Central Wellington’s ageing parking meter system is being updated with new technology, with the new meters installed and going live next week.
There are 400 new Pay by Plate machines in central Wellington, Kelburn and by the Botanic Gardens ki Paekākā; 260 are card-only and 140 are cash and card machines. The new parking system will be live from Wednesday 3 January.
Pay by Plate is a paperless system that uses the vehicle plate number, rather than a numbered car park, to record the parking time and payment.
Parking prices will stay the same, from $3 – $5 per hour on weekdays depending on the location, and $3 per hour on weekends.
So what do you need to know to be ready for the switch?
Tips for smooth parking with Pay by Plate:
· There are two types of new meter – all meters accept PayWave and a third of them also take coins.
· Coin/card meters are the black and yellow rectangular meters that sit on the ground, the card-only meters are on a pole.
· Take a note of your Parking Area, which is on the side of the meter, eg W01. You can ignore the old kerbside numbers – these will be removed in the new year.
· Your active parking session can be used in any parking space until it expires, so long as the vehicle plate number and parking area are the same. If you park in another parking area which has a different ‘W’ (Wellington) number, you’ll need…
The United States acquired the island of Key West through neither military conquest nor diplomatic treaty. In good American fashion, it was purchased with private funds.
The island was uninhabited except by foliage and flamingos when John Whitehead spotted it while sailing from Nassau in 1819. It had little to recommend it—not even a source of fresh water—except a deep harbor, fortuitously placed between America’s Eastern Seaboard and the busy gulf port of Mobile, Alabama.
Sensing the potential in that location, Whitehead and a business partner, John Simonton, tracked down the island’s owner, a Spanish citizen named Juan Pablo Salas, and made him a $2,000 offer. “Salas accepted, no doubt believing he’d gotten the better part of the deal,” writes Maureen Ogle in Key West: History of an Island of Dreams.
The island began to fill with settlers and just as soon acquired a reputation as a “deadly nest” of pirates and disease. “In another time and place, such a reputation may have killed the settlement,” Ogle explains. “But in early-nineteenth-century America—alive with the pioneering spirit—that reputation only added to Key West’s allure.” As Simonton himself put it, “Capital and capitalists will always go where profit is to be found.”
Wrecking, or salvaging the cargo of distressed sea vessels, was the town’s chief industry. Wreckers provided an invaluable service, venturing out during violent storms at grave risk to themselves to prevent the loss of both life and goods when ships foundered on the hazardous coral reefs. “It was a vocation regulated by few laws,” writes Victoria Shearer in It Happened in the Florida Keys, “but governed by firm rules of honor: The first wrecking vessel to arrive at a distressed ship became the wrecking master of record, directing the salvage and earning a larger share of the proceeds. Other wreckers received shares in proportion to the amount of tonnage they saved.”
On shore, commission agents waited to receive the cargo and arranged to have it auctioned off—for a cut of the reward, of course.
The construction of public lighthouses (and the introduction of steam-powered ships, less likely to be blown aground) eventually put the wreckers out of business. Sea-sponge harvesting, cigar manufacturing, and tourism took over as engines of the local economy. The second of those was a product of government intervention: In the 1850s, Congress imposed stiff tariffs on Cuban cigars but failed to apply the duty to raw tobacco leaf. Predictably, entrepreneurs took to making bulk ingredient purchases in Havana and then set up factories in Key West, a mere 90 miles away. The workers were largely imported from Cuba as well.
During the 19th century, “a decidedly cosmopolitan city slowly emerged from the mangrove thickets,” Ogle writes. “Because Key West sat at the crossroads of the Caribbean, everyone crossed paths with throngs of what one islander called ‘world wanderers,’” from Bahamians to Irishmen to “Hindoos” to Swedes.
Key West naturally selected for a certain anti-authoritarian disposition. When state health officials responded to an 1896 smallpox outbreak by establishing a quarantine camp and closing the harbor, residents “balked,” Ogle recounts. “At a town meeting, seven hundred people listened as one speaker after another denounced government interference. Key Westers paid taxes and got nothing but grief” from the state capital, they said. Eventually, “the crowd voted to inform the state legislature of their desire to secede.”
