Best in the Country for Education, and Closing Schools — with Aquiles La Grave, Part 2

[00:00:00] Aquiles, this is kind of a continuation of a discussion we had a couple weeks ago, but a lot has changed in a short period of time. Even the last two nights have created some things for us to talk about. Oh my goodness. Yeah, what a whirlwind. Should we get into it? Yeah, because I wasn't there Wednesday night, so I want to hear what happened Wednesday night.

[00:00:25] But let's start with last night, because last night is what life is all about. It's about people and connections and enjoying one another, so let's talk about what we did together last night. Well, let me tell you, last night something amazing happened. Boulder felt like Boulder again at your house.

[00:00:45] So that was amazing, and that was just so inspiring to see every corner of the community fold itself in, in community, in person, in celebration of our give first values, of innovation, of creativity. And I'm still buzzing. And a love of Boulder, a love of Colorado, a love of art and artists and community.

[00:01:13] It was the kickoff celebration for Tulagi, and this whole weekend hopefully is going to feel that way across our entire community. Because I think you care about this. I know you care about this. I know I care about it. And we know lots and lots of other people care about it as well. We want people to come together. We want people who have different points of view, different backgrounds, different histories, different beliefs.

[00:01:41] We want people to come together and get to enjoy one another in the physical world, listen, talk, exchange ideas. And I think collectively, since we're in Boulder, people who want Boulder to continue on with its journey of being just a special place on earth for people who both live here and people who visit us here.

[00:02:04] And it's such a great reminder that what binds us is so much stronger than our opinions. Yes. You know? So that was just a great gift, I know, for everybody who was there last night and something that Tulagi will continue on with for the coming days. And I'm just so excited to be a part of it. Yeah, we had a lot of guests last night.

[00:02:28] And part of last night was also a big thank you for the Founders Experience members. These are the people who reached into their bank accounts and wrote big checks because they wanted to help create something for the broad community of Boulder and for Colorado and for the support of culture, for art, for artists. So it was a thank you celebration for them to kick off this long weekend. And I think it shows that people care.

[00:02:56] Not only that, but here's what was special for me. Last night, over those few hours, I got to reconnect with people across my over 30 years in Boulder. Every chapter that I've had in Boulder, you know this, I had the great fortune of growing up here. I went to Boulder High. I went to Naropa. I delivered the daily camera, delivered furniture for Boulder Furniture Arts.

[00:03:22] And then this town gave me the ability to innovate and start businesses and made everything possible for me. And just last night, 30 years of history were just represented at the party. And I was able to catch up and we were able to see this campaign and the movement that we've started a couple of weeks ago together on the podcast.

[00:03:49] It was the first thing that we did, just how it's built and how it's synthesizing into something really remarkable. Yeah. And we went deep into your journey in the last one, but I want to do a recap here. So tell us, like, how was you ended up in Boulder? Where were you at before that? And, you know, we went deep into it last time. So those who are listening in, hopefully this is a little bit of a teaser for you to go back and hear the full story.

[00:04:18] But give us the synopsis version of your journey that has led you to sit here with me today. So as folks know, I'm Aquiles La Grave and I'm running for mayor. And I had the great fortune of growing up in Boulder, as I said, going to Boulder High, Naropa. My first jobs as a kid were here in Boulder and my life is here in Boulder. By the way, let me interrupt you for a second. So we didn't talk about this last time.

[00:04:48] Naropa has been here for a long time, but I've known very few people who've gone to Naropa. It's kind of like mysterious to a lot of us, polarized, like, oh, Naropa, what's that all about? What is Naropa? So Naropa is the only accredited university with a Buddhist lineage in the Western Hemisphere. Really? Yes. I didn't know that. It was founded. I knew the Buddhist heritage, but I didn't know the only one in the Western Hemisphere. Yes.

[00:05:16] So it is a very contemplative focused education. It teaches you to ask why and to dig really deep into the nature of things. I was part of the first cohort.

[00:05:32] We were actually a pilot program back in 1999 where they were shifting from having been a graduate university with a strong focus on Buddhism and religious studies and an incredible writing program and a psychology program only at the graduate level. So they put in a pilot program.

[00:05:56] They put in a pilot program of undergraduate students, which I was very lucky to be a part of. And the school was founded by... And did you have a Buddhist history prior to that? No, I did not. Yeah. I did not. And it was founded by a Tibetan Lama called Chongyan Trongpa Rinpoche. He's also the founder of Shambhala Buddhism, which is centered...

[00:06:26] One of its global centers is right here in Boulder. And what is that branch? What's the practice? What makes it unique? Yeah, so it falls under Mahayana Buddhism, which is the Buddhism that is expressed out of Tibet. And Mahayana places a little bit more of a practical and Western integration of Tibetan Buddhism into the American experience.

[00:06:56] It's been hugely influential. I'll tell you my favorite Chongyan quote, because I think it encapsulates the kind of mental model. Bad news, you're falling through the sky, no parachute. Good news, there is no ground.

[00:07:25] So, yeah, so I attended... All right, I'm still thinking about that one. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I'm going to use that on my team, but hopefully they wouldn't have heard it before. We loved it. And let me tell you what. So many of the kids, we were all 18, 19-year-olds.

[00:07:47] We were really scratching at the walls of what was community, of what was possible, of who we were. And so many of us projected ourselves outwards. And so many of us projected ourselves outwards as incredible either entrepreneurs, innovators, and or creatives, achieving incredible success and building incredible companies, each of us in our own right.

[00:08:15] And so many of us, we were all 18, 19-year-olds, and the entrepreneurs' mantra, that the solution is always inside the problem. And so many of us, we kind of figured out how to do that.

[00:08:36] And so many of us, we kind of figured out how to do that. But it's like the religious gene just missed me somehow.

[00:09:05] Now, I don't know why, because it turns out, like, the current pope is from the town adjacent to my hometown. And he ate pizza at the place I ate pizza, a place called Aurelio's. So I think he got more than his fair share of the religious gene, and he left me without any of them. But I love the history of religion. I mean, I've studied, kind of read up on, and paid a lot of attention to, kind of, religion from kind of the earliest of times, you know, the earliest of writings,

[00:09:34] and even the legends that predated, you know, written history all the way through, you know, current day. And so I love history in general, but I love history of religion. Well, history and history of religion are really so intertwined with one another. They're not two different things. But, you know, having said all that, Buddhism is not one I've gotten that close to ever.

[00:09:55] It's an incredible tradition, and it's an incredible practice that manifestly has shaped the culture of this town, actually, over 70 years, if not more. Yep. So how did you get to Boulder? Let's get back to that. Yeah, so in 1995, my mom, my sister, and I arrived here as immigrants.

[00:10:21] A few possessions, no money, no ties, no real ties to the community. And her story, as I shared in the prior podcast, was one, that's very common as a first-generation immigrant. And you came from Venezuela. From Venezuela, yeah. And there was real disruption going on at Venezuela.

[00:10:44] We were experiencing the midst of a transition into what was branded as 21st century socialism. We see how that has served what was the strongest economy in South America, the strongest middle class, the most educated workforce.

[00:11:08] Of course, the Venezuela that I knew crumbled and disappeared under this weight. Slowly at first, and then all at once, as I like to say. But our life changed over a period of weeks.

