8/13/2019 Boulder Buzz Newspaper Final

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Supplemental budgetrequest covers initial

response, repairs

Boulder will be digging intoits budget reserves to make its

rst payments on ood-relat-ed expenses.

T e Boulder City Councilis expected to approve a $6.8million supplemental bud-get request for ood-relatedexpenses as part of its consentagenda Tuesday night.

T e request represents justa fraction of the roughly $49million the city estimates the

ood to have cost in damageto public infrastructure.

Boulder Finance DirectorBob Eichem said the requestcovers just the money thathas been spent this year or isexpected to be spent by theend of the year.

T e remainder of theood expenses will be part of

another supplemental budget

request in May.City officials hope the Fed-eral Emergency ManagementAgency eventually will reim-burse 75 percent of Boulders

ood expenses and that thestate will reimburse another12.5 percent, Eichem said.

In the meantime, the cityhas to pay the upfront costsof recovery, mostly from thebudget reserves that the citycarries for just such emergen-cies.

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Digital First Media, thesecond-largest newspapercompany in the United States,is adopting an all-accesssubscription model for itsnewspapers, including theDaily Camera in Boulder, theLongmont Times-Call and theLoveland Reporter-Herald.

CEO John Paton an-nounced the transition in ablog post Monday.

We need more gas inthe tank if we are going tocomplete this journey ofprint-to-digital transforma-tion, he wrote.

T e Pioneer Press in St.Paul, Minn., will become the

rst Digital First property to

transition to the new modelthis week. With the exceptionof T e Salt Lake Tribune, theremainder of the chains 75daily newspapers will rollout subscription packagesthrough January 2014.

T e Camera, Times-Call,Reporter-Herald and PrairieMountain Publishings otherpaid daily newspapers, in-cluding the Canon City DailyRecord, the Fort Morgan

Times and the Sterling Jour-nal-Advocate, will implementthe all-access plan on Dec. 2.

T e plan will not apply tothe companys Colorado Dai-ly, Broom eld Enterprise orColorado Hometown Weeklynewspapers.

T e all-access meteredmodel allows non-subscribersa set number of free articlesper month. Print subscribers

BOULDER - Mayor MattAppelbaum is considering joining Platte River PowerAuthority, the utility ownedby cities such as Fort Collins,if Boulder is successful in re-placing Xcel Energy Inc. witha city-owned utility.

Appelbaum, in fact, hasdiscussed the matter withFort Collins, Loveland andLongmont officials in the past,

he told the Business Report.Most recently, a discussion ofthe concept came up betweenAppelbaum and Fort Collinsofficials at the two-day re-newable energy conferenceNetZero Cities in October.

Here youve got a bunch ofcommunities that have run apower system for a long time.T ey know what theyre do-ing. T eyve got good people,Appelbaum said. It would begreat to be able to work withthem.

Appelbaum made the re-

marks to the Business Reportas the city of Boulder attemptsto break away from XcelEnergy (NYSE: XEL). Xcel, afor-pro t investor-owned util-ity, has fought the citys eff ortsto separate.

On Nov. 5, Boulder votersindicated their willingness to

re Xcel by defeating a mea-sure backed by the companythat would have required voter approval for any debtissued for a municipal utility.

Voters, however, set a limit of$214 million on the amountthe city could pay for Xcelassets, as well as other costs.

Regardless, the divorcecould take several years,Appelbaum told the BusinessReport. T ats why the idea ofsome kind of union betweenBoulder and PRPA hasntbeen researched formally.

Its just way too early forthat, he said. We dont evenknow if were going to getthere yet. By the time we did,

* +,-./0 ( !9+0 ( ,--2 808! 8 !0"7/02;48

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 | No. 344 | BOULDER, COLORADO SECTION C

EURO 1 US $ = .7408

YEN 1 US $ = 100.07

POUND 1 US $ = .6212

Police and emergency responders

Debris collection

Open Space and Parks repairs

Road Repairs

Water utility repairs

Wastewater utility repairs

Stormwater system repairs

City Managers Office

Continues page C2 Continues page C2

We need more gasin the tank if we aregoing to complete this

journey of print-to-digitaltransformation

$193,400

$1.6 million

$1 million

$982,000

$1 million

$750,000

$1 million

$245,000

T e ood relatedsupplementalappropriationsinclude:T e $6.8 million supplemental budgetrequest represents just a fraction of theroughly $49 million the city estimatesthe ood to have cost in damage topublic infrastructure.

337 structures worth $41million destroyed in BoulderCountys September oods.

Breakdown on C2

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Tuesday, December 10, 2013 Daily Buff Page 2c

the world will have probablychanged a little.

Fort Collins, Longmont,Loveland and Estes Parkformed PRPA in 1973.T osecommunities have remainedthe owners of PRPA, a non-pro t wholesale electricitygeneration and transmissionprovider, for four decades.

T ese kinds of joint-actionagencies are common in thepublic power industry, saidNick Braden, spokesman forthe American Public PowerAssociation, in an email.

Since public power sys-tems are not for pro t andof en very small, joining a(joint-action agency) allowsthem to pool their limited

resources in order to procuregeneration resources andinfrastructure to serve theirlocal communities, he said.

