There’s an old saying: “When you find yourself in a deep hole, quit digging!” I was reminded of this when I read the story about proposals to transfer funding from open space purchases to the operations of other city departments. It is a fact that we don’t have enough money to fund adequately these other departments, so let’s divert the needed funds from open space.

The city’s unwavering encouragement of more growth (digging the hole deeper) means that the city will experience increases in growth-driven tax revenue but even larger growth-driven increases in costs that can only be funded by increasing taxes for Boulder citizens. Note that Boulder has had rapid population growth for decades and the growth has never solved the city’s fiscal problems. The growth has never paid for itself. The hole becomes deeper. Addressing the cause of the fiscal shortfall (population growth) would amount to stopping our digging. The reason we can’t question population growth is that population growth makes money for a select powerful few. As the economist Herman Daly wrote recently, “…because even though the benefits of further growth are now less than the costs, our decision-making elites have figured out how to keep the dwindling extra benefits for themselves, while “sharing” the exploding extra costs with the poor, the future, and other species.”

The small group of elites that profits from growth naturally wants the growth to continue, so the elites have to convince the public that what’s good for the elites is also good for the public. Their program of misleading the public has been enormously successful.

Purchasing open space lands so the lands can’t be developed into taxpaying properties is the most constructive thing that the city can do to slow the rise of taxes in Boulder. Open space and farming make very little in the way of demand for schools, libraries, police, fire, water, sewer… and all of the other costly municipal services. Developing vacant land into tax-paying industrial, commercial and residential uses generates large costs for expansion of the city’s governmental infrastructure. So those who are falling in line with the proposal to divert money from the open space funds to support municipal services are recommending that we do as much as we can to speed the increase Boulder’s municipal taxes. For public officials, this requires an unusual interpretation of their oath to serve the public.

And the argument that we should divert the taxes because the open space department does not have a detailed plan for their proposed expenditures for the next 30 years overlooks the way that open space purchases proceed. Many purchases are not planned but are the result of unanticipated opportunities. A property comes on the market with no advance warning and the open space department needs to be flexible so that it can act quickly to purchase the land. Every piece purchased stops a possible development and thus slows the growth-driven increase in municipal taxes. We should applaud the open space department for maintaining their flexibility and for not having a detailed plan for purchases over the next 30 years.

Instead, the population growth continues and some want to rob the city’s open space budget to provide funds to pay the costs that growth puts on Boulder. This speeds the growth and makes the hole deeper.

As long as population growth continues, the need for more purchases of open space will continue. The best thing the city could do now to reduce the inevitable growth in municipal taxes would be to purchase all of the undeveloped land in and around the city to preserve these lands undeveloped as open space. This would pretty much stop our population growth; it would give everyone relief from the ever increasing crowding and congestion, it would help enormously to stablilize Boulder’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases and it would give the city a giant boost toward its much trumpeted goal of sustainability.

I believe it was David Brower who observed that promoting growth is just a sophisticated way to steal from our children.

Albert Bartlett is Physics Professor Emeritus at University of Colorado.