[00:11:31] I went from a very stable kind of middle class background in Venezuela to... And feeling safe to feeling unsafe, I imagine. Yeah. And just being here, being like, what the heck just happened to us? And the outcome that my family had in Boulder is one that I am...

[00:11:57] That I will continue to say I don't believe would have been possible anywhere but Boulder at any time other than when we landed here. Because it propelled all three members of that family within one generation into incredible individual success for each of us, independently of one another.

[00:12:20] My mom has gone on to do incredible work and be enmeshed in the community. My sister has seen a career that most of us would only ever dream of. And, you know, I am now in this position of actually talking about it. Which causes me, Dan, to say in full belief that I believe Boulder is the indispensable city.

[00:12:48] Boulder is the indispensable city to the front range and therefore to Colorado. We just got ranked number one in education in the country. That does not happen for Colorado without Boulder. Yep. Right? But at the same time we have... And Boulder punches way above its weight in that it could be an icon of leadership that goes way beyond the front range and way beyond Colorado. Especially with Sundance coming to town.

[00:13:18] But a lot of other stuff that isn't around Boulder. So if we really together put our minds to it, I mean, Boulder could be, you know, a source of inspiration. As opposed to, in many ways right now, a source of, oh my God, what's going on in Boulder? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's what has changed in the past couple of weeks as we've started talking about this campaign. Somebody last night summed it up beautifully.

[00:13:46] This campaign is saying the quiet part out loud. You know, we haven't seen leaders recently willing to just state it as plainly as we're stating it. And that is causing people to just react and wake up and pay attention as these other ladders in the community are presenting themselves to Laggy included.

[00:14:09] And we're feeling a whole new energy and a whole new capacity of people rallying each other saying like, yeah, we just need to wake up and get out of our own way. Yeah. And stop pretending that anyone is going to fix it but us. And that it's not going to require hard work. What it requires is being honest about what the work is.

[00:14:32] So we just finished a recording of this podcast in front of also a live audience with Dave Crary, who's an iconic figure in downtown Boulder. And part of what we talked about is we may have different points of views about certain things, right, as a community.

[00:14:56] But we all, I think, want, and in his case, we were talking about downtown Boulder. We all want downtown Boulder to thrive, don't we? And he's like, he would think so. But he's like, you know, he gives a little bit of a shrug. At least that's what I interpreted. That, like, so, like, obviously for downtown Boulder to thrive, the city of Boulder, meaning the city staff, the employees, the city council, you know, that means they've got to want downtown Boulder to thrive, right?

[00:15:26] He's like, well, yeah. I'm like, well, do you guys all get together and say, what do we need to do to make Boulder really thrive? He's like, not really. You know, that's not really how it, you know, how it happens. I'm like, well, why wouldn't there be, like, a consensus that, you know, like, we want to do everything we can to make, you know, downtown Boulder be everything downtown Boulder could be because it's so vital for our overall community.

[00:15:49] And it's like, well, you know, some people just, you know, have, it's not that they don't, but what they don't want to do the things that you so obviously would do if that was, you know, a priority. I mean, you wouldn't, you know, you just said, we just have to be honest. I mean, if it feels unsafe to walk around Boulder Creek, you know, that's not good for Boulder, right?

[00:16:13] Yet, you know, people are like, yeah, but, you know, how committed are we to just say, yeah, of course we want people to feel safe and welcome when they're, you know, in the parks and walking down. And, you know, and, you know, what we talked about is, you know, that's not a question of a trade-off of being compassionate or wanting it to be safe on the creeks. You want both.

[00:16:33] You want to be compassionate people who are in need, but not to a point of thinking that you can only be compassionate if you're willing to sacrifice the safety and security of being in and around Main Street of Boulder and the parks and the walking paths around it. And so I think that's what, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think that's part of what you mean, that we need to be honest about the challenges that we face. Well, and it goes beyond that, right?

[00:16:59] Like, I think we've lost the plot among many of these leaders who have allowed that situation to continue because the other bookend of that conversation is a question of dignity, a question of abandoning or needy to a creek path, to sleeping under a bridge, right?

[00:17:28] So, yes, there's absolutely this safety infrastructure conversation that we've had and we fully agree on, which is these spaces are safety and social capital infrastructure that serve more than one population of need and need to be available to all. I know I know I found safety as a young person in those spaces, right?

[00:17:55] But on the other side is if you truly care about that community and we really want to lead with we take care of one another, we are abandoning them, right? Right? Into public spaces, into drug addiction, and have done nothing.

[00:18:20] Have done very little, let's be fair, because there's a lot of organizations out there trying desperately to help, but there hasn't been a centralized commitment from our elected leaders to get it done. A few nights ago, we had our first candidate forum. Yep. Let me tell you what I observed. I hear there are a lot of people on stage. How many people are running for city council? Oh, my God.

[00:18:46] Between mayor candidates and council candidates, I think there were 19 of us. Oh, my gosh. I am here for it. I am loving the level of energy and participation and single-issue candidates. It's very vibrant. How are you going to get the tension that it takes to be elected in this town if there's 19 people on stage with you? I mean, what's your kind of unique messaging?

[00:19:14] Why should people want you to be our next mayor? Why should they even want you to be on the city council? What do you bring to the table? Well, that's what I observed. Among those 19 people, there was no shortage of great values and love for this town and wish for this town to succeed. Right? What there is is a huge delivery problem.

[00:19:42] We continue to focus on conversations of what are our values and as a community. And one of the things that we can do so easily as voters and as members of the community is ask, how are you going to get that done? What is your governance vision over the next two years if you're the mayor or next four years if you're a council member in terms of actually meeting the moment and meeting these challenges?

[00:20:12] And what are you going to come back to us with? In terms of having gotten done? That's not a conversation most of the candidates seem to be having. Oh, we want Boulder to be vibrant. We want Boulder to be successful. We want Boulder to be accessible for kids. Okay. Tell us how you get there. Tell us where you start. You know?

[00:20:40] And let's go back to Buddhism. One of my favorite Buddhist cones is about the apprentice goes to see the Buddhist master and he's practicing his calligraphy. And he walks up and he says, Master, what is the hardest part? And the master sits for a moment, looks at him and goes, knowing where to begin. And that's often the hardest part.

[00:21:10] It's moving back into action. And that's, I think, what really differentiates this campaign. We share all of those same values. But there are very specific things that we need to get moving on. Right? You mentioned downtown. Downtown is the financial lung of this town.

[00:21:34] If our downtown isn't operating based on a tax code that overwhelmingly funds the city on retail revenue, no one is coming downtown or downtown businesses are suffering. We have a 30%. Yeah, but can't we solve it by just increasing the tax rate? Because we have a big problem. We spend a ton of money and we don't collect enough taxes. Why not just raise the tax rate on those businesses downtown?

[00:22:00] That's the second thing I've been talking about the past couple of weeks. Based on failed decision making by council and the city, it seems to be, the theory seems to be, that downtown businesses, which are local businesses. Let's start with the fact that downtown is made up of over 80% local businesses.