It wouldn’t be the last time.
***
By the early 20th century, Key West was gaining fame as a haven of vice. Saloons lined Duval Street. Gambling and prostitution were major attractions.
The situation intensified with the passage of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. Suddenly, rumrunning became the biggest business of all. “Liquor washed over Key West during Prohibition like high tide under a full moon,” Shearer writes. “Given its proximity to Cuba and the Bahamas, both of which were swimming in booze, the Florida Keys became a wide-open distribution point….Locals considered smuggling liquor a public service.”
In Key West, even the Prohibition agents often left the islanders well enough alone—and for good reason. One story, recounted in both books, involves a 1926 speakeasy raid by a group of federal “revenooers” down from Miami. For whatever reason, this time the townspeople weren’t having it. “Proprietors of the raided properties swore out warrants against the agents,” Ogle writes, “charging them with assault and battery, destruction of private property, and larceny.”
The justice of the peace for the Keys, Rogelio Gomez, “sided with the locals and granted the warrants,” Shearer explains, making him “the only county magistrate in the United States ever to issue an arrest warrant against a Prohibition agent.” The Miami agents, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, snuck out through the back door of the courthouse and escaped aboard a Navy ship. “The mess was finally cleaned up when the two sides—locals and feds—reached a compromise and dropped both cases,” Shearer writes.
Around this time, Key Westers (also known as “Conchs”) rejoiced when the U.S. Coast Guard relocated its headquarters away from the island. “And why shouldn’t they have?” asks Ogle. “From the point of view of Key West rumrunners, the Coast Guard represented unfair competition. As soon as the Guard’s servicemen seized a cargo of contraband booze, they turned right around and sold it….Who wouldn’t be resentful?”
The onset of the Great Depression a few years later hit the island city hard. It’s an exaggeration to say Ernest Hemingway’s personal expenditures single-handedly kept the economy going, but only just. The celebrity writer ate and drank at the city’s taverns; took out-of-town friends on deep-sea fishing expeditions; bought and renovated his now-famous residence on Whitehead Street; and lured in other literary types with disposable income, including the poet Robert Frost, the philosopher John Dewey, and the playwright Tennessee Williams.
But even Hemingway’s largesse wasn’t enough for the struggling town. In 1934, Julius Stone Jr., head of the Florida division at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, arrived with an ambitious plan: to “turn Key West into a first-class tourist destination” by rehabilitating the historic downtown with a combination of federal dollars and local volunteer labor. Hoping to cultivate the arts scene, Stone also tasked a cadre of writers, painters, thespians, and musicians employed by the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project with beautifying the island.
Perhaps the least libertarian aspect of Key West history, then, is that its fame as a hub of arts and culture was purchased in sizable part with tax money. But that story’s epilogue is worth bearing in mind: After the New Deal programs dried up, locals created an arts league in an effort to maintain their new reputation. Stone himself, “back in town as a practicing attorney and mover-and-shaker, served as one of the organization’s first presidents,” Ogle writes. “Later, he would flee the island when one of his many shady deals turned sour.”
Leading lights such as Hemingway and Frost, lamenting the touristification of the island, decamped. But those who remained bet on the allure of “bohemianism,” producing glossy brochures that, in Ogle’s words, “played up the island’s live-and-let-live attitude and portrayed the community as a hotbed of eccentricity.” Later, the same spirit would make Key West into a gay enclave famous for its drag shows.
There does seem to be something to the notion that Conchs are just different from other folks. In 1962, Americans held their collective breath as the country tottered on the edge of war. News broke that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in communist Cuba, putting attack capabilities in the United States’ backyard. But despite being on the literal frontlines of that showdown, Shearer reports, “Life in Key West remained curiously, quintessentially laid back. After all, October in the Florida Keys, the height of hurricane season, had always been fraught with a degree of danger.”
In the 1970s, the Keys emerged as a way station in the international drug trade. The same personal and geographic characteristics that had allowed Key West denizens to flourish during Prohibition (including a high tolerance for risk and hundreds of miles of marshy coastline) made it tough for federal law enforcement officials to keep up with traffickers half a century later—especially when local law enforcement officials were sometimes in on the game.
