Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: My name is Ryan Stuart, I am a member of the Boulder City Council and I'm running for re election.
My mission is to make Boulder work for everyone now and in the future. I focus on helping to cut the cost of living, adapt our community to a world it wasn't built for and make our government more predictable and effective.
I'm so happy to be here with Better Boulder who is one of the driving forces for creating more housing, creating a more prosperous, people centered place in the city Boulder that's more structurally efficient and I have loved getting to know Plan Boulder and many of their members over the last couple years in office, learning about how to create higher a higher bar for big decisions and also to work with individual members like Cindy Warren on dangerous problems you might not even know about, like the threat of Excel's coal ash at the end of town that's bringing the potential for all kinds of toxic problems that we're getting we're starting to get our arms around and I'm really grateful for Open Bowler for their leadership in bringing Wildfire forward and getting this current council focus on community scale protections that I'm confident that whoever is in the next City Council is going to be moving forward in a meaningful way.
So thank you all for coming for the Dream Team coming together.
Thank you Casey for moderating and everyone for being here.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: That was the voice of Ryan Shuhart, a candidate for Boulder City Council, introducing himself at a recent forum.
Welcome to the Better Boulder Hearts and Minds podcast folks. I received a text message from Boulder county notifying me that my ballot is in the mail, which means it's time to make big decisions about who and what to vote for.
There are many great candidates to choose from and I hope you will consider the ones endorsed by Better Boulder.
We endorse seven City Council candidates and we hope this series of episodes 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 betterboulder.com and click elections.
Our fifth candidate interview in this series is with Ryan Shewhard, who is running for reelection after serving his first term. We met on a Saturday morning at the main branch of the Bowler Public Library and decided to bike up Boulder Creek a ways where we found a couple of logs to sit on in the shade.
We talked about housing, transportation, wildfire, resilience and fiscal responsibility among other subjects. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Ryan Shuhard.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Ryan Shuhard, welcome to the Better Bowler Hearts and Minds podcast.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Thanks, Philip. It's an honor to be here.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: Yeah, it's great to have you.
Well, you're running for re election. Thanks for your service on City Council and congratulations on your endorsement from Better Boulder.
Please give us a thumbnail sketch of what you've done on City Council, what you're proud of, what you want to tell voters about.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Thanks a lot. So this is my first term, and when I ran the first time, I was really focused on building a better balance of housing options that works for people in all ages and stages. I have two kids. They're now 8 and 10 in BVSD schools. At the time, one of them was in preschool, and she was about to go to elementary school. And I talked to other parents who were leaving because they couldn't make it work here, and that was one of the things that animated me. And so one of my commitments that we have worked on and done a lot with is housing reform through the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, which is setting the stage for changing city code that the phrases Title IX folks use, that's the chapter in city code that deals with housing. So we've made a lot of reforms through the comprehensive plan and also through city code in the underlying economics of housing. And 2027 and beyond will just keep moving that forward, and it's a really big accomplishment. Three years ago, this was a big idea. It was very ambitious, the kinds of things we were talking about, and we move it forward.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: You mind if I comment on this just a bit? The. The. I'm on the Housing Advisory Board, and Carl Giler from City Staff comes and. And talks about how we can improve the zoning code subject to the constraints of the bvcp. And so there's been this kind of tension between the two sets of codes. And the passing of the BVCP is a big step towards helping us revise Title 9.
Is that right?
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Totally agree. Yeah, totally agree.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: So cool.
Okay, what's next?
[00:05:05] Speaker A: So I would just say for housing, you know, this is something that everybody.
Well, that's not true. Not everybody.
Most of the candidates running, and I think most of the community realize that we need to make housing work for a better balance of people on all ages and stages.
[00:05:20] Speaker D: And.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: And I knew this in 2023. I underestimated how important it was. So we had a meeting with the police, a study session with the police a couple weeks ago, and Police Chief Redfern talked about staff retention. And when I sort of pulled a little Harder. One of the key answers was, well, we don't. It's too hard for officers to be able to afford to live in Boulder. And it's the same thing with, you know, the BBSD have as we're going through this reorganization few weeks ago, same forces, you know, they're years, decades in the making. It's too hard for families with kids and others to live here. And I was talking to the restaurant association just a few days ago and same story, right. Like workers who live who restaurant industry and we need for restaurant service can't afford to live here. And it's sort of at every step in town we find that making housing work is the success factor or not of, of our, of our city working well. So going forward, there's a number of things we need to do. Some of it is about supply, some of it is about the demand and some of it is about making the cost of place overall cheaper when that means our transportation connectivity. But there's, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot to do.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Yeah, amazing. Well, so one question I have along these lines. It seems like there's been a lot of talk about housing for five plus years and there's been a lot of things that have changed.