[00:22:28] So when we talk about downtown and when we talk about business in Boulder, we're not talking about some giant corporation based somewhere owned by some PE firm. We're talking about people like Dave. We're talking about people like Peter and Lindsay and so many of our friends and neighbors, Kevin, who are actually small business owners.

[00:22:50] And we keep acting as if these businesses are a sponge with limitless absorption capacity to absorb an increase in prices, an increase in fees, a decrease in visitors who can continuously fund this city. Well, we need some new offices for our city officials, though. So we're going to need more revenue for those new offices. You really want my head to explode, right?

[00:23:19] No, we won't go there again. No, no, no. Let's go there. But I do want to go. No, you went there. You went there and I want to go there now. Yes, please. This is a beautiful complex with water features and a park and land that overlooks the foothills. I mean, I am so proud that we've got some additional city infrastructure to house our city employees.

[00:23:45] So if you guys don't know what Dan is talking about is the Alpine Balsam Project, which has completely spiraled, completely spiraled out of control. We are about $140 million in to a new administrative building that is supposed to house 600 city employees. Something to consider.

[00:24:14] We have more than 600 city employees. But we are presupposing that we're going to move 600 of them out of downtown to this new facility. Complex. Yes. It's more than a facility. It's got a lot of features. West of Broadway in probably the most expensive real estate in Boulder and away from downtown.

[00:24:41] Part of the problem is that largely the city workforce is remote. So we've made this investment for a remote workforce that broadly lives outside of Boulder. And we haven't been able to deliver this project.

[00:24:58] Last year we had to pass an emergency $100 million bond that raised all of our property prices and hit downtown businesses at 4x what residential taxes were hit. In the midst of that, just a few weeks ago, council approved the most outrageous thing you will see in this year's ballot.

[00:25:25] And that is Boulder's largest bailout. It is a $650 million all-in debt measure for a city that, to put in context, our annual budget is $500 million. They are selling it as an infrastructure and safety bond.

[00:25:49] And it was approved with no budget, with no plan, and with no accountability. Since then, a lot of us have raised serious concerns about the way that that moved forward. And the city very haphazardly put up a website saying, well, we want to do projects such as. And they put down a list.

[00:26:17] Among that list, for example, is $30 million for the Penfield Tate building, which is only used at this point for council meetings. It is a tiny building of about, or comparatively small in terms of city real estate, of about 20,000 square feet.

[00:26:40] You do the math, and you're talking about investing $1,250 per square foot into this building. Well, we have so limited commercial real estate available in Boulder. I mean, where else would they have a city council meeting? How about one of those vacancies? Well, how about you tie it with the outcome?

[00:27:04] Because what you're talking about is another $500 for every household that we will need to pay. And another $1,500 for every about $1 million in value of commercial real estate that we are going to have to carry. Again, with no plan, no budget, no accountability, and what they're putting out there is just completely outrageous.

[00:27:34] Yeah, and the people who are doing this are good people. And you know that. I know that. This isn't really criticism about individuals. But there's two things missing. One is true leadership. And again, this isn't a, you know, when I say that, I'm not criticizing a person. I'm criticizing the dearth of leadership. Like, no one is stepping up and saying, I'm going to be a leader here because this is not appropriate. And maybe single-handedly, I can't stop this from happening. But I certainly can be vocal on it.

[00:28:03] I certainly can be a leadership voice that says, we have to do a better job. We want to be in this position of leadership in the city, either as a city council member, as mayor, as a city manager. They could step up and say, listen, you know, for whatever set of historic reasons, we've gotten ourselves in a difficult situation, but we need to go figure this out. And we're not going to figure it out by driving more business out of Boulder and making things more expensive. I mean, we want Boulder to be more affordable. Do you want Boulder to be more affordable?

[00:28:34] Of course I do. Yeah. So how do we get to be more affordable when we just spend more and more money on stuff the city doesn't need? It doesn't need kind of this big complex. Now, if you spend more and more money on one hand and then say, and we want the city to be more affordable for people who we want to live here, those two things don't gel together. We need leadership, right? You know, so our current mayor, I consider a personal friend.

[00:29:01] He is a good and decent man who's devoted, I guess, over 15 years in service in this town as a politician and elected leader across different offices. So I agree with you. And if we were, as I said last time, if we were in an election, we were voting for like, who's a really nice person.

[00:29:31] I would probably give my vote to him. I would vote for him too. Yeah. In terms of who is the nicest guy running or person running for mayor, if that is what you want to base your vote on, vote for Aaron. Fully endorse it from that perspective. But you're going to see a continuation of the last two years and the last two years before that.

[00:29:55] And what we're seeing is every KPI in this city has been moving in the wrong direction. And we do not see the type of accountability and the type of change in process that we need to see to start delivering. I believe we need a fresh set of eyes, which is why I'm running.

[00:30:18] Let me tell you just very practically, very practically, what I would do different in terms of actually ensuring that we start seeing fewer of those outcomes. You know, Aaron, a couple of nights ago, praised me for my social conservatism, which would really, really tick off my wife because she sees her credit card statements.

[00:30:45] And I think she would highly disagree with that characterization. What I am is a person who has a background. What does social conservative even mean? Let's start there. What do you mean? I don't know. I don't know. I just think he wanted to tie me to the term conservative. It's just process. It's just process sanity. So let me tell you about the CAC. I've been talking about the CAC with a lot of folks who don't know what it is.

[00:31:13] Raise your hand if you've heard of the CAC. No one in this room has heard of the CAC. The CAC is the most important meeting that happens in this city. It happens every Monday at 9 a.m. You can get a public Zoom link. And you can go watch it. It is a meeting. You don't need to send me that link. I'm not. It stands for the Council Agenda Committee.

[00:31:38] And it is chaired by the mayor of the city, alongside the mayor pro tem and a rotating member of council who rotates every 90 days. And it is the job of the subcommittee to vote in terms of assembling the agenda and what items are ready to move forward to the entire council. I'll tell you one thing that will happen on day one when I become mayor.

[00:32:06] I will not allow anything to move forward to the entire council that isn't backed by a budget and by an identified source of revenue to fund whatever initiative the entire council is going to be discussing. And that is a position that isn't an individual Achilles thing.

[00:32:35] It is actually in favor of the entire council. Whether I agree with that or not, we have to stop moving forward projects to councils that we are incapable of dimensionalizing the cost, the opportunity, and the risk for the city. Right? Right? And cannot fund.

[00:32:58] Because we end up with things like reimagining policing, which came out and said we need 206 officers in this town in order to deal with our safety infrastructure, including downtown, which is still unfunded. The clutch report, which gave us a pathway for how do we, using best practices, resolve the homelessness crisis in Boulder, which is still unfunded.

[00:33:27] Right? And keeps us from having to run out and put out emergency tax bonds because we just found out that the project for the new administrative buildings requires hundreds of millions of dollars that we just don't have. Yep. So, let's talk about a couple other things that are related to that.

[00:33:49] So first, I think I hear you saying that if you are elected mayor, that you're going to bring a leadership voice to the table? Is that what you're saying? Well, I think the system demands it. Right? Oh, yeah. Jump on out. Hi. Oh, I'm on camera. Okay. Okay. I am thinking about moving to Boulder.

