Mark Gelband Platform for Boulder City Council
Aug 29th
Dear Family, Friends, and Supporters,
I am proud to announce my candidacy for November’s Boulder City Council election. Thanks to all of you who quickly stepped up and signed my petition to get on the ballot. The real work begins now. We have eight short weeks to get the message out and your emotional, organizational, and financial support is critical to my success. Boulder needs a new voice on council. There is a growing chasm between the city’s aging leadership and the young families, young professionals, creative class and students who represent the future of Boulder.
Perhaps, some of you are thinking: Why did I receive this e-mail when I don’t live in Boulder, don’t know your platform, or don’t even know you all that well?
The easy answer is that I am reaching out to folks with whom I have felt a connection in my life. Whether you live in Boulder or not, I can still benefit greatly from your financial support, if you can afford the contribution and believe in me personally or in my vision for the city. Detailed contribution information is included at the end of this e-mail.
For those of you who need more information before committing your support, here are the critical issues that constitute my platform.
Open Space Access
The aging hippies currently running the show look nothing like the younger, progressive versions of themselves that supported citizen initiatives to create the Blue Line in 1959 and the Open Space program in 1967. We owe them for their past foresight, but their vision today is nothing like it once was. They’ve recently begun a campaign to “reclaim” shared recreational land with the mindset that we are loving nature “to death .” Current Council is prejudiced against dog owners and mountain bikers, with an anti-recreation mentality. Much of the open space we have all paid for is off-limits, with little or no access. Open Space is house poor with 47% of its budget spent on debt service. Why are we buying land in neighboring Jefferson County when we cannot even maintain the most precious resources outside our door? We need to refocus our priorities and better manage our open space, but the solution is not to deny access to the many people who have chosen Boulder as their home for its recreational opportunities.
Core City Services
Current council is challenged to manage a single council meeting, let alone the breadth of our core city services. We currently have a $700,000,000 dollar backlog in deferred maintenance projects and, yet, these folks seem to prioritize efforts such as prairie dog relocation, the minute alteration of snow shoveling ordinances to which they themselves are unable to adhere, and endless pontification about Arizona’s Immigration laws. We need leaders who will fix our potholed streets, who will plow side streets in the winter so that children can safely get to school, and who will address the traffic problems around town, libraries, public safety, decaying infrastructure and the growing homeless problem.
Homelessness
Boulder bears a disproportionate share of the county’s homeless problem. The county homeless shelter is in the city, and the city has become a “convention center” for chronic vagrancy and associated crime. We need to distinguish the working poor and the transitionally homeless in our community, and to ensure that they are first in line to receive the resources to help feed and clothe them, get them jobs and into affordable housing. But let’s confront chronic vagrancy head-on by actually enforcing the existing loitering, panhandling and public intoxication laws that are already on the books.
Overregulation
People in glass houses should not overregulate. Current Council “manages” meetings by restricting public input; this limiting approach to community involvement is just the tip of the iceberg. The council has now spent several decades implementing solutions in search of problems. As the city regulates and regulates and regulates, it continues to squeeze the working class. Their growing list of regulations is hurting those of us least able to afford it. For example, the city has 100 of 10,000 homes that are larger than 5,000 square feet (50% of them built prior to 1940) and, yet, our council has spent countless hours in the last few years developing an onerous, inflexible McMansion ordinance that has only served to ‘handcuff’ young families interested in expansion without relocation. The council’s “obsession” with controlling individual choices in the absence of a viable long-term city plan has led to a scary sort of Big Brother government.
I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the key issues that are facing Boulder and about proactive paths toward solutions. If you are unable to support me financially, maybe you would consider hosting a meet-and-greet, spreading the word about my candidacy, putting a yard sign up, or simply sending the campaign some good energy.
If you are in a position to help financially, Boulder campaign finance reform limits individual contributions to $100 per person. If you have a husband, wife or partner, and can contribute more than $25, it helps to receive two checks, one from each of you. This allows me to better access city matching funds, should I choose to go that route. I am currently working on a campaign website and should have it finished in the coming week or so. Until that time, I can only accept checks – payable to:
Gelband for Council – A Good Sign
Please mail checks to 505 College Ave, Boulder, CO 80302.
If you live locally and want to donate to my campaign, call me at 303-522-1192 and we can meet. Same limits and rules apply to locals.
NEW PARTNERSHIP BRINGS POWERFUL NEUROIMAGING SCANNER TO CU-BOULDER CAMPUS
Aug 29th
Aug. 29, 2011
The University of Colorado Boulder has partnered with the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, N.M., to bring to campus a state-of-the-art magnetic resonancescanner that will significantly enhance the neuroimaging capabilities on campus.
The partnership, called the Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium, is designed to bring researchers from Boulder, the Front Range and New Mexico together to cooperatively use the new system to investigate how the brain works and how it influences our behavior.
At the heart of the center, the 25,000-pound, $3 million Siemens 3T Trio Magnetic Resonance Imaging System will be the most powerful imaging system on campus and will allow brain researchers to use new tools and techniques in the quest to better understand brain function and anatomy. The scanner will be located at CU-Boulder’s Center for Innovation and Creativity, which also houses the Janus supercomputer, one of the 52 fastest computers in the world.
Having these two tools in the same location will greatly help researchers analyze the massive amounts of brain imaging data and investigate the link between brain activity and behavior, according to Marie Banich, executive director of the Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium and director of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Cognitive Science. Along with software being developed at CU-Boulder, the Janus Supercomputer will allow researchers to combine multiple measures of how the brain functions with measures of brain anatomy to see which best predict aspects of people’s behavior, such as whether they are sensitive to pain.
“The implications of the work to be performed here at CU-Boulder are far-reaching,” Banich said. “These range from revealing the causes of mental illness and addiction, which in turn can lead to the creation of new avenues for treatments, to understanding factors that influence how easy or difficult it is to pay attention.”
In addition, researchers from CU-Boulder’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics will use the scanner to determine what aspects of brain function are more strongly influenced bygenetic factors and which are more highly influenced by the environment. Developmental psychologists will be examining how the brain changes during childhood and adolescence, while others will examine the effects on the brain of training and interventions.
Prior to the imaging system’s delivery to campus, CU-Boulder researchers had to travel down to the Anschutz Medical Campus to conduct brain scans, while others scannedtheir subjects on the East and West coasts.
-CU-
The Flower Bin – Back to Cool Sale 2013
Aug 28th
We go back to The Flower Bin to learn about their annual Back to Cool Sale coming up this Labor Day Weekend Friday – Monday, August 30 – September 2 2013. Don Weakland shows us some of the great things you can get at the sale including annuals, mixed pots, hanging baskets, Perennials, Water Plants, Nursery Stock, Herbs, Foliage, Cacti and a selection of Fountains, Bird feeders and Stone Statues.
