Taishya Adams

Taishya Adams is running for Boulder City Council in 2023. If she wins a seat on Council, she will earn a three-year term that expires in 2026, although she could run for re-election in 2026 if she so chooses.

Q – Why are you running?

According to Adams, she brings to the table visions of what she calls a “just and joyous” society, along with a resume and skill sets demonstrating experience in civic affairs and the ability to get things accomplished.

On the vision side, she said she’s running because she believes Boulder residents can “co-create a world that we’ve never seen before,” but added that she believes “we are a world out of balance right now.” This is partially because of the climate crisis, culture wars, and other challenges with longer-term sustainability. She said she’s heard that “Boulder is a bubble,” but actually believes the city is a “bubble of bubbles,” giving an illustration that she recently moved from north Boulder to south Boulder and has seen the differences – but saying that she hopes to work on “healing the relationships we have in these little mini-bubbles” in order to better thrive as a larger community.

On the side of civic affairs, she’s served on the city’s Police Oversight Panel, the state’s Parks and Wildlife Advisory Board, worked in education, and worked in the policy field. She said she’s hoping to serve on Council in part to take part in updating the city’s upcoming long-range planning process, again employing vision along with tactical considerations, also considering transparency and shared power while creating plans that could help the city stay sustainable not just in the near-term, but “seven generations from now.”

“I’ve always been driven by service, as someone who’s from a marginalized community but has been able to navigate systems that were not designed for me to win. I have the lived experience of navigating systems that are not designed for me to succeed, that are actually designed for me to fail. I’m somebody who understands marginalized perspectives from a variety of different ways – not just race and ethnicity, but geographic, education, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ – my eye is on the sparrow,” said Adams.

Mini-Life Story

Adams was born in a suburban area of northern Virginia, noting that her family was one of the few African-American families in the area, but also recalling it was forested and nature-rich. She went to Los Angeles for middle school, and to New York City for high school, in the process building “cultural understanding and geographic understanding” from living on both coasts. She earned undergraduate degrees in political science and film production from Vassar College, and a master’s in international education from George Washington University.

She started working in public education, noting that she realized relatively early in life that “the whole thing is made up – our political system is made up by people,” and took a job with the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools. In the education field, she’s worked in arts, international programs, and accountability systems among other pursuits. She said at some point “the umbrella of my work in education was not broad enough,” so she moved toward environmental work and became the first national policy and education director for Outdoor Afro. She later founded the Mukuyu Collective, which she described as a collaborative effort including contributions from governmental agencies and conservation groups to “transform systems through policy and play.”

Her campaign website is https://www.adamsforboulder.com/

Police Oversight Panel

Virtually every candidate in the 2023 Council race has opinions about the Police Oversight Panel (POP), but Adams is the only one who served as a member. She noted that the early years of the brand-new POP included a heavy learning curve for all involved, and said she had learned in past work with agencies and programs that “the first time out of the gate is not going to be perfect.” But she also said there was a great deal of research from POP members and values of integrity put into development of the POP, plus the panel was made up of far more members of marginalized communities than other city boards and commissions.

“If we don’t have representation from all the little mini-bubbles, then we’re going to have policy that is skewed toward a dominant view, which is exactly what we have,” said Adams in reference to other city boards and commissions.

According to Adams, Boulder’s Police Chief has agreed with POP recommendations that were stronger than professional standards “more than 90% of the time,” with some of the exceptions regarding termination policies. She expressed frustrations including that quarterly meetings between the POP and the Police Chief are public but not recorded, and that City Council agenda packets did not include POP monthly memos.

However, she said the POP was formed to address inequities in policing and how different communities are treated. In Boulder, she said people have “literally seen it on camera,” and she referenced the book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander as historical perspective that the modern policing system is “an outgrowth of slave patrols.” Since POP formed, the Boulder Police Department has released its new Reimaging Policing plan, and Adams noted she was grateful to see the plan’s focuses on less reactionary and more preventative policing, along with transparency and data availability. But she also said that moving forward, the role of an oversight panel is absolutely critical because there is work to be done.

“These are the kinds of inequities I want to address – not just in policing, but in housing, transportation, and workforce development. The inequities we see in crime are a result of inequitable processes in protocols and policies,” said Adams.

Housing, Affordable and Otherwise

There are obvious immediate issues with affordable housing in Boulder, but Adams said there are broader issues with affordability, including whether affordable housing can contribute to people building equity, and the costs of other bills people pay beyond their rent or mortgage. She is a renter, but said she couldn’t afford to buy the house she lives in, and while she’s not building equity, her rent payments are going toward the owner’s mortgage and property taxes. She noted that many of the city’s affordable housing programs don’t allow for intergenerational wealth building.