[00:34:19] So, I'm somebody who is retired and wants to come live in a beautiful place. I'm from a city. And now I want to be in the mountains and where Twang lives, which I'm so thrilled about this festival. It's like right up my alley. My question, I'm going to get really direct because I'm from New York. What exactly do you want to do specifically to make Boulder more affordable?

[00:34:43] I know you're talking about working on the budget meeting so that ideas that have to talk about real funding or lack of funding come to the fore, but like specific ideas. Well, I'll give you a high leverage one. We need Title IX reform.

[00:35:01] So, Title IX is the part of the charter where we have over 30, 40 years continue to put a whole set of different requirements for building code, etc. We have made it so expensive, so archaic, Kafkaesque, and hard to build in Boulder that that is reflective.

[00:35:29] And we've talked about this in extremely long permitting times and extremely expensive outcomes that are incapable of delivering the type of housing and the right price points of that housing that would attract younger families into Boulder.

[00:35:55] And let me build on that and at the risk of using my famous oversimplifications.

[00:36:05] If we ran Boulder's building codes through AI and said, AI, we want to increase the pace of new housing in Boulder on land that is designed to be built on, either because something's already on that land or that land is already zoned as such.

[00:36:35] But we want to make it quicker to build and we want to make it far less expensive to build. And we want you to spit out the 30 things that we need to change if the outcome we're looking for is to unleash those who want to put capital work to build to actually get on with it, building. So we have more supply of housing because, let's face it, housing is the most expensive part of affordability.

[00:37:03] We need more supply of housing and we want it to start showing up quick. I mean, I suppose we've come up with a lot of great suggestions in a two-hour session with Claude. In fact, I think some people have already done that. Is that what you're talking about? That's not what you need to reform. It's like, we're going to frickin' reform and we're going to reform immediately. And we're going to, you know, get the engine of housing supply happening again in Boulder because it's stagnant now. People can't build because it takes way too long and it's way too expensive. So they just don't build. And guess what?

[00:37:33] Housing goes up in price. Yeah, so many good things there. Yes, you could do that with AI. It won't happen in the city because the city has forbidden its staff from using AI. But what have done are you? You're the frickin' mayor. You could do whatever you want. Well, that's not true that I can do whatever I want. What I can do is set the tone and ask the hard questions. Yes, you can do whatever you want.

[00:38:01] I mean, you can't get away with all of it, but couldn't you come in and say, we're going to do this. And you guys are going to be with me or not, but we're going to do it. And I'm going to be your best friend if we do it. And I'm going to be like an ornery mayor if you don't. And maybe I can't do whatever I want to do. But I'm not going to just let you guys do what you've been doing the last 10 years, which is very little. We are going to make it so that we're going to do what we say we want to do. Don't we want to make Boulder more affordable for people who we want to be here?

[00:38:30] Well, it brings us back. We need to get to work. It brings us back to how we should be sending people to council and sending people to the mayor's office. We need to stop asking folks what their values are and how much love Boulder. Let me get into it. Let me get into it. Let me get into it. We provide people who we are sending up to these institutions our popular mandate. Right?

[00:39:00] So we should not be giving our popular mandate to these folks without them expressing what the vision and what the governance priorities in great detail are. And when they do that and we get them elected, we should expect those leaders to remind the entire system that that's why they're there.

[00:39:23] That's what they have promised to deliver and act as a team to make sure that we're delivering towards those priorities. So if the priority is housing and turning that engine on and actually cracking open Title IX, which has been overdue for decades,

[00:39:46] and everybody knows is due a hard, serious look to ensure that the code is aligned to the need and to the product that we need in this town, then yes, they should be talking often and bluntly about that in the way that you're suggesting. Well, I want it to be the way you're suggesting that you as mayor would demand that happen. I would absolutely demand it. Demand that we're going to get together and we're going to work together.

[00:40:13] We're going to collaborate and we're going to do what we say we want to do because the city council and the employees of the city want to make things more affordable. So we're not telling them to do something they don't want to do. No, they want it to be more affordable for people who are part of Boulder. So, okay, if we want to do that, how about this? Let's sit down and do it. So you're going to have to like get off your Zoom call. You have to come into the office. We're going to sit around a table and we're going to, we all know, you know,

[00:40:40] I don't think most of them need to be educated on what it is about the city code that is causing all the delays and delays and delays and added costs, added costs. And you know what? If we really want to be more affordable, we're going to have to address that. We're going to have to address it like exactly right now, not through some elaborate reform process, but man, within a week, you know, what can we change? What can we bring up to city council? Exactly right. And have them vote on it. Is that what you would do as mayor? Yeah. What I'm going to do as mayor is that, which means we're going to regain the initiative.

[00:41:10] We've gotten lost in activity and we track very little progress and we do not align our actions towards it. We kind of react to these different things one at a time and then hope there is an outcome. We need a centralized vision. We need a centralized clearinghouse for that vision. And then we need to manifest it in what we do. And all of that is supposed to happen in council.

[00:41:35] And that's exactly what I would do because let's go back to where we are right now. Boulder every year wins best city in America for. This year, it actually caught my eye. It wasn't best city in America to raise a family. It was best city in America to be retired.

[00:41:57] A city that is responsible for pushing Colorado to be number one in education in the country this week announced we're closing schools. Think about that for a second. Let the weight of that come on your shoulders. The city that is responsible for Colorado being rated number one in education in the country is closing schools.

[00:42:26] If that doesn't stop you cold and say we really need to meet this moment and that is the last warning that we need to actually address the pathways to make our economy sustainable, to provide pathways of opportunity for families to choose to live in Boulder, right?

[00:42:56] For businesses to thrive in Boulder and for housing that attracts those people into Boulder, I don't know that there's another off ramp. I do not know that there's another off ramp.

[00:43:09] And I'm really sorry for the inconvenience of jumping in when my friend Aaron wanted to serve his last two years as mayor before being term limited because he's been there so long, right? But I don't think we can afford another two years like the last two. Yeah, because what you said is you want more families to be here because we want schools to stay open. The schools need to have kids to go to school.

[00:43:39] If the kids are going to go to school, that means families are moving here. It's not just where people go to retire. It's where people go here to build families. And that gets us back to what we were just talking about. Like, okay, if you want more families to be here, you have to have the kind of housing supply that's conducive for people to have families here. Let me give you a personal example of that. I was talking to a friend, I won't say their name, who has a three-acre property on Area 2A. Now, I'm getting a little geeky.

[00:44:10] Area 2A is an area of town that we have identified. We want to annex into the city, and we want these areas to develop into exactly the housing opportunities. He's an empty nester, and he thought to himself, you know, it's a great time now for us to annex this property into the city and maybe build six homes for families out of it.

[00:44:39] The city has said they want to annex us. They've said they want more families to come into town. So he marched his happy little butt down to the city and said, hey, I'm here. I'd like to be part of the solution. What came out of the other side in terms of the requirements for him to annex in would have been impossible for him to create housing that in any way would have served that outcome.

[00:45:08] The price of that property would have been so high that it wasn't financially viable. So what are we doing? And by price, you mean the cost. He would have to absorb a bunch of costs. Yes, exactly. In order to develop into six homes to the point where it's like, okay, there's no way this could be built and sold. It doesn't pencil out.

