Council looking at bid preferences for independents

BOULDER – They say there’s strength in numbers.

With 20 people addressing the city council Dec. 7 in favor of a proposal to ban new chain stores in the city compared to the lone local developer J Nold Midyette opposing it, council members decided that the Community Vitality Act (CVA) warranted further review.

“That’s exactly what we wanted to see happen,” says Jeff Milchen, director of the Boulder Independent Business Alliance (BIBA), which drafted and distributed the proposal. “The supporters and the authors of the CVA were not ready to see it pass as we’d initially drafted it.”

The city council will review two of the CVA’s four components – the first would require the city to establish bidding preferences for local, independent contractors, and the second would mandate that city-owned commercial property be leased to locally owned, independent or “non-formula” businesses. Milchen defines locally owned businesses as those with the owner living in city limits.

The other components to put restrictions on new chain stores, called “formula businesses” in the CVA, and to require special reviews for large commercial outlets at Boulder Crossroads probably wouldn’t hold up in court, said Boulder City Attorney Joe de Raismes, who is working on draft ordinances for council to discuss at a retreat in February.

But while Milchen declares the council’s decision a victory, Deputy Mayor Don Mock says the council is “taking a non-committal approach” to the issue.

Still to be decided is whether national retailers are, in fact, taking over locally owned businesses, as stated in the CVA. The Boulder Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Boulder Inc. say national retailers are fewer in number now than they were in years past. The city’s Downtown Management Commission and the Boulder Chamber of Commerce oppose the proposal.

“All I’ve gotten is a lot of people’s opinions,” Mock says. “I haven’t actually seen much evidence one way or another about the nature of the problem. I characterize what we did as a fairly modest step at taking the issue seriously but without necessarily rushing to judgment on whether a serious problem exists.”

Counter-group established

While the city is deciding whether locals are being snuffed out by nationals, a group opposed to the Community Vitality Act, called Boulder for Fair Competition (BFC), will be asking the city to forget the whole thing.

Eric Morgan, the current director of BFV, says the group, which is establishing its leadership, intends to oppose the CVA through letter-writing campaigns and having people speak at meetings and to council members.

“We think it’s bad public policy for Boulder,” Morgan says. “One of the key ramifications is that it would further undermine Boulder’s already dwindling retail sales-tax base. The long-term financial health of the city is challenging as it is.”

Councilman Gordon Riggle, while interested in learning more about business trends in the city, also has reservations. Riggle says he’s uneasy about preferential bidding ordinances for locally owned businesses, a definition of which still needs to be decided, and says he would oppose bidding preferences unless city staffers could show that “there is clear evidence of past wrongs.”

“The devil is in the details,” Riggle says. “There’re very serious definitional issues – no one has yet told me what a locally owned business is. It may be hard to find those since for many of what we perceive as locally owned businesses in Boulder, the owners don’t live in the city of Boulder.”