PRPA has not discussedsupplying Boulder withelectricity, said BarbaraAteshzar, PRPAs governmentand external aff airs officer.Any decision about whetherto include another city in theorganization would requireapproval from PRPAs boardof directors, which includesthe mayors from each city.

It would be difficult forsomebody to buy in as anequal partner at this point,she said. But further downthe road, as mayor Appel-baum indicated, there couldbe other opportunities forpartnerships or power-pur-chase agreements in regard tofuture resources.

Loveland Mayor Cecil Guti-errez, a PRPA board member,said the organization wouldhave to carefully deliberatewhether to include Boulder inits energy-generation projectsor partnerships. However,he agreed that opportunitiesfor Boulder to participate in

PRPAs renewable-genera-tion projects may arise as thenonpro t seeks to diversify itsenergy portfolio.

Were always open to

discussions, he said. Werealways about trying to gureout the most bene cial wayand cost-eff ective way todo power for all four of ourcities.

One thing is clear: Boulderlikely would not want to takepart in PRPAs electric gener-ation from coal, Appelbaumsaid. PRPA operates the coal-

red Rawhide Energy Stationnorth of Wellington and joint-ly owns the coal- red YampaProject near Craig.

Boulder would want to par-ticipate in renewable-energyinitiatives such as PRPAs planto buy 32.5 megawatts fromthe Spring Canyon II EnergyCenter in Logan County hesaid.

Together, we would be abigger entity, which wouldgive us more leverage, hesaid.

Joining PRPA as a full-edged member might not

work for Boulder, however.Were not going to aban-

don coal overnight, Gutierrezsaid. We just cant do that:We have to be pragmatic.

So, the idea may remainsimply a topic of conversation

at renewable-energy summitssuch as NetZero Cities - atleast for a while.

Fort Collins Utilities hashad many of those conver-sations with Boulder abouthow the utility operates thecitys electric system as wellas how other utilities operate,said Steve Catanach, Light &Power manager for the city ofFort Collins.

As Boulder moves forwardplanning their system, hesaid, Fort Collins will be gladto share our experiences.

receive access to print, thedigital replica edition, digitaland mobile content on alldevices. For $10 a month, dig-ital-only subscribers will haveaccess to unlimited digital andmobile content.

T

is is really an excitingchange in our business mod-el, said Al Manzi, CEO, pres-ident and publisher of PrairieMountain Publishing. Wehave always given away ourcontent on digital platforms.Now that will change withour all access program, all ofour readers, not just our printreaders will be asked to payfor the valuable local contentthat we produce.

Our combined print anddigital audience is largerthan ever, but using our printmodel on the digital side ofour business has not workedwell enough to allow us torely solely on print and digitaladvertising revenue, he said.We are asking the commu-nities and readers that weserve to support this eff ort tofurther strengthen this com-pany, allow us to continue tocontribute to its success andinvest in its future.

Manzi added that thepaywall threshold has notyet been established for theCamera and other PMP sites,

but will be announced prior toDec. 2 when they are activat-ed.

Previously, content on mostDigital First sites was availablefor free. Individual paperswithin the company hadexperimented with paywallsand other revenue generators,such as asking consumers to

ll out surveys before access-ing content, but neither ap-proach had the desired results.

Surveys trimmed onlinetraffic while traditional pay-walls failed to generate signi -cant revenue, Paton wrote.

Paton has been a vocalcritic of paywalls in the past,calling them a stack of pen-nies in an industry swappingprint dollars for digital dimes.He said he still doesnt thinksubscription models hold allof the answers to the newsindustrys nancial woes.

I do think long-term theycan restrict audience growth,and thats something wellhave to be careful about, hesaid in an interview. Still, hesees them as a good, strongbusiness initiative in theshort-term.

Paton said one of the rea-sons he held out for so longwas that paywalls seemed tooeasy a solution to the digitalmedia problem and one thatcould stymie innovation.

Digital First Media isamong the last of the majorU.S. newspaper companies toshif to a subscription strategy.Gannett Co., the largest localnews chain in the country,already has implemented asubscription model at all of itsnewspapers except for USAToday.

Paywalls are becoming thedefault for American newspa-pers, said Ken Doctor, a con-sultant whose work focuseson the transformation of theconsumer media industry.

Publishers nd paywallsallow them to increase pricesfor print consumers, provid-ing a revenue bump without

signi cantly cutting subscrip-tion volume. If you executewell, you can usually keep 85percent plus of those readersin that new program and get abump in new revenue, Doc-tor said.

About 40 percent of Amer-ican newspapers will requiresome type of payment foronline content when the Dig-ital First Media transition iscomplete, Doctor said.

T ough he did hold outlonger than many of his peers,Paton said the power of sub-scription models can be hardto deny. T ere are widgets tobe sold, so Im going to go sellthem, he said.

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Boulder County ood losses:337 structures worth $41M

T e following data represents 313 destroyed properties inBoulder County. Some properties saw multiple structuresdestroyed, bringing the destroyed structure total to 337.

Boulder

Longmont

Jamestown

Lyons

Superior

Unincorporated Boulder County

= 10 structures

Matt Appelbaum thanks the City Council members, including Lisa Morzel, left, after beingre-elected as mayor Tuesday night. (JEREMY PAPASSO)