Jenny Robins

Jenny Robins is running for a seat on Boulder City Council in 2023. If she wins, she will earn a three-year term on Council that expires in 2026, but she will be able to run for re-election in 2026 if she so chooses.

Q – Why are you running?

According to Robins, she decided to run in part because she grew up immersed in local governance, and partially out of dissatisfaction with a few issues at Boulder’s local level. Her mother was a former village trustee in Illinois, and her mother also ran for a seat with the Cook County Commissioners (Cook County includes Chicago) while Jenny Robins helped with her campaign. After moving to Boulder, Robins applied to be appointed to the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, and said during the process that she noticed a lack of formal city organizations she could get her kids involved in. Also, she believed the City of Boulder hadn’t done enough on issues including environmentalism, housing affordability, or public safety. With a professional background relevant to local government (see Mini-Life Story below) and a passion for service, she thought it would be appropriate to run for office.

“I’ve been a chronic volunteer since I was in my 20s, and community activism is a very important thing to me. So, I decided that this would be the right time for me to jump in and make a difference,” said Robins.

Mini-Life Story

Robins was born in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. She enrolled at Marquette University in Milwaukee and stayed there for two years, but ultimately wanted to go to law school in Chicago, so she transferred to DePaul University, earning a degree in communications with a minor in pre-law. She said she was interested in studying intellectual property law, and was accepted into John Marshall Law School, but she got a summer job in the telecommunications field. She decided to defer law school to make money, but never left her telecommunications work and was still in it 20 years later.

Her husband’s company was looking for new locations in which to do business, and they decided Boulder would be a good location. The couple moved to Boulder about seven years ago, and Robins said she wanted to go to law school at CU but determined her passion in law was in legislation, regulation, and political law, so she did not pursue law school at this point in life. She remains in the telecommunications field as a director for Insite-inc.com, in part working with local governments on legislation, contract negotiations, zoning, and permitting processes. She and her husband are raising a family, and Robins has been a local Girl Scout leader for about six years.

Her campaign website is https://jennyforboulder.com/

Q – How do you keep in touch with Boulder government?

Robins said she is a regular watcher of City Council meetings, even study sessions, and follows local voting records and issues through local media. She added that she’s gotten to know all of the current Council members to some extent, at least having spoken to all of them several times.

Homelessness

Robins said it’s important to look at the entire population of people experiencing homelessness in Boulder not as one group, but as subsets of people, each with unique challenges. She mentioned individuals, families, senior citizens, veterans, and “high utilizer” individuals who have more frequent interactions with authorities.

She said the “logical step” to eliminating homelessness is with housing, but it’s a nuanced situation in Boulder. She supports the “Housing First” model, along with the city’s current “coordinated entry” process that helps people who are interested become connected with available services. However, she said simply allowing people to camp here in unregulated encampments is “not a compassionate solution,” since the lifespan for those living outside tends to be much lower than for the housed population, while the unsheltered also experience high rates of violence and issues associated with substance abuse.

According to Robins, it’s important for Boulder County and the City of Boulder to perform their respective duties when it comes to homelessness – the County has a responsibility to public health while the City must protect public safety. She said to some extent there are elements of substance abuse and mental health challenges within the broader issue of homelessness, and she was disappointed that a County sales tax extension on the ballot will be not be for mental health services. On the other hand, the extension will fund affordable housing, which will include housing that she believes would be appropriate for people experiencing homelessness – especially if people who need supportive services have access to services they need.

Housing: Affordable and Otherwise

Robins said she believes it’s actually possible to find many available rental units and “hundreds of houses for sale or rent” in Boulder, but the question of if they’re affordable is a different story. She said the city has some good mechanisms in place to help with affordability, including its inclusionary zoning requirements for future affordable housing supply, along with commercial linkage fees and cash-in-lieu payments to devote toward affordable housing projects. She also said the city has additional rental units in planning or development stages right now, plus its new down payment assistance program for middle income earners, but “the market’s going to do what the market’s going to do” for not-so-affordable properties that are truly on the open market.

According to Robins, she agreed with parts of the state Senate Bill 23-213, a massive bill that would have created new development land use standards for municipalities that in some cases would have overridden local land use control. She agreed with parts of 213 that would have called for increased density near transit, and revising parking requirement. However, she said she supports local control where appropriate, and since Colorado has so many different types of cities, it would be a “terrible idea” to saddle different cities with similar land use regulations. Boulder has already worked on some of the smaller components addressed in 213, and Robins mentioned she didn’t agree with the recent Boulder local occupancy limit increase because it didn’t include affordability requirements. SB213 in general did not include specific affordability requirements, and Robins said she thinks a giant bill like 213 should at least give cities the option to implement rent control measures if they so choose.