[00:45:30] So instead of the attitude being, what can we do to make it highly likely that there will be homes built on that side as soon as possible, the attitude was, okay, here's our list of things you have to do. Sorry, you're going to have to absorb all those costs. It's like, oh, I guess you can't do it. Oh, well. I mean, that's the passive. Not that any individual is like being inappropriate. They're following the rules. They're saying, yep, those are our codes. Here's what we need to do. That's the process.

[00:45:58] And it's like, okay, do you or don't you want homes to be built on that side? Because if you do, that's when leadership matters. It's like, let's go make that happen. That's it. It's we're moving through inertia and bad habits. Right? And we have these values. We want families. We want missing middle housing. We want to keep... We state these values. We state... Over and over and over. We express those values, but we don't live those values. And then two years later, nothing has happened. We've moved in the wrong direction.

[00:46:27] And then we restate the values. Yeah. And two years later, we come back. And nothing has happened. And everything has moved in the wrong direction. And we restate our values. So my challenge to all of my friends and neighbors over 30 years is... Raise your expectations. Ask harder questions. Ask folks who have been there, as they have, for subsequent terms. What did you deliver?

[00:46:58] And what are you going to deliver next? First, we believe in your values. We believe you love Boulder. We believe you want us to succeed. But are you capable of it? Because a lot of things you're talking about right now, it's not that we have different points of views. We're not arguing about, you know, I believe in here and I believe in there. It's like we're all... What I hear you saying is we're expressing a consensus on what we want for Boulder. We want Boulder to continue to be a very special place.

[00:47:28] We want Boulder to thrive. We want to work. We want, you know, people to be here. We want to see, you know, the downtown Boulder thriving. So we have a shared kind of agreement at some level of what we're looking to do. But we're not doing it. We're not executing. And I would think there's a lot of people who work for the city who would jump all over that. Like, yeah, we've been wanting to do these things for a long time.

[00:47:51] We've just been unable to do it because we're caught up in like a bureaucracy and a tradition and an indecisiveness, a passiveness that makes it really hard for any of us to get done with what we would like to get done. So maybe what the, you know, a lot of the team of Boulder needs is just a leadership that fully, you know, empowers them to say, okay, let's do what we know we need to do for Boulder. You know, one of the things that I've been nervous about over that, I'm going to be really vulnerable.

[00:48:19] I've been really worried over the past couple of weeks that my message of yes, we can could be heard in a different way as a criticism of our city staff, to whom we actually owe a lot. They work really hard.

[00:48:50] The question is, are they working on the right things? My hope is exactly what you just stated, which is, you know, they should want to have impact. Having run organizations, I know the difference in morale between a workforce that is just treading water and not really understanding how their work is leading to positive impacts

[00:49:15] and a workforce that is centered around a mission that they believe matters and they believe moves the needle for actual people, right? That's the culture that I want this city to go back to. Last night, something really interesting happened, which I wasn't expecting.

[00:49:37] I had someone I didn't know come up to me, shake my hand, tell me that they had worked for the city since the early 2000s, gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, thank you. And I believe this town very much wants to center around the capacity to deliver, and that includes our city staff, and that we can get out of our own way.

[00:50:04] We can get re-inspired around all the things that bind us and find solutions to all of these problems because they're actually solvable. That's the frustrating part. If you see frustration in me, it's because everyone knows what we need to do. We just haven't had the courage to do it. We haven't had the voice in leadership saying, you know, we're going to take some people off, right?

[00:50:31] And we're going to go through some things that are going to feel uncomfortable as we have hard conversations around layers of bureaucracy that we've piled on with great intentions, all of them. But are they serving our city now? And are they serving the needs of where we need to go? Yeah. And I think that's a really good point because I've worked in environments, like early in my career,

[00:51:00] my first job, the paychecks at Illinois Bell, you know, I was with the Bell system, and it was coming under competitive threat. And fortunately for me, I jumped on the other side of that battle, and I became part of the companies that broke apart the Bell system. But the people in the Bell system, they lived in bureaucracy for decades. They were immune to competition.

[00:51:26] The more money they spent, the higher they could charge for phone service, and there wasn't another phone provider, so there was, like, no end in sight for that. It was just, like, every year prices would go up. They'd get more revenue. They'd create more bureaucracy. But the people in there were frustrated, you know, because they couldn't be creative. They couldn't be innovative. They couldn't, you know, get stuff done. And until the real impact of competition hit them, they would never make the hard decisions. Why would they?

[00:51:55] But a lot of the people there wanted to be unleashed. They wanted to make change. They wanted to do what they knew they should be doing in order to provide better service, you know, for people because people needed phones. I bet there's a lot of people in the city who they want the same thing for the city that we're talking about right now. They don't have a different point of view there. They just feel totally not empowered, powerless to make change.

[00:52:22] You know, they're living in a bureaucracy, a set of rules, you know, an inertia that points them a certain direction. And I think if someone came in and said, hey, you know, it's a new day, and, you know, we're going to do the things we all really want to do. We want to make downtown vibrant again. We want people to be filling up those offices, and we want, you know, those buildings in the east side of Pearl.

[00:52:46] We want them to be filled up with really interesting new businesses, and we want to see more housing be developed so more families move here and the schools get filled up. We all want that, don't we? We want to be filled up with the community. And we need to work with the community, the non-public sector. We need to go meet with them. We need to go meet with the Dave Quarries who was just here and sit down and say, okay, what do we really need to do to, like, bring full life to everything we're doing here in Boulder? We're going to do that now. I mean, I think you can do that.

[00:53:16] You as that kind of person running for mayor can say this is a, you know, what we're talking about is a new day here, not taking Boulder a different direction. It's to take Boulder the same direction, but get it done. We need a new set of eyes, and we need a voice, and we need a new pathway to leadership in this town. We talked about my history here.

[00:53:38] If I had been limited by the ceiling of what the system told me was possible for me, we would not be sitting here today. As a first-generation immigrant, I would have set my sights about as low as the system expected them of me. You know, I went to a Boulder high school that measured my success on them keeping me from dropping out.

[00:54:05] Like, not propelling me towards a scholarship that would get me educated. Not towards plugging me into the – I had to fight for those, right? And I think it's just about time that – Dave Curry told us that his parents had to go build new stands in the football field just so they would graduate him from high school. I'm like, is that a bribe?

[00:54:32] So you were on the opposite side of that equation, so I was like – No, there's many pathways. But yeah, I want to be a voice of possibility. I want to break that inertia and that calcification. I want to turn around the culture in the town. And we need to use the mayor's office as an organizing house, not just for the city, right?

[00:55:03] Because so much of the great potential in this town lies beyond the city as an institution. We have great organizations. We have the university and incredible experts that we can bring to bear in actually collaborating towards solving our problems. And we need to invite those people again.

[00:55:25] We need to make it fun and pleasant to deal with the city again, to solve big problems again, and to actually raise your hand with an idea because one of the things that I've learned is when you move to a culture like Boulder has of no and here's why, people just stop raising their hands because it's kind of like talking to a wall.

[00:55:53] So we need to inspire people to say we want your ideas, and we will work with you to actuating those ideas and making them possible. Yeah, let me throw something else out there. It feels like there's a lot of negativity or anger in the way kind of city council interacts with the community, I think.

