The Boulder claims to be innovative and a leader is a partial fraud. Go to http://www.EndTheMuni.org for the full truth instead of propaganda. Boulder has spent 10 years and over $33 million trying to create their own Municipal Electric Utility without one ounce of carbon reduction. Ten years ago this was presented as a faster and cheaper way to reduce carbon. There was a promise to have it up and running by 2017. After that failed, they requested more money and promised to allow us to vote on the issue in 2020. That failed because they have treated some of the largest costs of acquiring the utility (Stranded cost and Going Concern) as ZERO under the premise that it was too complicated to calculate. That is fraud. Both of those values can be estimated with high, medium and low values.
Boulder, just like Trump likes to blame the decade of failures on everything else but themselves. In this case that would be Xcel, the current utility provider. All of these Boulder failures are documented with 85 2-minute videos at http://tinyurl.com/BoulderMuni. These 85 videos are summarized in 9 2-minute videos at http://endthemuni.org/index.php/https-youtu-be-nzf5efqiifw/. Xcel too deserves critical review, but since the Muni effort started Xcel has added renewables equivalent to 10x the total electric usage of Boulder.
End The Muni seeks to redirect the funds from this long history of bad leadership, bad legal decisions and financial shenanigans toward solar incentives, wind incentives, renewable energy certificates (REC’s), and carbon reduction efforts. At best, the Muni could not save one ounce of carbon until 5 years from now, and the final cost would be close to $1 billion with bond costs. This is insane. The Boulder Municipalization effort is not sanity, it is vanity. About half of Boulder is firmly against the Muni and the first vote to continue the muni passed by 50.4% vs. 49.6%. In spite of this Boulder has not critically evaluated the muni, and promised off-ramps have been blocked repeatedly.
The Boulder effort has been an embarrassment and provides no example for any other city or town to follow. Boulder likes to see itself as a leader, it has instead become a cautionary tale. Claims otherwise are propaganda. Boulder needs to learn how to collaborate, not litigate.
