Your articles of the last few weeks concerning Boulder’s revenue challenges, if representative of the thinking of Boulder’s leadership are interesting and depressing.
It takes some effort to identify the members of the Blue Ribbon Committee. It is even more difficult to establish whether any of them have any qualifications for their role. There seems to be a shortage of the financially and analytically astute on this committee. Their conclusions reinforce that suspicion.
If your accounts of the finding of the city’s Blue Ribbon Commission and the comments of Mayor Matt Appelbaum are accurate, it shows they are laboring under a clueless sense of entitlement.
Has the Blue Ribbon Commission examined the following?
1. The number of Boulder municipal employees and contractors in comparison to numbers in cities of similar size.
2. Overtime wages paid to municipal employees.
3. The average pay of municipal employees in comparison to similar cities.
4. The cost and of medical and retirement benefits paid to municipal employees and the solvency of the retirement plans.
5. Plans for municipal employee furloughs.
6. The number of city owned motor vehicles, their average age and maintenance schedules.
It is revealing that Mayor Appelbaum speaks only of ways to increase or preserve revenue with the threat of reduction in services. What additional services would he reduce? Snow clearing? Weed control and mowing of city land? Efficient traffic flow on Broadway and 28th St? Please.
The average American is going through a period of deleveraging, examining where and how to make sensible savings in their everyday lives.
It seems only reasonable that elected and appointed officials in Boulder conduct themselves in a similar manner.
If instead, their only response is to stick their hand out and conduct business as usual, one hopes the voters throw them out of office.

Dennis Goggin

Boulder

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