“I don’t need affordability programs that actually are gilded cages, I need programs that are going to bring the winds beneath our wings,” said Adams.

She believes there are power imbalances between developers and the public – both historical and current – when it comes to affordable housing in Boulder. She also said the city and developers should work toward building more climate resilient structures, with items including pollinator gardens, green roofs, and better transportation systems and options.

Directly regarding homelessness, she said it’s important to remember that it’s not just about the highly publicized issues like encampments by Boulder Creek, but there are many people who fall into homelessness because they can’t afford housing, and the fastest-growing subset of the unhoused is the elderly. On top of that, there are significant numbers of people who aren’t homeless now, but might be on the cusp.

Adams said a recent study coming out of Los Angeles showed public investments of just several thousand dollars per person might have kept some people from becoming unhoused, and the primary reason for becoming unhoused was not drugs or alcohol – it was money. She said she knows there are drug and alcohol problems in the homeless community, and she is the adult child of an addict, and supports recovery and sober living programs or treatments, but the issue of homelessness still largely boils down to financial issues including minimum wages or other supports.

She noted that Denver has a basic income program that’s up and running, but Boulder’s pilot program as of this early September interview was not. She spoke positively about recent Boulder efforts to increase density and occupancy limits to provide more housing opportunities, but added that many local employees can’t afford to live here due in part to wages, and concluded “If you’re not going to talk to me about the minimum wage, then it’s a set-up giving them a house.”

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission

Adams was appointed to and served four years on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission (CPWC), an experience she described in part as a “mini-master’s” in aspects the commission deals with, including natural resources management, climate, wildlife management, and biodiversity, plus there was an element of human diversity involved in her service.

She was the first African-American ever to serve on the Commission, appointed 122 years after the establishment of what eventually became Colorado Parks and Wildlife. She again noted the lack of racial representation at various levels of governments and commissions, recalling that only current member Junie Joseph and long-ago former Mayor Penfield Tate II are African-Americans who have served on City Council.

Boulder and Boulder County have protected vast amounts of land as formal Open Space or natural lands, which also serves as wildlife habitat, and Adams said in this respect she has been working on behalf of Boulder since CPWC and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department are in charge of all the wildlife in Colorado. But even though Boulder has significant Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) holdings, Adams said she believes Boulder needs to acquire more to help meet demands from population growth – while the City of Boulder has relatively flat population growth, nearby communities are growing and people from elsewhere use Boulder Open Space.

She believes that one of the big-picture lessons she learned on CPWC is that components like parks, wildlife systems, cities, and even private property are part of a larger ecosystem. For example, she said the “global climate community” says a sole focus on emissions control to limit climate change will not be sufficient, and we will need additional strategies including biodiversity restoration to effectively address climate. She added that many of the carbon-absorbing trees in Boulder are on private land, but perhaps 20% of the city’s current ash trees are threatened by the Emerald Ash Borer.

“This isn’t just your lawn…this is your windows, your roofs, energy efficiency, and water efficiency,” she said about some of the many private property factors that can influence climate.

Adams also said she learned while with CPWC about the “incredibly complicated relationships across agencies” that have some influence over climate and wildlife issues – including local, state and federal governments, but also departments within governments such as those dealing with energy, environment, housing, human services, policing, and transportation.

Crime

Adams started answering a question about crime by asking “what kinds of crime are we talking about?” There have been highly publicized issues in the Council race around property crime like bike theft, but she noted that there are other concerns in the community including wage theft, banking discrimination, housing discrimination, and even “bad apples” in local law enforcement.

She said she does want to address crime in Boulder, but believes “hard on crime language is dangerous language” because there are inequities in law enforcement and criminal justice practices. As with her earlier comments on homelessness, she added that there are economic factors in Boulder, some of which originated long ago like the high cost of Boulder’s original housing lots, that can reinforce inequitable living environments. She pointed out that funding for Boulder’s Housing and Human Services department is just now approaching equity with the Police Department, saying “for years we have overinvested in policing and underinvested in housing and human services.”

Safe Zones (Question 302)

Adams opposes Question 302 in part because she believes the city already has prioritization around the zones the ballot measure would prioritize, and said 302 is a “fear response.” She said she was impressed with the opposition campaign “Solutions Not Safe Zones,” and believes data supports their approach more than the proponent campaign’s approach

Sales Tax Extension with 50% of Revenue for Arts (Issue 2A)

Adams opposes Issue 2A partially because it involves sales taxes, which she believes are regressive and impact poorer people disproportionally. She also said the city budget needs to be “adaptive” moving forward to best address current concerns, while 2A would earmark significant amounts of money for the arts. She is a former arts educator and a current musician, and said she is an arts supporter, but believes there could be other ways to better fund arts in Boulder, such as adding arts partnership incentives to grant application processes.