Letter to the Editor: City of Boulder’s Lawfare

This letter was sent to Yellow Scene Magazine. As with all Letters to the Editor, the views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publication. We value providing space for community voices.

There’s a pattern of the City of Boulder spending big on legal work to intimidate:

1. It’s almost a certainty that the city will spend far more than $2,800 to keep the police video secret that Yellow Scene wants. So it’s to intimidate others from trying to expose City secrets. It seems that blurring faces is the highly claimed cost. If you Google “video blurring software,” you’ll see that software that tracks a certain face or person to blur it throughout a video is easily available. Much of it is free! The city simply needs to let an employee learn how to use it. I bet the real cost of an employee using it would be hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.
2. The city’s attempt to sue Save South Boulder for legal expenses of some $46,000 failed, but they continue to sue, now over the appeal costs: https://share.google/B0RPQp1JeXEpZBYqA
3. The city is suing anti-genocide Council candidate Aaron Stone over $375, almost certainly a big money loser: https://share.google/WafjWzgh2fJ5B9fMX
4. After the sauna in North Boulder Rec Center was closed many times for a total of about two of the last 6 months of 2024, due to people pouring water on either the heater or the temperature sensor, after I suggested “Do not touch” signs to management, receiving no reply, and finally telling council I would do it myself, I put little paper signs up next to the heater and the sensor with push pins.

The first time, they stayed up for over a month with no further incidents. I was there every few days to see if they got wrinkled from the moisture people bring in from the pool. Then the signs started disappearing. I complained to management, they suspended my annual pass for 3 months, I appealed, and they took me through a quasi-judicial hearing.

At the hearing, the North Boulder Rec Center manager stated he had personally found a sign that was “scorched,” and therefore, I had endangered everyone using the sauna for months. This is impossible because the sauna never gets over about 180° while the ignition point of paper is over 400° F, with scorching occurring just before that. He said he had thrown away the evidence because they thought some employee must have done it.

So, he destroyed the main evidence and almost certainly perjured himself. The judge let the suspension stand. I didn’t understand that I needed to bring a chemistry or combustion expert, though the ignition point of different papers is easily found online.

They installed a video camera that now looks in through the window at us in the sauna. AND, they put “Do not touch” stickers on the wooden enclosure of the sensor! The stickers are made of paper, with a similar ignition temperature!

The manager told the City Manager, whom I complained to about this, that the stickers are safe since the sensor is not near the heater. But the City’s own evidence, a photo of a thermometer pointed at where my sign was near the heater, shows it’s the same temperature as the rest of the sauna.

The backstory is that they spent some $4,500 on repeated repairs in 2024, when a brand new top-of-the-line sauna heater is about $1,500! And they must have spent at least $1,500 on the video camera wiring installation software, etc., so they almost certainly spent over $6,000 when what was needed was a $0.05 “do not touch” sign. And who knows how much on taking me to trial.

A big reason the city shows such incompetence, as evidenced by the need to increase their communication specialists from 12 in 2018 to 30-something now, is that after all the lying and cheating to obstruct the online petitioning for direct democracy which I spearheaded as a member of the city’s Campaign Finance and Elections working group, I documented it thoroughly and the city replaced the City Manager, the City Attorney, the City Clerk and the City IT director in 2020 to 21.

Here is my documentation, which no news outlet has ever covered in spite of the City spending a million and counting on dysfunctional software, replacing the city’s top brass, and the 2018 vote of 71 to 29% to put online petitioning in the City Charter:

Tinyurl.com/petitionstory

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Evan Ravitz,

48-year Boulder resident