The ordinances and you know, there's a lot of housing coming online are like, are we on the right path and we just need to keep the ship moving in this direction and, and this is all going to sort itself out. Are there still kind of like major things we need to modify so that,
[00:06:55] Speaker B: that the ship's going in the right direction?
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think, you know, big picture, this is one of multiple issues that Boulder is facing that is a, it's part of a national system. And so we have a, a nationwide housing challenge that comes from 60, 70 years of housing policy that's centered on single family homes. Assuming you have a car and you just have to kind of drive till you can afford to buy, so to speak, if you can't do it. So we're working against that. One of the challenges or the realities of the system is we just have a system where you can, whoever can pay the most for the home gets to buy it. And so on the one hand, we need to create more supply of the stock that we need that has different types of housing that meet different types of needs. But we also need to be thoughtful about displacement and guarding against displacement and really going through the inventory of user experience and figuring out what does it take to help the demographics that were failing in Boulder and have been failing for years to be successful over time and being, you know, somewhat patient because this is the things that BVSD did to do to do the reorg a few weeks ago. These were just a long time in the making. So we do have to be pretty long term oriented when we think about it.
[00:08:14] Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you.
Well, I really appreciate your work on housing. It's my, it's one of my big subjects. I would love for you to highlight your work on the can, the core arterial network.
Super thrilled to see a ton of improvements around the city related to CAN and just other maintenance. So do you mind talking about that?
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Great. So let me just jump off from housing if you don't mind.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Oh, okay.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I mentioned that housing.
We need to increase the stock of housing supply of the types that we need. We need to be thoughtful about demand and what's working for people from essentially a user experience.
But then we also have, have the chance to think about the cost of place more broadly. And there's this idea that most people, most people, many people have heard. If you have more than 30% of your housing costs, your cost in housing, that's unaffordable, but housing and transportation costs are related. And so there's a more integrated way to think about. If you pay more than 45% of your housing and transportation together, it's unaffordable. And this is useful because you can pay more for your housing. You can afford to pay more for housing if you can be given a chance to pay less for transportation.
And you know, Boulder is got a really good transit oriented, bicycle friendly, ish, pedestrian friendly ish community compared to most towns in the country. I mean, I literally moved here in 2019 with my wife to raise our kids because of that.
And so, you know, we're in a position to have, we bike a lot, we drive, we have one car.
We don't always have to drive the car, we do drive it. But this is about giving people chances to spend less money on transportation if they choose to. So that's the preamble.
[00:09:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it seems like if, if you had moved to Broomfield in a few years, you'd need four cars, right?
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. We'd be spending more money on our vehicle. We'd be not just on the vehicle itself, but the number of driving miles. And this all translates to the cost of place. Right. So, so that's, that's the big picture.
Can is the core arterial network and this is the system of, oh, I don't know, it's A half a dozen or so main arterials in town that have typically, well, traditionally been given over to pretty fast moving car traffic. And we're going to make it be more multimodal so that it's safer and easy for people of all ages to be able to ride a bike and then also to make the transit work better.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: So this is Iris Folsom baseline, Arapahoe.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: That's right. And bus lanes on Broadway.
Did you say Folsom?
Folsom, yeah. And a few others. And so iris Folsom North 30th have been approved. We're still working to get the funding. Most of this gets funded externally from the, traditionally from federal grants. So in any case, we're just working through the process of getting them built and approving some others.
And I was on the transportation advisory board and was part of helping to get this going for our on council. And I think it's an incredible program. I'm really excited about it.
And you know, for me, just like a personal note on it is I live just north of Iris and my kids understand that Iris, literally Iris Avenue is one of the most dangerous things in their life. I mean, we camp, we backpack, they, we ski, we do, we do all kinds of things that you might, you know, people might call a high risk activity.
We're not really worried about, you know, bears or mountain lions. We are worried literally about Iris. And the question of, of how calm and safe it is to cross Iris if you're a kid trying to go to a friend's house or to one of the schools nearby translates to the literal age of which you have access to part of Boulder. Because if you can, if you can calm that down, you're literally going to make it.
