Adam Swetlik
Website: adamswetlikforboulder.com
Age: 32
Family: None
How long have you lived in Boulder: 13 years
Professional background: Currently a marketing specialist at Björn’s Colorado Honey, former marketing manager at SparkFun Electronics, former doorman at the Walrus Saloon
Political/community experience: Currently chair of Boulder’s Housing Advisory Board with 18 months of service, former Bernie Sanders delegate in 2016, former head coach of CU’s Rowing Team (2010-2013)
Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing from Leeds School of Business (Class of 2010)
What kind of new funding mechanisms, if any, would you support the city exploring and implementing to finance transportation network improvements?
First I would like to join with our neighboring cities to take legal action against RTD so we either get our train service or stop paying for it as taxpayers. We should also look at head taxes on our largest corporations in Boulder, those with 100 or more employees in the city limits. These taxes could be used on our transportation systems to offset the impact these very large businesses place on our town.
Do you think Boulder can build its way to better affordability? And if not, what kind of local regulations aimed at boosting affordable housing and limiting housing costs that would not require a change to state law to impose would you support?
I do not think Boulder can ever build its way to affordability. Thus far additional building and densifying has only created a much larger stock of luxury housing, more traffic, more accidents and more stress on our town’s infrastructure. As a member of the Housing Advisory Board I’ve learned that as we build more luxury units and huge homes, many of lower wage residents get pushed out due to higher property taxes. Our permanently affordable housing residents also get the rents raised on them every time our area median income goes up from our highly paid tech economy. We can make a big impact on this trend in several ways. We must raise our inclusionary housing requirement, the number of units required to be permanently affordable when large housing structures are built, from 25% to 35%. We also need to look into placing head taxes on those largest tech corporations that drive up area median income. Finally we should require any buildings over the 35-foot height maximum to include a much larger percentage of permanently affordable housing. Only through increasing our supply of permanently affordable housing can we truly tackle the housing affordability crisis.
Do you support instituting some type of fee on users or vehicles entering open space properties to fund their maintenance, and if so, what kind?
While I think open space is our greatest single community resource, I believe it’s being overwhelmed. While a vehicle fee can’t be used to capture all the traffic through open space, I think instituting a vehicle fee in highly trafficked parking areas could help offset some of the required maintenance and help people consider alternative modes of transit when going to explore open space.
