using public areas for pop-up community activities. Let’s get out of our neighborhoods and mingle! While we’re at it, can the city better support people who’d like to move around it on foot or bicycle? How about monthly car-free days on major thoroughfares like Iris Avenue? Other cities are doing it! I welcome anything Boulder can do to continue making transportation options as green, affordable and safe as possible.
Affordable housing and a livable wage are essential to making sure all our citizens thrive — let’s focus on these. And we should resolve to lose fewer unhoused people to early death in 2024, as we were recently reminded that their life expectancy, even if they move back into more stable situations, is greatly reduced. Let’s get the homeless day center up and running, improve mental health and addiction services, and address the issue of deadly drug availability.
Finally, let’s continue to preserve and add to our open space portfolio. And in order to sustain beautiful and wildlifefriendly spaces within as well as outside city limits, we can encourage community efforts like the Edgewooders, who’ve organized to protect the Upper Goose Creek Wildlife Corridor. Happy New Year, Boulder!
Diane Schwemm, parksidediane@gmail.com
Moving into 2024, I rue rising despair and value Boulder’s historical and cultural traditions, capacity for innovation, and creativity. For New Year’s resolutions, it’s also important to suggest how our community can improve.
Boulder is an emerging global city. Neighborhood grocery stores offer a cornucopia of tropical fruit. I watch foreign films at local theaters. CU Boulder employs faculty from overseas, recruits international students and maintains cross-border research networks. Boulder has sister-city relationships in different countries, as demonstrated by the Dushanbe Teahouse, established with the capital of Tajikistan.
Moreover, globalization touches down in Boulder’s realms of finance, trade, technology, migration, climate change and civil society.
Rather than dial into globalization in a haphazard way, the City Council should be proactive and launch a globalization commission. We need detailed local research on global flows to and from Boulder. Equipped with these data, the commission would offer recommendations on how to steer them.
Make no mistake. Globalization means that local and transnational elements fuse in distinctive ways. This process shrinks space and time. With a click of a mouse, we can effect transactions in distant lands. Our lives are speeded up in ways that reconfigure the economy and politics.
Other emerging global cities are marked by increasing inequalities and social divisions. These trends cut against democracy. Authoritarian, populist impulses are mounting. To counter them, diversity initiatives, particularly anti-racist policies, must be advanced. Independent, local journalism, too, plays a key role in highlighting grass-roots actions to strengthen democracy.
On the eve of the New Year, I am hopeful. Hope is the flip side of despair. More than a disposition, hope is based on solid evidence, for example, of Boulder’s proven willingness to engage in trial-and-error. By pioneering new globalization policies, we can forge a more humane future.
Jim Mittelman, jhmittelman@yahoo.com
As a young Benedictine novice in a large monastery, I was regularly struck by the stark difference between the elderly monks who were kind, gentle, patient and even funny, and other older monks who most decisively were not. The difference between the two groups ran far deeper than just their actions, reaching all the way down into the essential roots of who they had become over their years in the monastery. I remember asking the novice master about the unpleasant division and how I could avoid becoming a grouchy old-monk memory of some future novice. He told me that was a decision I must make every day about who I was and who I wanted to be.
Obviously, I did not make it to old monkhood for many reasons irrelevant to this topic. But the basic truth of this one memory feels very relevant here. These past few years have felt like we are collectively descending into more of a bitter, edgy, intolerant and humorless kind of existence than what most of us first experienced Boulder as, and what we believe it can be.
We can point a finger of blame at many issues. There is no doubt that nasty national politics has a strong influence.
The expanding divide in wealth (reflected in the majority of new residents who can afford this place), the ongoing lack of diversity, the ballooning mental and physical needs of the unhoused, the regular eruptions of NIMBYISM, etc., all contribute to a coarse edginess that seems so foreign to the Boulder many of us knew and loved.
But these are all just symptoms of a more insidious distortion of traditional “Boulderness.” Maybe our first, collective 2024 resolution needs to be less about the stuff we should do and more about who we choose to be.
Fintan Steele, fsteele1@me.com
As the Chair of the Environmental Advisory Board (EAB), I’d like to take this opportunity to raise awareness about urban heat islands and share my wishlist for addressing these challenges in 2024. Since 2019, the EAB has consistently highlighted urban heat islands in our memos to the Council as a top priority. Through my conversations with the Climate Initiatives department, I understand that cooling will be a major focus next year.
Urban heat islands refer to the phenomenon where urban areas experience higher temperatures than their surrounding rural areas. Factors contributing to this effect include the extensive development and modification of land surfaces, and the high concentration of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure that absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes. The urban heat island effect is becoming a significant concern for Boulder — the number of high heat days (temperatures exceeding 95 degrees) has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, with projections showing a potential dramatic increase in the future. This escalation in heat poses serious risks to human health, air quality, and the overall livability of our city.
To mitigate these effects, several strategies can be implemented such as increasing green spaces and tree cover to provide natural cooling and shade or implementing building and paving materials in specific colors that reflect more sunlight and absorb less heat. Efforts to mitigate the effects of urban heat islands in Boulder, such as the Cool Boulder project (www. coolboulder.org), are commendable and I anticipate their expansion in scope over the next few years. However, I firmly believe that at its core, this issue is rooted in urban planning. Therefore, I urge the Council to prioritize the integration of tree canopy expansion in the Planning Board’s agenda. This proactive approach will ensure that urban development aligns with our environmental goals, making Boulder a cooler, more sustainable city.
Hernán Villanueva, chvillanuevap@gmail.com