Kids of a younger age to be more independent, to be able to get
[00:11:56] Speaker C: around, kids ought to be able to bike to that ball field on Iris. We saved the ball fields kids out of.
Be able to, to walk over and bike over and, you know, feel safe doing it.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And to Foothill elementary, which is, you know, across Caddy Corner, across the street to Columbine Elementary. I mean, these. So you have, you have Iris and also Broadway. Yeah, disrupting, you know, these neighborhood cash.
[00:12:21] Speaker C: We raised our kids just off of Baseline and same thing, you know, that intersection at Mohawk and Baseline. We just never could feel safe sending a child across by themselves on a, on a daily routine type of a scenario with forgetting to school. So, yeah, that intersection is way better.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Can I comment on this one? So I, we bike and drive and I've Been this year, I actually have driven quite a bit. I take the kids to school in the mornings and we often will drive them. So we'll go down Foothill Parkway south, get on Baseline, and then we, we take that what is now a quite a high angle turn onto Mohawk. And it, you know, it's, I've talked to a lot of parents about it who are all, we're all doing this together. And they've asked me and they've, they said, gosh, like what? Why are we doing this? And it really makes me have to slow down and like, it feels like I have to pay attention.
And it's literally the point. And it's, you know, it's a big change for people, especially the older folks, who literally have just driven longer without having to do this. But it makes it safer in the sense that you're less statistically likely to miss looking over your shoulder and seeing some come through on a bike. And just yesterday as I was making, you know, as approaching the turn, sure enough there was a parent on a, with a cargo bike with two kids on the back going down the, the bikeway crossing Mohawk. And I haven't seen many of them until we, we've done this treatment. So it, the design is to. Meant to slow things down. It is, we know from a research and study standpoint, probabilistically safer. And it's also something new for people to get used to. And I, I do understand that it's.
Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a change
[00:14:02] Speaker C: you want to do. This is probably my own hobby horse, but I wish there were elevated pedestrian crosswalks at, at that intersection and many others around town.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: But.
[00:14:12] Speaker C: Okay, so one of the things I found interesting on your website, you have a Did you know section and a bunch of stuff that's not related to housing or transportation directly.
And I wonder if you wouldn't mind just itemizing some of those. I think it's really useful to know.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Okay, so I, when I ran for council the first time, I was interested in the housing, transportation and climate nexus. I'm a climate resilience professional and came to it with that angle. And so there's maybe a few things I'm focused on the most. So one is to, to cut the costs of living for everyone through housing, transportation.
And that's grown and so if you wanted to get into it, you could, you could look at the, look at my website and see the page about a lot of the detail.
We just kind of scratched the surface on, on the housing I, as part of that I'd become a labor advocate, which wasn't exactly the case when I ran the first time. So, you know, you know, I've stood up for higher minimum wage and not reducing wages to the tip credit, which is, which is new for me. And I've just come to learn that that's really so important.
So an integrated picture of cutting the cost of living.
But a couple of new things that are just broadly new for me on council is we need to adapt our community to a world that's not built for. And first of all, wildfire is this is not even a topic that was on the agenda for people in 2023.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Like this literally was not just percolating a little, but. Right.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: Because of Marshall. But like, I think people didn't quite, the public didn't quite think this was a real priority.
This is a big one. And then relatedly ending or at least significantly minimizing the occurrences of the impacts of power outages is something we've got to, we've got to take on at the council level.
And these two things have to be done together because we're going to have more and more impacts on the electricity grid with more stress from, from the climate. And so a lot of the outages that we're seeing are associated with efforts to, to try to reduce the risk. Nevertheless, there's solutions. Saying we have to do this wildfire thing and we have to, you know, essentially the way I think about it is we have to create collective protection for when we have these high weight wind, high risk red flag days where you imagine these embers burning embers flying through the air, they can go a mile and we just need to reduce the statistical chance that they're going to ignite a home or a landscape juniper
[00:16:40] Speaker C: next to a flammable siding or whatever.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Exactly. And it's a statistical game. There's, you know, maybe 4,50,000 ish properties, private properties in Boulder, homes in Boulder, you could say. And it's just a grid of 50,000 pixels and we need to, we need to statistically improve the protection or the hardening on those, those grids over a long time. It's a behavior adoption exercise. It's not about what's going to happen in two or three years. It's about how are we going to propel, you know, for five, ten and more years for this all to work. So anyway, just to get to the, to an answer of what I've done, I co authored the city council's current work plan item on the Wildfire hiring protection. So Rob Kaplan Brad Forward the idea of a home hardening hub. I brought forward the idea that we, you have a cost benefit assessment that would put us in a position to be able to consider large scale plans, could include incentives. It could, could be some regulation. But I think most importantly it's about creating a services marketplace. So it's easy in one transaction for a homeowner or a resident to be able to get work done.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: A services marketplace. So that's, someone says okay, I'm ready to harden my house. And the city helps with a little bit of lift with like here's, here's where you start. Here's the things to think about. Here's the vent, here's the, the approved vendors or, or like right.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: So. So to start with we, we just got one of the city's detailed home assessments which the city provides.
