Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: My name is Jill Grano and I am not an incumbent candidate, but as my treasurer, Eric McGloom, likes to say, I am a born again. I served on Boulder City Council almost a decade ago with some of you and chose to answer the call when my congressman called me and asked if I'd serve and run his district outreach. But I have never left the community. I care so deeply about the Boulder community, and I think back about arriving here 22 years ago.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: I was one of these kids that
[00:00:29] Speaker A: served on student council from third grade all the way through senior year and then studied government at William Mary. And I showed up and one of the first things I did was Google who the mayor was and it was Susan Osborne. And I don't know if you remember running into each other at the grocery store and I bought you a magazine in my 20s. I'm like, hi, I really like you. And you know, I have volunteered in this community and served on boards and served on council and for our congressmen because I love it so much. And the big thing that has motivated me to come back was going to graduate school. I just graduated in May with a master's where I studied Boulder. It was my field site and I produced a thesis that's a book on the whole history of Boulder's housing and economic development. And in it I can really see challenges growing decades ago, ones that we're grappling with today.
One of the things that I document and really contribute to the literature is this tremendous rise in financialization in our city. We have an influx of big institutional capital like we've never seen before. Just in the last nine years, Blackstone Capital has bought up over a billion dollars of Boulder real estate. That's a rent check that immediately leaves our pocket and goes into the hands of a Republican billionaire, mega donor and sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. I would love to try to tackle this and get a handle on this, as well as rebuilding public trust and public processes like Tina kind of talked about. I have never seen public trust so low, and I want to be part of that solution.
[00:02:24] Speaker C: That was the voice of Jill Grano, a candidate for Boulder City Council, introducing herself at a recent forum. Welcome to the Better Bolder Hearts and Minds podcast, folks. My ballot has arrived. I'm so thankful for mail in ballots where I can sit in the comfort of my own home, open it up, read through it carefully, research the candidates and ballot measures and vote carefully.
I remember 20 some years ago walking into a church building lobby with a vague idea of some of the candidates I would vote for seeing my ballot for the first time and making weighty decisions about issues I had some uninformed, prejudiced intuitions about and either voting when I thought I knew enough to weigh in or leaving it blank when I didn't. That's no way to vote and I'm so thankful for the movers and shakers who had the political will to make universal mail in voting a reality in Colorado. I hope it goes nationwide so we have our ballots. It's time to vote. There are many great candidates to choose from and I hope you will consider the candidates endorsed by Better Boulder. We endorse seven city Council candidates and we hope this series of episodes and is helpful as you get to know them and make your choices. Our slate is the result of numerous one on one conversations in person, interviews in front of the entire board, lively discussions and multiple rounds of voting. To see our full list of candidates, please visit betterbolder.com and click elections.
Our sixth candidate interview in this series is with Jill Grano. We met on a Saturday afternoon at her place in North Boulder and sat on her back porch and talked about fiscal responsibility and housing, among other subjects. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Jill Grano.
[00:04:05] Speaker D: Jill, welcome to the Better Boulder Hearts and Minds podcast.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Thank you for having me on here and thank you Better Boulder for your endorsement.
[00:04:12] Speaker D: Yeah, congrats on that. That's great.
Jill, you have this way of when you start talking, my head starts nodding. You know, I could. So I don't know how you do it, but I'm excited to have this interview.
You're a new candidate, sort of, kind of. Give us a quick bio and tell us why you're running.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm a new old candidate I guess.
Well, you know, public service has truly always been at the heart of my life and mean that from such a young age. Like I joined student council in third grade and I was SCA president all the way through high school year, senior year and would volunteer. I studied government at the College of William and Mary, came straight to Boulder after that, landed here and just jumped in volunteering and I was on the board of New Era really early on and gosh the board zoning adjustments. I worked with manufactured homeowners a lot. I was actually, this is like so ancient history but behind the 10 cent bag fee that we have.
[00:05:13] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: I've worked on so many different initiatives and things and ran, you know, ran for council and was elected and I loved serving and what year was that? 2017. So almost 10 years ago.