***
By 1982, the feds had come up with a new tactic for catching drug runners and illegal immigrants entering the country through the Keys. Their move sparked an uprising that, in a sense, continues to this day.
On April 18, without warning, the U.S. Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on U.S. Highway 1 at the top of the Keys—the only road out of town—and began searching all vehicles attempting to pass north onto the mainland. By some reports, the roadblock caused traffic to back up for 19 miles. Motorists, most of whom were vacationers headed home at the end of the weekend, sat for hours in the heat waiting for their chance to pass.
The tourism industry felt an immediate impact in the form of canceled reservations. Proprietors didn’t take that lightly.
Mayor Dennis Wardlow and the island’s Chamber of Commerce initially tried the legal route: They flew to Miami and filed for an injunction in federal court. It was to no avail. So the outraged Key Westers opted for a more dramatic response.
On April 23, Wardlow announced that Key West was seceding from the Union. “They’re treating us like a foreign country,” he said, “so we might as well become one.” Assuming the title of prime minister, he lowered the stars and stripes and raised the light blue flag of the fledgling Conch Republic. “We serve notice on the government in Washington,” he declared, “to remove the roadblock or get ready to put up a permanent border to a new foreign land. We as a people may have suffered in the past, but we have no intention of suffering in the future at the hands of fools and bureaucrats….We’re Conchs and we’ve had enough.”
Wardlow’s cheeky intention was to declare war on America, fire one shot, surrender, and then ask for $1 billion in aid for rebuilding. His countrymen carried out the plan of attack as only Key Westers would. “Using the Conch Republic’s weapon of choice—hard, stale Cuban bread,” Shearer writes, a member of Wardlow’s war cabinet “hit a cooperative young uniformed naval officer over the head, then immediately handed over the loaf.”
The rebellion was part publicity stunt, part genuine protest. (“We’re happy to secede today with some humor,” Wardlow said. “But there’s some anger, too.”) It was effective on both counts: The roadblock was speedily removed, and the gag became a tourism bonanza.
Today, Conch Republic apparel is available at pretty much all of Key West’s many, many T-shirt shops. A 10-day “independence” celebration happens every April, drawing thousands to the island. (The festivities include a mock battle in which combatants pelt naval vessels with water balloons and conch fritters.) Community leaders boast that Conchs are a people with a “sovereign state of mind.” The micronation even sells novelty passports—and there are documented cases of holders successfully using them to travel abroad and reenter the United States. Sovereign, indeed!
In 1994, the Conchs sent an “official” delegation to the Summit of the Americas in Miami. In 1995, when a government shutdown in Washington caused the closure of Dry Tortugas National Park, just off the Florida coast, the Republic “threatened to use three antique biplanes loaded with stale Cuban bread to bomb the park’s Fort Jefferson” unless the popular tourist destination was reopened, Shearer writes.
More recently, in 2006, the fake country “annexed” a stretch of an abandoned overseas bridge after the Coast Guard told a group of Cuban refugees that landing there did not trigger “wet foot, dry foot”—the policy at the time of granting legal status to any Cuban who landed on American soil.
Peter Anderson, who held the title of Conch Republic secretary general, “led a landing party of Conchs who staked miniature flags along the bridge,” wrote Darien Cavanaugh in a 2015 article for the War Is Boring website. “Since the federal government decided in its infinite wisdom that the old Seven Mile Bridge is not territory of the United States, the Conch Republic is very interested,” Anderson told reporters; Washington “chose not to defend” the bridge against the invasion.
And there you have the colorful history behind the Key West motto, emblazoned on everything from sweatshirts to souvenir passports: “We seceded where others failed.”
There are currently 1,967 special districts across Florida, according to the Florida Department of Commerce. Most aren’t like the big, quasi-autonomous districts that cover The Villages and Disney World, though. Some just cover local or county libraries, utilities, parks, or airports, among other typical government functions. Others cover the whole state under a variety of functions, like Space Florida’s function as “the single point of contact for all space-related functions of the State of Florida.” Most districts are focused on community and commercial development, though some remain undeveloped years after creation.