[00:18:07] Speaker C: Your family did.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Our friend. Yeah, yeah, our house did. Our home did. And there's maybe 6ish kind of categories of things. So one is vegetation management.
That's my term for it. But some of it is about making sure that the trees are limbed not too close to the house 5ft away. You should also generally work towards having a 5 foot non combustible zone. And then there are other plantings. Junipers and evergreens in general can be pretty combustible. So that's kind of one category. Another category is anywhere where you have a space for a spark or an ember to go into the home under a deck or into some event that has big screens should have really fine grain screens. So 18 of an inch. Another part of it is the. Any place an ember hits, hits a wall or hits, hits a horizontal surface and can fall. You've got this maybe I think it's about six inches from the, from the base. That should be a non, a truly non combustible space. And then there's a, there's a few other, there's main, like sort of cleaning up debris is part of it. But basically these are all a bunch of things that aren't. Most of them on their own are not big ticket items. But it's, it's project management to think about all of these things. And then each of these things multiplied
[00:19:16] Speaker C: over thousands of units.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Exactly. And they don't have a trade like these things don't actually have a, a clear trade where you as the homeowner or the resident is saying look, I just make the home safe.
[00:19:26] Speaker C: I just, I'm a certified wild wildfire mitigation specialist. Right. Like, that doesn't exist.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: Exactly. And, and, and even if you were to say that this. We don't have a, a way to validate that from, like a quality control perspective from the city. So my idea is the city's. The city's role is to help create a way for a homeowner in the way that a homeowner can get an energy efficiency audit. And some people come, they do a blower door test, they do various measurements, and then as part of that, they say, okay, here's what you're going to do and here's the services and here's what it's going to cost. That's, that's the model that we need. So the city has a role to play to help create the standards for that to bring forward, you know, kind of a Yellow Pages in a sense of. Here's maybe that's an old timey term.
A list. Yeah, A list of providers. And then, and then to help make sure the workflow is working right, so that the assessment isn't an assessment, and then you have to do another assessment for the service provider. But, but you're getting the whole thing done by a contractor. That contractor is doing, helping out with the reporting and the homeowner is just kind of pushing a button.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's not so painful. And there's like a, there's a, there's a path to, to go down rather than like every, every person has to like, figure out the landscape for themselves.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: That's right. And if we could do this right, we'll get a much better idea of what do things cost.
Where are there gaps? Like, where are certain materials Hard to come by. These odd shapes of, of molding or siding. You know, the base that goes around siding. This is one that I'm, I'm learning is there's not really a standard procedure for this. There's also certain materials, like fencing, knocker, bustle, fencing. We're putting up a fence. This is very expensive. I mean, it's also kind of hard, actually.
We have just had our fence taken down to put up a new one. And we're going to use Trex. It's a class B material. It's what we could afford.
They worked on the fence. The contractor went and he said, I'm sorry, it's out. So now we have no fence. And we're. I think he said it probably in a few weeks.
But there's something with this whole marketplace where the city can play an aggregation role. Um, and there's the material side. There's also the services side. I mean the city could literally do neighborhood scale, you know, prunings anyway. I could go on and on. But the idea is if we get the services marketplace right, this is what, over three and five and seven and ten plus years. I would, I would think we'll say worked to create this compounding change rather than kind of going in and doing some big burst of activity and then the next council says, well that, okay, let's do something else then.
[00:21:51] Speaker C: Well, that's great. I, I really don't want Bowler to make national news for wildfire disaster.
Yeah. Not to mention all the heartache that goes with that.
Man, you learn a lot on city council.
I mean I think about this like when I, when I go to city council meetings and about, for, for something I care about.