Yeah, and I definitely was not looking to leave or applying for other jobs. But when Congressman Jona Goose was elected, he called me personally and asked me to serve with him. And that felt like a real calling. And I learned so much working with Joe. It was really incredible to see what the whole 2nd congressional district cares about and the unique challenges and opportunities.
I went back into the private sector when my son went to college. It was a little hard to stay on a public salary and send a kid to college, but I decided I'd do something for myself at the same time, which was go to grad school simultaneously. So I was rebuilding my real estate business and going to grad school, and I studied Boulder. And that has been so impactful in the way that I view the city, because there are so many challenges you can see arising, you know, decades ago when you go through the history.
I always give this example, but the inaugural issue of the Boulder Weekly in 1994 said, is the middle class being squeezed out of Boulder? The need for missing middle housing?
30 years later, we're still having the same conversation. And so I think there's a lot we can learn from the past and bring to the present.
[00:06:41] Speaker D: We're not asking the question at this point, though. It's like the middle has been squeezed.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: We know they're gone.
[00:06:46] Speaker D: Yeah, totally.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Schools are closing.
[00:06:50] Speaker D: Well, thank you for your service and for that intro.
So you're on the campaign trail again. And how's that going? What are people talking about? What do people seem to care about?
[00:07:02] Speaker B: This is an interesting year, to say the least.
I haven't seen the community so angry in the past, and I don't think that that's this council's fault or even unique to Boulder. I think a lot of it dribbles down from the national level, and a lot of it is just because, well, we're all struggling. I mean, going to the grocery store and buying what you think is enough food for one dinner and having it cost just an outrageous amount of money. It. Gas prices. I mean, you know, interest rates are still really high. Home prices are flattening or even going down.
And I think people are just upset. Like, life feels hard for a lot of people and.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: And.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: And then there are some very real challenges that we have in Boulder that are linked to their. Their anchor to. I think it's really hard to see schools closing and rec centers closing and pools closing at the same time as, you know, projects like Alpine Balsam are going over budget, and we have this bond on the. The ballot, and people are just like, what is going on where why is this, you know, what we're prioritizing. And so I see more people engaged this election than in past elections too.
I was kind of.
We were chit chatting before we started, but like, even in my yoga classes, people are asking me questions about, about the budget in particular, to be honest.
So, yeah, that's a. It's been really eye opening to just get out there and talk to community members and hear what they're concerned about.
[00:08:38] Speaker D: Okay, so I assume that's shaped your campaign messaging. What are you, what are you telling people?
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it has. I mean, I started the campaign with a couple of priorities that still are top priorities. One is supporting small businesses, getting spaces filled. You know, I've talked with a bunch of commercial landlords and they have shown me property after property that people want to fill. And you know, in one case, they're on day 407 of trying to get a permit. I mean, it's kind of crazy. So.
So we've got to get, you know, our, our spaces filled because a city that relies on sales tax revenue for core services has to have a vibrant business economy. So that's a priority I started with. That remains a priority. Housing for our workforce and families, that's a priority I started with. It remains a priority. But getting the budget under control, getting better oversight, I think a capital improvement advisory council could be very useful. We have big capital projects that we, we set in motion and don't really check in on and reevaluate.
I think that could be really helpful. I think an independent performance auditor could be really helpful too, to, to. To see what programs are working and where we can save. I'd love to review our spending on consultants. We have a huge staff. Our staff per resident is pretty high compared to most cities, and yet we're still spending almost $10 million a year on consulting consultants.
I think that these are real top priorities and for me actually have become priority 1, 2, and 3 so that we can rebuild public trust, get our spending under control. And that's going to help us do a lot of these other things.
[00:10:21] Speaker D: I feel like city council, some of the members I know, they work so hard for transparency and to tell communities they have newsletters and they have office hours and they try so hard to communicate what's going on in their minds and how they're making decisions.
Is transparency the problem or is it attention spans or like, you know, maybe that's too digressive.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: I don't know. No, I think it's a valid question because it's Daunting thinking about if I'm lucky enough to get elected, how I would get the message out and do things differently. And it's not actually that I think we need to do anything differently than our current counselors have done in terms of communication. I think that these kind of systems that I just outlined to get a real handle on the budget are going to be huge themselves.