[00:56:22] So, you know, it's the portion of the community that presents itself to the city council. The city council and how it's interacting, there's a negativity to that that is totally unnecessary. It would seem like, like, why are we wasting so much of our energy on stuff that feels so negative, as opposed to redirecting that toward, you know, toward being aspirational and being positive and talking about what we can do and what we want to do together,

[00:56:49] as opposed to, like, what feels like a, you know, some kind of, like, unnecessary tension between those who are, you know, who are in city council and the way they, they, they seems like they behave at times. And I don't think they do it intentionally. I think it's maybe because they don't understand the rest of the community and, or they, they view, you know, the majority of the city council, you know, has a view of the rest of Boulder because there are people who came here more recently

[00:57:15] or I don't know what, but I don't know why there's all this negativity toward that as opposed to, like, like, man, you're, like, representing Boulder, Colorado. Look at all the stuff we could do together. Let's get out there and roll up our sleeves and, and, and collaborate. Let's do things like, you know, Tulagi. Let's figure out how to get more cool businesses in Boulder and cool people in Boulder and families in Boulder and, and, and arts in Boulder and let's work together to, you know, to, to just take it, you know,

[00:57:43] take advantage of what a beautiful place we all, you know, call home together. Like, why doesn't that exist, Maura? You know, I, I think it is all of the above of, of what we're discussing, you know. So, um, having observed and calling, uh, many of those people my friends, they're under incredible pressure. It's draining. I mean, the whole system of how they even operate is draining of energy.

[00:58:12] It's, it's, we've made it really not fun. Yeah. We've made it really not fun and because. Can they change that? Can they be like, okay, these, like, this Thursday night tradition, you know, no one last night was from the city council or the, you know, the city manager. They couldn't come because they had their Thursday night, you know, whatever, which is, I'm sure was very productive last night. I don't know what they accomplished, but they could have been there and they were all invited and some of them had said yes.

[00:58:40] And then they realized they had this Thursday night conflict. And, you know, that, that was a community gathering. We had last night, the governor's there, the police chief is there, the athletic director, the, the chancellor of CU. A lot of the people representing the community from different ways, but the whole city council and city manager couldn't come because they had to go to this long, drawn out Thursday night meeting that probably went on forever and they probably accomplished nothing. Yeah.

[00:59:06] We need to pace it better and we need to support our council people better. And that really is part of the core job of mayor, right? That goes back to the CAC. That goes back to shaping what is the agenda that we're talking about? And how much time are we giving people to process all of this information? What does that packet look like?

[00:59:33] Are we having the big hard conversations up front rather than on the back end of the meeting? This is one of the things that like baffles me. I know that when I organize a meeting to solve a problem with any of my teams, I want people to be rested. I want people to have their highest level of cognitive energy up front as we tackle the most complex issues.

[01:00:02] It seems my observation often is we smash giant conversations without proper consideration with how the town will react to new outcomes. So they show up really charged and angry and confused. And then we pack these conversations towards the back of these three, four hour long meetings

[01:00:29] and are asking our community and our elected leaders to somehow react to it in that way. You know, there should be a threshold. If this decision is going to have a threshold of impact in the community, let's have more than one conversation about it. Let's talk about them up front when everybody is clear. Well, how late would last night's meeting have gone, do you think?

[01:00:56] I mean, they go very long. It's a good night. Could the mayor of last night have just said, hey, tonight is Thursday night. We have a hard stop at 730 tonight. Could the mayor have said that? The mayor could have said that if during the CAC he had assembled an agenda that achieved that and had gotten at least the mayor pro tem or that other rotating member.

[01:01:24] So the city manager and the mayor, like last Monday, could have been like, hey, you know, we've all been invited to this sloggy thing that's really important to the community. It's on Thursday night and we, the city, really need to be there because we're part of this. Of course. And when there's a conflict with our Thursday night, so let's agree that we're going to have a, you know, only one item on the agenda. We're going to declare that the meeting is going to end at this time. And then, you know, everyone can make their own decision.

[01:01:52] But I, the mayor and I, the city manager, and hopefully a lot of you with us are going to come with us and we're going to show that we're part of this city and this is something that we're doing for the city, that we're all behind. They could have done that? They could have. Could they have, like, because, I don't know, like some of the people in this room here kept me up, you know, past midnight and past one in the morning. So they could even come at, they could have come at 10 o'clock, you know, or they could have caught the last act of steel drivers.

[01:02:19] I am sensing that you did not feel the love from our city council leaders last night. Well, I have felt the love from city council and from the city on everything we're doing with Tulagi. I mean, it's been a really positive partnership. I see it as a lost opportunity. It's like a lack of awareness. It's like a, you know, I feel it for them that they had an opportunity to show so many people. You saw last night. They could have showed them that, you know, we are part of this. You know, we were supportive of it.

[01:02:49] We are supportive. We helped make this happen. We know this is the kind of thing that's going to bring the community together. And you know what? We went out of our way to make sure the city agenda on Thursday was short so that we could get through it and that we could get there and be present and be part of it. They could have done that. And I think that's, and I want to be careful here because, you know, I think if I would have had this conversation with them two weeks ago, they probably would have done that. I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't even know they could do that.

[01:03:17] But I thought about it out loud here that they should have been there last night and they could have been there last night. And, yeah, they had a conflict, but they could have managed through that conflict and said, you know, hey, you know, this is, you know, we want to be there and we want to show up and we want to show up because this belongs to us too. It was like a lost opportunity. We have a lot of lost opportunities in this town. And we can't continue to miss these moments. Yeah, I think we could work together on that too.

[01:03:46] I mean, I think we could help, you know, whether you get elected or not. I mean, I think we'd get together and just have these conversations. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Would Tulagi, let me ask you this. Would Tulagi host a council meeting? Would Tulagi put the council on a stage and have them hold their meeting for, you know, 90 minutes or two hours and then the meeting stops and we all party together? Yeah, we'd get some bands and play some music.

[01:04:16] Absolutely, we'd do that. Wouldn't that be fun? Sure. You know? Let's do it. Like, we need to get back out there. Yeah. You know? We need to get back out there and we need to start externalizing the functions of government and we need to start highlighting. I like that externalizing it. And highlighting the work. The mayor, I imagine a mayor who's out there with the different functions of the city,

[01:04:44] showcasing what those functions are to local residents and showing what the impact of those functions are for our neighbors and what they mean. And let's actually start building some felt empathy. Because one thing that I have learned in over 30 years in governance and leadership at the intersection of private and public service

[01:05:09] is the one common trait that high-performing organizations have is felt empathy. It's the ability for you to have line of sight as to how your work actually benefits somebody else. And if you can be in relationship with that person, sometimes many, many levels out,

[01:05:37] the quality of your work and the decisions that you make are manifestly different. Because if you don't have visibility, you're going to have empathy for yourself. So I'm going to try to optimize my work to what's easiest for me. Right? If instead, I know who I'm impacting next from me, I might choose not to put a staple on this stack of paper.

