Tara Winer

Tara Winer, a local business owner and member of Boulder’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, is making her first run for public elected office in the 2021 Boulder City Council race.

“For over 25 years, I’ve run my own business, which has been successful. So, I have expertise in forming partnerships, collaborating with others, identifying unintended consequences, understanding complex problems, and most importantly solving them. Actually, solving problems is one of my hobbies. I do it every day, but it’s also something I love to do and I’m good at it. I think my combination of business acumen, solving problems, and understanding the way Boulder city government operates in systems and processes, that I would make a great City Council member,” said Winer on her reasons for running for office.

SHORT LIFE STORY

Winer was born in Brooklyn, emphasizing she lived there “before it was nice” in the neighborhood of Canarsie, and graduated from high school in Brooklyn. She went on to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in economics. After leaving Wisconsin she moved to Philadelphia and lived there for roughly 37 years, meeting her husband and raising three daughters.

Her sister had lived in Boulder for decades, and Winer said she visited her often and loved it, which made her wonder why she was living on the East Coast. She said the economic troubles from the Great Recession made it easier to buy a house in Boulder, and she and her husband bought a house in 2009 but it took a few years to settle in, so she’s been a Boulder resident since 2011. Her three daughters now live in Boulder or Boulder County, and she has three sons-in-law plus a granddaughter and “one granddaughter on the way.”

Professionally, she has been an independent contractor since the age of 23, in the world of branded merchandise manufacturing, and currently works as a contractor for a company called ePromos Promotional Products. Like in so many areas of modern society, the COVID-19 pandemic made Winer’s recent work environment difficult. She said the “supply chain is broken,” apparel is difficult to obtain, and factories are having a tough time hiring workers if they haven’t had to close altogether. Add in the challenges of trucking and buying goods from overseas, and she spends a great deal of time “solving unsolvable problems,” plus she’s learned how to rely on experts since expertise in many fields takes real time to develop.

She lives reasonably close to Chautauqua, and her first direct experience with the City of Boulder was being appointed to the Chautauqua Access Management Plan Working Group five years ago. To address the well-known parking problems, the Working Group created a pilot program to run a free Park-to-Park Shuttle, which moves people from central locations in Boulder to Chautauqua without the need to park a car there, and the shuttle is still in operation today. She said people with the City were happy with her Working Group efforts, so she was asked to join the Capital Tax Working Group when there was an opening. This group was tasked with allocating funds to a number of local projects including the Scott Carpenter Pool renovation and Fire Station Number 3.

She became a member of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board (PRAB) in 2020, which means she experienced some excitement around the reopening of the remodeled Scott Carpenter Pool, which she had a hand in funding with the Capital Tax Working Group. She is also a member of the Boulder Community Initiatives Board, which is engaged in pursuits such as bringing events back to Downtown Boulder that were curtailed during the pandemic, and making Downtown more welcoming to diverse members of the community.

ON THE ISSUES

Housing: According to Winer, it will take creativity and comprehensive strategies to best address Boulder’s housing challenges, especially since available land is finite. When it comes to possibly adding larger numbers of housing units, she is interested in examining underutilized parking lots or shopping centers and transforming them into walkable neighborhoods. She is also following the ongoing East Boulder Subcommunity Plan process, partially because it could create new neighborhoods with a variety of housing options. She specifically mentioned The Nest Communities in Boulder as a good example of how to maintain quantities of permanently affordable housing, as opposed to seeing formerly affordable units turn into luxury apartments.

She does not support eliminating single-family zoning in Boulder, but could support investigating smaller lot sizes and duplexes or triplexes in certain areas. She personally grew up in attached housing with no trees or grass, plus noise from neighbors sharing walls, and said while apartment/condo living might be a great option for some, large percentages of Americans live in single-family housing and some who can’t would like to. She said there is a shortage of “missing-middle” housing in Boulder that’s appropriate for middle-income earners, especially those with kids who might feel constrained in a small apartment, and as a result people who would like to live here are instead living in Louisville, Lafayette or Superior.

She clearly said Boulder needs more housing, but major questions include where to build and what types to offer. She said permanently affordable housing is essential in part because it will help Boulder maintain racial and economic diversity within city limits, while duplexes and triplexes might help with missing-middle or market-rate affordable housing availability. She did not say that extensive new construction in Boulder would move the needle on affordability, since the demand to live in Boulder could be much higher than even new supply could provide, but said she’d listen to any good idea to help more people find the attainable housing that best suits their needs.

CU-South: During a late August interview, Winer said she generally supported the CU-South annexation agreement as it stood at the time, and gave Mayor Sam Weaver and Council member Rachel Friend credit for negotiations that she believed made earlier versions of the agreement better. One of her most important reasons for support was the safety that a flood mitigation project would provide for residents living in or near the South Boulder Creek floodplain, and added that one of the most important things a government can do is protect its constituents. She also mentioned that South Boulder Creek was not the only problem area in Boulder during the 2013 flood, including reports of flooded basements and other problems in her neighborhood, so she favors considering flood mitigation strategies across the city and its neighborhoods to examine issues like tributary flooding, protective berms, and adequacy of storm sewer drainage.

In late August, she was remaining neutral on the “Let the Voters Decide on Annexation of CU-South” ballot measure. She said she respects how proponents gathered sufficient petition signatures to get the measure on the ballot, and understands that citizen initiatives of the past have yielded positive results like Open Space or preventing the development of a hotel on Enchanted Mesa, but in this case she wanted to see how the actual annexation agreement wound up before saying whether or not the initiative would be the best course forward.