But it is hard to get messaging out. I mean, I just finished a six month contract with the governor's office helping with housing for Sundance. I mean, we had articles in every single newspaper platform, on the news, on TV news. I went to every real estate firm. I did multiple talks at Highland City Club and with property management companies and the board of Realtors. And yet everywhere I went, people are like, well, I never heard that information. You know, it's tough. It's really tough. But I don't know that we have a crisis of communication as much as a crisis actually doing the thing right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:56] Speaker D: Well, Aaron was saying that it's gone up about 3% per year for a very long time, slower than inflation.
So I'm kind of like, what, what is the crisis?
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Well, I mean, so, okay, there's. There's different buckets. And that's true for sort of the overall budget. But like, let's take the CCRS tax that we passed, Community Culture and Resilience and Safety tax.
The, you know, we have not long ago approved $53 million from CCRS for a deep energy retrofit of the East Boulder Rec Center. So we've known for a long time that the H vac system and the windows are going to need to be replaced. That triggers our energy code, which is one of the most stringent in the country, which means we need to redo that entire building envelope, replace the systems with either geothermal or heat pumps that are all electric, put higher R value windows in there than we may otherwise. And it's a huge, I mean, that's a huge expense. So, I mean, you know, 53 million is 10% of our annual budget. Now, of course, that's laid out over a period of years, but I think that we need to check back on things like that. Is it still worth it? You know, could we do that for cheaper?
Because when we can't even find $100,000, keep Spruce Pool open and we're spending 53 on one rec center, the public's like, something's not adding up. I mean, same with Alpine Balsam. There were so many expenses at that property that we could have Done without, you know, So I think that's, that's, that's part of the rub.
[00:13:34] Speaker D: Yeah, that east of the rec center, I love that place and I would love to see it be brand new again.
But I also like when you kind of walk around, spend time there, people are playing soccer on the fields, people are playing handball at the handball course, there's really nice volleyball courts. And you could spend a few million dollars making those things really great and improve the lives of a lot of our community members.
And yeah, maybe that's not as good for people who play indoor basketball or want this lot pool, but I don't know, there's just trade offs. You have to make that seem difficult. $53 million seems like a lot.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. And you've got the private sector looking at. It's like why that's, I mean, you should be able to construct a whole new, you know, huge state of the art building for that price. Why is that? Just a retrofit, you know, And I was a proponent of CU South. I mean, there's important flood mitigation that we need to do over there, but already that's way, way over budget. I mean, many, many, many millions of budget. Are we looking at that?
And whether that's getting new contractors out for bidding, whether that's taking, you know, changing the plans or, you know, working with CU to get them to cover some, some more of it.
I think there's, there's a level of oversight that we need now, but maybe we just haven't been doing well.
[00:15:01] Speaker D: This is, this is very interesting. I always think of you as a kind of a radical liberal progressive, you know, and you sound very like, like a fiscal conservative today.
So, I mean, I, not, not to diminish what you just said, but I'm kind of just curious to hear you put on your, your radical progressive hat for a bit. Talk about housing and transportation or labor, labor rights or.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Well, I think that there's, there's,
[00:15:33] Speaker A: there's
[00:15:33] Speaker B: how I feel personally about the, the need for, you know, equity, inclusion and sort of how, how deeply skeptical I am of our financial systems and you know, things like that. And then there's, there's the practicalities of everyday governing a city, you know, and so, and I don't have to mix those two things all the time on some places they intersect, like the need for housing for our work workforce and for families. Gosh. I mean, one of the big things we've got to do that that BHP is, is now moving in that direction is build housing for 40% and below AMI. So 20% of our population is at 40% and below AMI. That's a full time minimum wage job. And yet only 0.7% of our housing stock is available to that income bracket. So this is why food insecurity is rising. For example, people in who make minimum wage and live here cannot afford, you know, rent even still. So that's really important. I think there, there is a lot that we could be doing to kind of support EHP's work.