You know, I think, man, there's, there's so much like I feel like I can barely keep up with this one subject that I'm here for and then you turn around the next week and you're like debating something else on some other equally big thing.
So. Thank you for drinking from the fire height.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: That's nice. I would say though, it's true. But it points to that having a professional staff of employees who are the best in the business and bring forward proposals that are well developed and they feel like it's a great place to work and this is one of the most important things we can do so that you imagine if city council, City council can't be the one that is getting in there, rolling up sleeves with all the details and technical work. It's, it's great when council members bring perspectives that can add. But this is, this is the work is, it's, it's creating an environment for staff that are the professionals who know this all really well and how to, how to make trade offs to just make Boulder be the best place for the best people.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Okay, well, I, I guess We've gone 21 minutes already.
This is, it's unfortunate. Like we've had a few conversations and I know we've gone very long in the past, but I did want you to touch on your role with fiscal responsibility in the city. If you don't mind talking about your
[00:23:41] Speaker B: leadership role in that.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Great. So I, I'm a member of the council's financial strategy committee and I've learned over the last couple of years that Boulder is in many ways ahead of other towns with being financially strong.
The deferred maintenance of city facilities that a lot of people now know about is something the City has been planning to manage since 2021 and had systems in place, and we've been working towards greater management of that. This is something that other towns have not been doing.
The fact is, around the country, cities have had this boom from the 60s to the 80s of buildings and infrastructure, and it is now across the country aging. And so in many ways, Boulder is ahead of working on that.
But we also have challenges. So with our balance sheet or just generally how our finances work, we have a disproportionately high dependence on sales tax, and we have a disproportionately high amount of our revenue. Excuse me, our budget that is dedicated. So only about a third of our funds we can use for whatever we want. This makes it hard to adapt when years are down. It makes it hard to go after opportunities when we see one. So a big idea is we need to become financially strong.
And it was in April that Mark Wallach and I wrote the letter in the Boulder Reporting Lab to the community to make sure people understood that we do have this major deferred maintenance issue. We need to get our arms around it. And that has catalyzed a community discussion. And it's now become a really big campaign issue that people talk about.
I would just offer, you know, my take is I do support the, the $400 million fix for the facilities.
It's a. It's a tough call.
I'm a yes on it, or at least, you know, I was a yes on moving it to give to the, to the voters. The voters, and I will vote for it myself.
And there's three things I like about it. One is the fact is we're going to have service cuts between rec center, police and or fire stations. If we don't do this, those will hit people who can afford it the least, probably the most. Secondly, it's.
This is the most affordable way to address this over time. And I know Aaron was on with you and I listened to that podcast and he talked about why that's the case. So I'll just leave it at that. And the third one is this is a plan to start a conversation about the facility by facility fixes. It's not going to be $400 million. In the end, each building facility is going to need its own evaluation and we get its own approval with community support. So this is a way to move that forward.
But I think the big picture is whether this bond passes or not, we're going to need to find new ways to fund the services that make our city work. And part of this is about making our balance sheet bigger and better so that we have the finances. Part of it's about getting focused on our services so that we're providing great services for good value. Part of it is making sure we're making good decisions when we have big long term questions.
So there's a lot going on there. But I think the most important thing is just imagine performance auditing is something that people have talked about. I think it's interesting. It is a good time for us to be clear about how we're doing with this outcomes based budgeting that we're moving towards, which is a good idea. But the bigger question is what Boulder are we going to build? How are we going to become financially strong? And I look forward over the next month during the election cycle to to talk more about that. How do we how do we become financially strong?
[00:27:17] Speaker C: Awesome.
Okay, I think we need to wrap this up. Do you have any, any final things you want to say that you want voters to know about?
[00:27:24] Speaker A: I I have office hours. I've had office hours every Thursday from 9am to 10:30 for the last few years. They're at the Main Library Cafe. I still do it. Please, please come see me. I also have a newsletter that I'm writing about about every week right now and each one I have an essay which gives you a my hottest take on the most important latest issue.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Well, thank you for all of that. That's a lot of effort to communicate with the voters. Appreciate that.
Thank you.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Thank you Phil. Thanks for your service. I love this podcast. I love the previous podcast. I love your work and Better Boulder's work to bring all this to the community.
[00:27:58] Speaker C: Great.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:28:01] Speaker D: 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 Bolder Hearts and Minds podcast was Produced and edited by Philip Ogren.