Robins also does not agree with rezoning low-density single family neighborhoods to allow duplexes or triplexes. She believes a better way to increase middle-income housing is to re-zone or upzone areas in industrial or business districts where “we can create more mixed use areas, and more walkable neighborhoods near mass transit.”

Regarding the potential of repurposing the Boulder Municipal Airport into housing, she said she needs to learn more about the actual costs of doing such a project or projects, and also knows there is a “very passionate airport community” that values keeping the airport as an airport. But she believes putting housing in the city’s Area III Planning Reserve near 28th and Jay, after potentially annexing it into city limits, would probably be far less expensive for housing than repurposing the airport, saying it’s a big chunk of land that wouldn’t require lots of mitigation to develop and is not generally prone to flooding.

Local Polarization in Boulder

Robins said she appreciates that municipal elections are technically nonpartisan, partially because it’s then possible to evaluate individual candidates without just looking at the letter next to their name on the ballot, but believes there is a local polarization issue in Boulder. She said she is an “independent thinker,” not a NIMBY or a YIMBY, respects all the candidates in this year’s race, and intends to come to processes with a perspective that everybody has something valuable to bring to a conversation. However, like a number of candidates she has noticed that there are different local political points of view between Twitter and NextDoor, and said there have been attacks coming out against candidates on social media that might get to the point that they would discourage some potential candidates from wanting to run. She followed the 2021 Council race, and noted that there were political actions in that election that led to litigation, which was regrettable in her view.

“You can hear what people think by interviews, and by all of these forums. Let people decide for themselves without attacking them on social media, without attacking them in the press,” said Robins.

Crime and Policing

Robins said she is aware of problems with crime in Boulder, but it would be a mistake to blame people experiencing homelessness since people committing crimes might not be homeless, and homeless people can themselves become victims of crime. In fact, her husband’s office was broken into earlier in the summer, but law enforcement officers looked at the video and knew the criminal was not homeless but was a repeat offender. In her opinion, one of the biggest problems in this area is offenders can be released on bonds or after being assigned diversionary conditions with minimal consequences, partially because the Boulder County Jail is often at capacity so it can’t take more inmates.

She also noted that Boulder County inmates with mental health issues often can’t be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo because it also does not have the capacity for new patients. Robins would support sentencing people into mandatory mental health or substance abuse treatments if appropriate, and mentioned a state law that allows for longer-term treatment.

“If we can get people on the right path with those services, and provide wraparound and transitional services after…that’s where I think we’ll find our biggest success with trying to reduce crime in our city,” said Robins.

Robins said she has followed issues regarding the city’s Police Oversight Panel (POP), and believes it’s important that it exists, but the initial ordinance might have been created a little too quickly. She said it seems good that the committee took a recent moratorium while a consultant works with the city to revise the ordinance. She added that she doesn’t believe the POP should have a disciplinary role, while recommendations and advisement on courses of action can be beneficial.

Climate Solutions

According to Robins, the environment is “one of my main passions, and offered a fairly long list of strategies or programs she’d like to tackle if elected. In no particular order, the list includes: increase the city’s tree canopy, vertical gardening and more community gardens to get more plant life inside the city, install more charging stations for electric bikes and autos, paint more roofs white for cooling at houses, reduce or eliminate gas-powered lawn equipment, keep wildlife corridors and maintain plant biodiversity on Open Space, and electrify new buildings to reduce the use of fossil fuel-burning appliances.

She said she was pleasantly surprised when Girl Scouts she was working with wanted to do projects to “make the world a better place.” The local Scouts worked with town officials and organizations including NREL to implement a Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Flag program in the Town of Superior, and Superior now raises a flag every day that corresponds with the day’s air quality.

Boulder City Council doesn’t have legislative power regarding RTD bus service, but they can weigh in, and Robins said she would like to see “more robust” transit service in Boulder to help get people out of cars. She would prefer a system with greater service frequency, and is interested in getting free passes to middle school and high school students to help them learn the benefits of transit.

Safe Zones (Question 302)

Robins said she supports the Safe Zones 4 Kids ballot measure (Question 302), saying there are and have been safety concerns around Boulder-area schools, and “there’s no world where I’m going to deprioritize our children.”

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

According to Robins, she understands Issue 2A is contentious from a budget standpoint because 50% of the revenue will not go directly into the city’s General Fund, but she supports the ballot measure. She said the current roughly $1.8 million in the city’s budget for arts and culture is “just not enough” for a city that’s so focused on culture and community, and increasing this portion of the budget can create “the ability for more joy and more celebration and more culture and more diversity in our community.”