I am, I've been really vocal about how discouraged I am by certain zones that are only producing luxury townhomes and condos. And that's not the fault of the developer. That's just like what the zoning allows for. Right. So they build what they're allowed to build. So when you see a luxury townhome or condo, think medium, mixed or business zone. I mean, that those are the zones that have these density caps that, that just sort of equal that. And I've done a bunch of studies on them and we're looking at about 35 to 50% vacancy. See vacancy in a city that, that is so land constrained. This is residential, commercial, that's residential.
[00:17:26] Speaker D: There's, there's 30 to 50% residential vacancy in certain categories of housing.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: I did an analysis of five different luxury townhome complexes along Folsom and Pearl. You guys can, you know which ones they are. You see them, and 35% of them are verifiably vacant, their second home.
But when I've talked to like the HOA residents at them, which I also did, they would tell you it's more like 50 because you, you, you put as your primary residence whichever one makes sense from a tax standpoint. So if you're in Texas and Colorado, Texas is your primary, Colorado is your secondary. If you're Colorado and California, Colorado is your primary. So it's actually higher than 35, but I can verify 35%.
[00:18:12] Speaker D: Oh, that's so disgusting.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Isn't that crazy?
[00:18:14] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, it's bad enough that all our commercial space is sitting empty and business downtime are struggling. Yeah. So how do we, how do we get the community to be, you know, like, people ask, like sometimes at the, at the raucous caucus, they'll ask, is Boulder full? And you get a yes and you sign. And my answer to that is like, yes, it's absolutely full. It's full of cars.
And there's like, but where are all the people? Like, people are Kind of like disappearing. And there's a lot of commercial and now there's. I didn't realize there was a lot of luxury residential that was kind of residential.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: I did a study on every home sold over $4 million for a two and a half year period. And about 30% of those are second homes too. Again, verifiably second.
Yeah, it is. The vacancy is a real problem in commercial and residential. Something we've got to get under control.
[00:19:14] Speaker D: And the we could do a whole hour subject. I know I've peeked under this hood with you before. There's a lot to it.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: There's a lot to it.
[00:19:26] Speaker D: I didn't mean to interrupt you, if you want to give a thumbnail, but.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: No, I mean, I'm just trying to take a much more nuanced view of housing than either just build more or don't build, because we did build almost 4,000 units in the last decade, more than in most other decades, and yet our non student population actually declined.
So that tells me that we're building housing that's going to second homeowners and we're building housing for students and we're not building housing for residents.
And so I, I'm a little less, kind of just all in on the supply side when we have done supply side for a decade and it's not, you know, rental prices have gone down. That's been a great outcome.
But, but, but we're still missing family type housing and 40% below AMI housing.
[00:20:17] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Yeah. Okay.
[00:20:19] Speaker D: Well. Yeah, well, Jill, man, time goes fast when we're talking like this, but I want to give you a chance to just riff on anything that you want voters to know about Chief as they make decisions about. Thank you.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: One of the things I learned from Congressman De Goose, it dovetails into what we were just talking about where, you know, his own personal politics may be slightly different, maybe a little more left of his district, honestly, but, but he does such a good job of listening to the district and he brings forward, you know, more moderate and sort of bipartisan bills and people will ask why? And he's like, because my district is purple. You know, it really is. We, you know, and I'm working hard to listen to the community, you know, into all perspectives and eventually we, we, we have to make decisions, of course.
But I, I'm, I'm not looking at this council run as Jill's a gem or, you know, just Jill's values. I'm, I'm, I'm out in parts of the community that maybe I wasn't the first time around, you know, and trying to just hear the experiences of everybody and come up with, with, with kind of steps one, two and three to help rebuild public trust, to balance the budget, to revitalize small businesses, to get more housing.
And so I think that, that, that, that, that that what I want people to know is, you know, if, if you think you don't like me for whatever reason, meet with me, talk to me. And maybe you'll be surprised.
[00:22:09] Speaker D: Maybe your head will start nodding like mine does.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know.
[00:22:13] Speaker D: Te thank you so much for participating. Yes, I very appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:22:18] Speaker E: Better Boulder is a nonprofit political action committee that endorses candidates and ballot measures and develops and promotes policies that we believe will make Boulder more vibrant, livable and connected.
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This episode of the Better Boulder Hearts and Minds podcast was produced and edited by Philip Ogren.
