Rebekah Stewart for Lakewood City Council Ward 3

Earlier this week I posted about the upcoming school board election, which is shaping up as a choice between loud, strident craziness and quiet, competent leadership.

Well, the Lakewood City Council races are another place to weigh in on the kind of leadership you prefer. Because, yes, there have been some strange city council stories in the news over the last few years involving boyfriends with knives and candidates sharing "news" written by fictional characters. There have also been stories circulating on Facebook that describe potential conflicts of interest among council members. It's all so weird that I really don't know what to make of it.

What I do know is that folks who live in Ward 3 and want quiet, competent leadership have an outstanding candidate for city council in Rebekah Stewart. 

Rebekah is active member of both the South Lakewood Business Association and Alameda Connects, and has been endorsed by Congressman Ed Perlmutter, State Senator Brittany Pettersen, Jeffco Commissioner Andy Kerr, the Sierra Club and the West Metro Fire Fighters Local 1309. 

Want to learn more about Rebekah and her qualifications? Check out her web page here.

Does Councilor-elect Bieda think Belmar is a criminal-filled slum?

A little over 154,000 people live in the City of Lakewood, but only 31,425 cast a ballot in this year's city council election. That's just twenty percent of city residents (some of whom, admittedly, are under 18 or otherwise ineligible to vote). Turnout among registered voters was only something like thirty-one percent.

A Bieda campaign advertisement that appears to
imply Belmar is a criminal-filled slum.

Thirty-one percent turnout stinks. There's just no other way to look at it, especially given the ease of voting by mail. Voters weren't familiar with the issues and so they just didn't return their ballots. In Ward 3 (which includes Belmar), the race came down to 300 votes out of just 6,120 ballots cast.

The winner? Mike Bieda, who ran on a platform of extreme opposition to Belmar and the very concept of a vibrant, downtown Lakewood.

What? Yes, I'm afraid so. Bieda also ran against redevelopment on Colfax, against affordable housing, against smart growth, and against the kinds of public-private partnerships that made Belmar possible. Shockingly, his ads during the campaign even appeared to imply that Belmar is an urban slum whose residents are extra-prone to criminality. It was a dog whistle campaign of the worst sort, suggesting to Ward 3's many senior citizens that Belmar's younger residents are somehow a dangerous threat to their way of life.

This divisive man is now our representative on the city council-- and will be for the next four years.

The Danish Plan, or How Boulder Capped Growth but Created New Problems

In 1976, Boulder adopted what's generally called the Danish Plan, named after Boulder anti-growth activist and politician Paul Danish. It limited housing growth to 2% a year, with an exemption for affordable housing projects funded by the Boulder Housing Authority. Adopted by voters, it had a sunset clause that kicked in after 5 years, after which the Boulder city council adopted its own ordinance limiting housing growth to 1% a year. The stated goal was to preserved Boulder's quality of life and unique character.

The Danish Plan (and its successor ordinance) did indeed put a brake on the development of new housing in Boulder. It also caused home prices, property taxes, and rents to skyrocket, and today affordable housing simply doesn't exist anywhere in the city. The Danish Plan increased traffic exponentially and made parking difficult as more and more workers and students were forced to drive in and out of Boulder each day from the surrounding municipalities where they lived. Indeed, the exclusivity of Boulder housing actually accelerated the changes to Boulder's character.

Today, Boulder is in many ways a playground of the rich, divorced from the rest of the metro area. It's a wonderful place to visit, but I could never afford to live there. When I do visit, I often remark to myself on how different it is from the Boulder I knew in the 1980's, when I was a college student. The goal of Paul Danish may have been to preserve the funky, hippie-friendly town he loved, but change is inevitable, and the Boulder of the 1970's and 80s is long gone.

Starting in about 2013, the Boulder city council reversed course and began to allow more housing growth, channeling it into transit oriented developments in old industrial zones that allow people to live and work closer together. This is the kind of growth that I favor-- growth that allows for the development of urban centers where people can shop and socialize without needing their cars. It's managed growth that preserves established neighborhoods but redevelops old and unneeded commercial strips. The metro area has way too much commercial real estate and not anywhere near enough housing-- especially affordable housing. Smart growth is about repurposing vacant or underutilized land to meet current needs. I'm absolutely against developers plopping three-story townhouses next to 1950's ranches in the middle of Green Mountain Heights or around Morse Park, but I'm also against leaving Colfax blighted.

Anti-growth measures like the Danish Plan are anti-smart growth just as much as they are anti-sprawl. At the same time, they do nothing to preserve the existing character of a city or limit traffic congestion. Instead they're a false promise to put time in a bottle.

Gary Harty for Lakewood City Council

Downtown Lakewood spans three different city council wards-- wards 1, 2, and 3.

If you live south of Alameda, you're in ward 3, where incumbent Pete Roybal faces a welcome challenge this year from Gary Harty. In office, Roybal has proven himself to be unreliable as an advocate for urban redevelopment and has allied himself with the head-in-the-sand policies of Ramey Johnson. Like Johnson, Roybal seems to think that by nixing high quality, carefully planned developments like Belmar, growth in Lakewood can somehow be stopped.

The reality is that growth is going to happen, and that the city of Lakewood should be working to manage this growth in ways that add to urbanized areas like downtown Lakewood and keep it out of suburban areas where it would be inappropriate.

Gary Harty understands the importance of promoting smart growth. He favors the city's sustainability plan and has been a long time advocate of alternate transportation and cycling. All this makes Harty the clear choice for anyone who loves la vida Belmar.