Altogether, they combine in a patchwork of governmental districts that blanket the state—sometimes complicating government functions, sometimes simplifying them. — Jason Russell
More than 800 kids — two a day — were taken off the streets as part of the Northbridge curfew trial, prompting an extension of the highly successful program.
Community Services Minister Sabine Winton told The Sunday Times the Home Safe trial, started in October 2022, would be extended until June 2025. The Government has credited the program with a massive drop in youth crime this year.
Gisborne’s central business district (CBD) is the focus of a huge line-up of fun Christmas activities this year.
A Kiwiana Christmas workshop at the HB Williams Memorial Library will be Christmas central for everyone in town.
There’ll be visits from Santa, music, a photo booth, workshops for children, and a present-wrapping HQ at the library throughout the month of December.
There’s also a new party in town with The Christmas Street Festival being held at the Grey Street Skate Park on Sunday 10 December from 12noon to 6pm.
That event is being organised by the Tairāwhiti Adventure Trust (TAT).
In the line-up for Sunday’s event are food trucks, craft stalls, and a parade float stall where the winner will be decided by public vote. This year’s theme is Beach Days.
Santa will be there from 2pm and if you have a Christmas-patterned jersey, dust it off because there’ll be a worst-Christmas-jersey competition.
There’ll be heaps for tamariki with a twinkle light tunnel, face painting, games, carols, and a fashion parade along a candy cane runway.
“We’re excited to move the annual celebration of Christmas to a different platform this year,“ says Gisborne District Council Chief Executive Nedine Thatcher Swann.
“All the key components of our traditional Christmas parade will be there including floats and Santa with heaps of extras for a festive…
PORT MOODY, British Columbia, October 19, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Univerus, a global provider of mission-critical software solutions, announces the acquisition of Varasset, a comprehensive software solution provider for the power and communications industries.
Varasset, the leading provider of software solutions for critical infrastructure management, brings over 25 years’ experience to Univerus. Its flagship solutions, Varasset XAM and Joint Use 365, automate back-office joint use processes and help customers reduce labour, provide management insight and meet business goals. Varasset’s work and asset management software solutions are used by power and communications customers across North America.
“The Varasset acquisition strategically reinforces our commitment to best-in-class solutions and our continued focus on enhancing our public sector platform,” says Brad Atchison, CEO of Univerus. “I’m thrilled to welcome the Varasset team to the Univerus group and further solidify our centralized management approach.”
The addition of Varasset broadens the Univerus portfolio and elevates its expertise in asset management. Known for its omni-purpose user interface, UNITY, the broadened suite of software solutions from Univerus delivers robust and innovative products for customers across the public sector, utilities, sport and recreation, construction and manufacturing industries.
“Joining the Univerus group allows us to offer our high-quality solutions to the utility sector on a larger scale,” says Dave Chaney, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Varasset. “We look forward to continuing to deliver exceptional value to our customers and growing together in the years ahead.”
Univerus is focused on improving business efficiency across its portfolio companies and delivering best-in-class solutions to its customers. The Varasset acquisition now brings together 18 acquired business units in the Univerus portfolio with over 150 employees worldwide.
About Univerus
Univerus’ core tenet is that significant harmonious value results from bringing together forward-thinking professionals and proven solutions. Representing a suite of software businesses strategically woven into the Univerus family, its centralized management approach has empowered top-notch teams to provide mission-critical solutions with the most robust and innovative products available in the marketplace.
On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”
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Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.
On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.
Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.
When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.
Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.
The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.
Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.
It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.
Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”
Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.
The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”
Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.
Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.
For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.
Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.
Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.
Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.
Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.
Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.
In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”
In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.
The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.
Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.
The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.
State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.
The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”
Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.
I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.
Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.
Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.
I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.
Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”
The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.
Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.
Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”
Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.
Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”
This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?
Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.
This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”
State planners have approved a $53 million plan for St George’s Anglican Grammar School to move 650m from its current William Street address in the Perth CBD so it can take in more students.
Perth Local Development Assessment Panel members approved the plans from landowner the Anglican Schools Commission Inc. to turn an office building at 441 Murray Street, Perth, into the secondary college’s new home.