Winer said it seems likely that climate change could contribute to flood events larger than 100-year floods, and the annexation agreement at the time called for 100-year flood mitigation. She said since extreme flooding of some type is likely into the future, it will be important to have other systems in place beyond the South Boulder Creek mitigation project envisioned for west of US 36, including sirens and alarm systems to help ensure residents like those at Frasier Meadows are able to evacuate in advance of an emergency.

Governance: According to Winer, her experience on local working groups and PRAB helped reinforce her understanding of the benefits of thoughtful compromise, since “nobody gets everything they want in life” but a good compromise can make many people at least somewhat happy. She believes Boulder is politically polarized – though she offered a quick aside mentioning the Middle East for perspective – while some of the local polarization might be because people spend significant amounts of time in “echo chambers” where one group generally agrees on issues, but they don’t often communicate with people of differing viewpoints. She also noted that even her own daughters push her to think outside of her box, and said it’s often beneficial to learn from someone representing other sides of an issue. She said there are so many experts on given topics in Boulder – some who don’t even have titles – that opportunities abound for gaining knowledge and perspective.

She believes the City of Boulder could improve at getting community involvement in issues from a wider range of community interests, saying city surveys and even formal boards and commissions don’t reach as many people and groups in Boulder as they could. She did give credit to the city’s Community Connectors program, which does outreach to diverse communities within the city in order to get input from underrepresented voices.

Homelessness: Winer supported the Council’s decision to approve a $2.7 million package to manage impacts associated with homelessness, along with the city’s policies to enforce the camping ban. She said safety within the community is of primary importance, and believes residents and visitors to Boulder alike need to feel as safe as reasonably possible in public spaces, including retail districts, paths, Open Space, and parks. There have been criticisms of the city’s current general policy as being too policing-heavy, but Winer said the city’s Ambassador and Ranger programs provide services without a police presence, while Boulder’s Police Chief Maris Herold is working to find the right balance between policing and alternative methods of responding to calls. She added that non-police personnel who might respond to calls, such as mental health or Parks professionals, might have safety concerns of their own and might want police presence when warranted.

When it comes to the City spending more on services to support people experiencing homelessness, she noted that Boulder’s budget has to take care of a lot of departments, so budgeting considerations need to include what might get cut to balance increased spending. For example, she said the Parks and Recreation budget got hit hard during the COVID peak, which meant popular services got cut. In early August, she expected that federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) stimulus funding could be used toward services for the homeless, and also mentioned that the State of Colorado could become more of a leader in providing funding for mental health or substance abuse programs and facilities. In addition, she supports a regional approach to the homelessness issue, and emphasized that the City of Boulder can only handle finite amounts of what it will take to meet the challenges on its own.

Public Safety: Winer has recently heard or read community complaints about issues including bike theft, personal property crime, business property crime, and concerns about student safety near Boulder High School (BHS). She said one of her daughters went to BHS “not that long ago,” and she did not report the same level of safety concerns she’s hearing about now. Winer said she does not agree with the slogan “defund the police,” and added that the Boulder Police Department was down perhaps 30 officers, so the city needs to hire more officers to “even get to where we were, never mind where we should be.” However, she said she believes social justice and safety don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and said it’s vitally important that the criminal justice system does not ruin peoples’ lives and does focus on issues of equity.

Transportation: Winer supports establishing “mobility hubs” in Boulder, which could provide a number of alternatives to single-occupancy vehicle use in centralized locations, including transit, electric vehicle infrastructure, bike storage facilities, and shuttles. In this way, more people might be able to access their needs without contributing as much to vehicle miles traveled (VMT) within Boulder. Like most candidates, she said Boulder needs better north-south bike lanes, along with more protected bike lanes, both for safety and to potentially make bike commuting more appealing. She would like to investigate a regional transit system that might not be as largely dependent on RTD, partially to provide more convenient transit options between neighboring cities, and supports locating newer housing near transit or alternative transportation facilities to help limit VMT.

Bedrooms Are For People: In early August, she said she was undecided on the Bedrooms Are For People ballot measure. She gave BAFP proponents credit for looking at ways to provide more housing, but said she always looks for unintended consequences and found a few such concerns with BAFP. She said the ballot measure language didn’t include affordability measures, homes might become more expensive to rent based on new occupancy limits, and families might not be able to afford certain homes if renting to students becomes more lucrative. But she added that if BAFP passes and she’s elected to Council, she will devote her efforts toward supporting the new law.

CONNECTIONS

Endorsements: Winer has received endorsements from the Unofficial Candidate Committee (UCC) Forward Boulder, along with the Boulder Daily Camera, PLAN-Boulder County, Think Boulder, Together4Boulder, and South East Boulder Neighborhood Association.

Contributions: As of Sept. 21, Winer had received maximum individual $100 contributions from former Council members Susan Osborne, Gordon Riggle, George Karahehian, Steve Pomerance, and Andrew Shoemaker (Lisa Morzel had contributed $25); current Council members Sam Weaver and Bob Yates (Junie Joseph had contributed $50); and current Council candidates Mark Wallach, Steve Rosenblum, and Michael Christy. On her most recent filing, she reported that she had made a $513.08 non-reimbursed loan to her campaign.

Digital Presence:
Website: https://www.taraforboulder.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taraforboulder