[01:06:05] Because I know Nancy, when she gets it, she has to struggle with getting the staple out because she has to make five photocopies. Right? And when she makes a five photocopies. And so it ladders down all the way to somebody suddenly having to wait two years for a permit

[01:06:23] because they needed to convert their garage into a living unit for their kid who, by circumstance, is now in a wheelchair and needs accessible housing. But they were made to wait those two years. If you know that that's what's standing on the other end, don't you think, Dan, that that city staff would be moving a lot quicker for that child?

[01:06:53] Yeah, I would think they would want to. Of course they would. You know? So we need to find the pathways to start creating that felt empathy across every layer of our community and our government and our code. Yeah. And in your example, you mentioned, you know, the wheelchair, which brings out certain emotion, you know, and we should go out of our way, you know, for reasons that make sense because of the wheelchair example.

[01:07:19] But I would also throw that and say, what about that small business owner on Pearl Street in Boulder who's building a business, trying to keep the business, employing people, and something is getting in the way of running their business that they think the city could help in? Shouldn't they have the same level of like, hey, we need to really hear that out and listen and understand and then, you know, problem solve together in real time. So go beyond just saying, yeah, I understand that's a problem for you, but here's why we can't do anything different.

[01:07:47] As opposed to like, yeah, let's go reach out and let's understand, let's figure out how do we, you know, better serve kind of the people who are working hard to make Boulder kind of a viable place. I mean, that's the kind of approach. Yes, all of the above. By the way. Who else is running for mayor? What? Who else is running for mayor? Well, we got six candidates. For mayor?

[01:08:19] But Aaron Brockett is our current mayor. And Aaron's invited to be on the podcast. I'd love for Aaron to have this conversation. I like Aaron. And, you know, by the way, Aaron's been really receptive. The city manager, Nuria, she's been, we sat down with her a handful of times about a couple different, and she's, you know, she's very pleasant, very, you know, well-spoken.

[01:08:44] She, the things we bring up, she is wholeheartedly in agreement, but she expresses, you know, frustration about how hard it is to get anything done. But, you know, these aren't, we're not arguing, I mean, I've never been in a situation where I'm saying we need to do this, and they're saying, no, we need to do something else. It's like, how do we do it? It's really the question. Yeah. But I would love for them to get more engaged and out there more and, you know, and feeling more empowered to really do stuff.

[01:09:10] Well, this is the challenge that we're making in terms of this campaign. Like, we demand more engagement. Yeah, so we have Aaron and we have Taisha Adams, who is a council person, and she's also challenging for that mayor seat. Then there's myself. Then we have... And she's considered, like, the most progressive of the candidates, is that right?

[01:09:41] Taisha? Or how would you characterize her? No, I mean, I would characterize Aaron as probably the most in-the-box progressive he's always been. This year, he's the only candidate for mayor who's endorsed by the bolder progressive juggernaut.

[01:10:01] Taisha, my observation is she cares deeply about the stewardship of her land and her climate. She also takes some really bold positions on governance.

[01:10:18] And she, I think it would be fair to say, also injects a broader set of lenses in terms of global politics and global issues. That... So she sounds like a really reasonable candidate. Well, it depends on what you think about certain issues. I don't know what you think, because I don't think you're telling me what you think right now. You're using, like, code words. Well, she's, you know...

[01:10:47] She's a broader global issues. She cares about the planet. I care about the planet, too. She's been very outspoken about the issue of Israel and Palestine from within city council. And I think she really challenged a lot of our town sensibilities after last year's anti-Semitic and terrorist attack on Pearl Street,

[01:11:17] when she was the one member who did not join the other members of council on the statement that the city issued. I don't know what any of that means. It sounds like she's being very responsible. You mentioned she's really strong at governance, that she cares a lot about the planet. She cares a lot about global issues. She cares a lot about Israel and Palestine, is what I heard you say. So I don't... I mean, I think you're talking like code words. I'm not talking about code words.

[01:11:45] What's the issue where she had one point of view and the others had a different point of view? Well, we suffered a horrible attack on Pearl Street. Yes. One of her neighbors died.

[01:12:01] And she was the one member who did not sign the statement from the city expressing condolences towards that attack or being willing to talk about the label of anti-Semitism relative to that attack. I think that was a... What was the nature of the attack? I mean, I sort of know, but I'm sure a lot of people who are listening have no idea what you're talking about.

[01:12:29] So during a march by members of our Jewish community in Boulder, a person from out of town came and attacked the march with a fire bombing using Molotov cocktails, which resulted in the death of one of our neighbors and the injury of many of the participants. It was a horrible moment for Boulder.

[01:12:55] And it's a horrific death, if I remember right, because the person was... Yes. ...was caught... I mean, it wasn't instantaneous. So the person went through... I mean, dying is, you know, bad enough even if it was instantaneous, but it was even more horrific than that. Is that right? Or am I remembering it wrong? You are not remembering it wrong. It was, again... But what would she have not agreed with? Like, why wouldn't she have signed...

[01:13:23] Well, you would really have to ask her, but the way it was interpreted was that she took some exception to calling it an anti-Semitism attack and that it might have been an anti-Syanist attack.

[01:13:46] Again, it's kind of this coded language that no matter what resulted in horrible, horrible damage and pain that still exists deeply today in this community.

[01:14:00] And I think we need to be bolder and not parse words as to how we meet hate, how we meet anti-Semitism, and how we meet some of these horrible traits that are still running rampant in our society and are present in our community.

[01:14:28] Okay, so it sounds like what she would have, like... She's walking beyond here, too. I would love to talk to her about it and her points of views in general. But it sounds like she didn't like it the way it was being characterized as, you know, as to what the motivation was. But she presumably condemned the attack. You would have to ask her. I'm talking about the way it was interpreted.

[01:14:51] You're running against her, so I'm asking you because I want to know about, like, why you should be mayor, not her, and why you should be mayor, not Erin. And who else is running for mayor? We have Lisa Ann Jacobs, who's a very interesting neighbor. I hadn't met her before. Her platform is that she has the highest IQ in the nation.

[01:15:20] We have Grateful Fred. She has the highest IQ in the nation? That's what I could gather. Wow. And she's also the descendant. Let's get her in Crucible Ventures. We need her. We need some real IQ on our team. Yep. Jammo is a CU student who just turned 21, a really great kid. And he, you know, got the required number of signatures to run for mayor. Oh, cool.

[01:15:47] And a longtime resident Grateful Fred is also running from what I could gather from our time together is he is a single-issue candidate who's focused on getting more young people out to drink at bars. Okay. Well, Dave Query is going to vote for him. Dave Query has got a lot of bars that he needs to sell. Probably.

[01:16:16] So, you know, it's a very dynamic field. I'm actually running on the question of what do we expect of the office of mayor? And we need to raise our expectations and we need to close our gap between having values and actually delivering on those values and making sure that we address this town's most pressing priorities. I think that's a good way of putting it.

[01:16:44] And I think, you know, bringing the community together, I think that's what I would love to hear more about. That we want – I want to support our city council. I want to support our city manager. I want to support our city employees. You know, I want to show them appreciation. I want to show them respect for what they do. I want to be more part of Boulder. I want to feel them being part of carrying Boulder forward and leading Boulder and making Boulder more affordable

[01:17:10] and making Boulder more special and making Boulder, you know, a place where people feel secure. They feel safe. They feel like we're taking care of our own. I want the city council and I want the city employees to, like, be viewed that way because they behave that way. And I think they – in their spirit, in their heart, I think they are. But they've got to be here. Okay? We talked about this last time. They also have to be here. I mean, if you're not going to live here, you've got to be here during the day.

[01:17:38] You can't, like, remote, you know, run Boulder from Louisville or wherever else you might spend your day and spend your nights. You can't just occasionally come into Boulder. You've got to be part of the Boulder community if you're going to, you know, if you're going to be in public service. And, again, I understand that they don't – you know, that doesn't mean they're all going to live here. But a lot of them do need to want to live here too. And if they want to live here, that will make them say, hey, I want to live there too. So we need to really do stuff that creates more housing for all of us to have access to.

[01:18:07] And, you know, if it's really easy for them to say, well, I'm just going to move outside of Boulder. And what's great, I don't have to drive into Boulder so I don't care if it's hard to get in and hard to get out and hard to live there because, you know, I'm getting paid by Boulder, but I don't have to go to Boulder. I could live in Arvada and go to downtown Arvada or wherever else you might live. It's just crazy. It feels like such a missed opportunity. Yes. Right? If you want to work for Boulder, you should want to spend time in Boulder. Yeah.

[01:18:33] And if you don't want to spend time in Boulder and you work for Boulder… You can't have both ways. What are the questions that fall out of that? Yeah. No, that's just the – They're pretty complicated. Yeah. And I've talked to so many of our businesses who say, man, like, let's get them back down. Let's make parking – let's give people two hours free parking. Right? We want to bring people from out of town to actually be spending money downtown.

[01:19:02] Let's make it easier for them to come down here. You mentioned Dave. There's many other restaurant owners who tell me they would love to give city workers a 50% discount during the week to come down and have lunch at their places.

[01:19:20] Wouldn't it be great if we had, like, a mall yacht party in the middle of the day and bring out some bands and bring out our city workers and bring out our office workers to intermingle and network right there on Pearl Street every Wednesday or every Monday, whatever day you want? Let's make it fun to start being back in community with each other.

[01:19:46] Let's unleash an economic development office in the city. For 50 years, we have assumed that our economic development office is the Flatirons. Right? We talked about this last time. It's not enough. It's not enough anymore. We have to compete for our entrepreneurship, for our innovation, and for our creative class to come back in Boulder and start filling up those spaces. Yeah.

[01:20:17] You know? Yeah. So let's get that to work. Let's start figuring out how to make these incredibly long permitting and process times for local businesses to renew themselves, to innovate. These are the things that we can do and should do and should be fun to do because it's Boulder. I like that. It should be fun to do.

[01:20:44] Instead of hearing, and I do hear this when I talk to them, how hard it is to do stuff. I mean, how hard is draining? It's demotivating. It's frustrating. You don't get fulfillment. I have a job. I work for the city, and we can't get anything done because it's so hard to get stuff done. And we know we're disappointing, but there's nothing we can do about that. That's not a fun way to live your professional life.

[01:21:09] And I think with the right type of inspirational leadership that comes in and says, guess what? It's a new day. We're going to start doing stuff. We're going to get shit done. And I'm going to be here. You know, I can't do the work. I'm the mayor. I'm only one of nine city council members. But I'm the mayor. And I'm going to, like, be a voice. And I'm going to inspire and encourage. And by the way, I'm going to do my best to hold accountability standard as well. That we are going to get shit done.

[01:21:35] And we're going to make Boulder everything Boulder can be and that we want Boulder to be. But you know what? Not only do I need you to come back into the city, that's going to be kind of like a, you know, it's not going to be optional. You know, because if you don't want to come into the city, you want to live somewhere else, you want to work somewhere else, you can't be part of our city payroll. Can we do that? We will do that. We will absolutely do that because, you know. It's the right thing to do. Yeah.

[01:22:03] And I know some people that take, like, such huge exception to the idea that I would ask city staff to come back into the city. Right? Many of us enjoy the flexibility of hybrid work. And I'm not against hybrid work. You know? Every once in a while, I too want to get dressed from the waist up and have my pajamas on the bottom as I jump on a Zoom from my home office. Right? That's nice.

[01:22:32] But the idea of remote work is predicated on you being able to deliver on that job from home. You can't build felt empathy. All of our KPIs are moving in the wrong direction. Our downtown is suffering. And Boulder is the largest employer downtown. We could re-inject energy. We could re-inject revenue.

[01:23:03] We could re-inject potential into our downtown just simply by asking them to participate more in the city that they choose to work for. By being in the city that they do work for. Yeah. And asking is one thing, but saying that's just, you know, you can't serve Boulder by living and working remote. It just makes no sense. But that's kind of a negative.

[01:23:30] The positive is we can make Boulder a better place. And we can work together. We can collaborate. We can do so and enjoy each other, get to know each other better, be on the same team. You know, we're on the Boulder team. You know, we're not on the conservative side or independent side or libertarian side or progressive side. Those are sides in a different league and a different game. Together, we're on the Boulder team. And let's work together on the Boulder team. That's right.

[01:23:59] Our municipal elections are nonpartisan for a reason. Because we are all neighbors and a part of Boulder. You know, we stand, I think, on national politics fairly far apart. Right? But we share the same. What? Who does? I'm saying. Oh, we in covenant. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I thought you said we do. I'm like, I don't know. I don't even know where I stand in national politics. Yeah, no, no. I'm just saying we can.

[01:24:29] But as neighbors and friends, you know, we're all ultimately Boulderites.

[01:24:35] And part of this is about the shared experience that we have as entrepreneurs, as creative technologists, as part of this creative class in Boulder over a long period of time, having created and scaled businesses, organizations, and cultures, saying, you know what? We see the problem. Let us help.

[01:25:05] Let us help. Because the path of leadership in this town cannot just simply continue to be. You served for many years on this commission, and then you serve for many years as council members, and then that gives you the right to be mayor. First of all, we rejected that as a community in 2020 when we made the mayor's office a directly elected mayor.

[01:25:30] And second of all, it seems to be producing very institutionalized candidates who operate within the bounds of their understanding of this bureaucratic system and unable to challenge that system in the way that we need to challenge it today. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is the beginning of a lot of conversations because, you know, I want to help your voice be heard over the next few months and hopefully see you elected mayor.

[01:26:00] But in any case, you know, hopefully it's a voice that helps bring the community together and helps those who are in power, both as city employees and as city council members realize that they can be more effective. They can choose to be tackling these problems and getting shit done. And we can do that together, not in opposition with one another, but as collaborators and trying to do stuff that's in the best interest of Boulder by working together and by enjoying each other.

[01:26:30] And I think you could bring that energy to the table, and, you know, I'm here to help. Well, thank you, Dan. And I will make you this promise. No matter what, after this candidacy and this election, no one in Boulder will look at the office of mayor of the same. And I think that's going to be very healthy for all of us. I agree. Well, thank you. Let's go do some talagi.

[01:26:58] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Bear Roars. Check out Stretch, the new song from Dan Caruso, with music by Jason Mendelsohn, available now on all streaming services. If you enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe on your listening platform. This podcast was produced by Loud Bear Productions and edited by Kendall Weinberg, with support from Gibson Seagert.