Matthew Popkin has been appointed to the Longmont City Council to finish out former council member Marcia Martin’s term, which ends on December 2 this year. Martin resigned at the end of 2024 to handle a family matter in New York, which led to a city council vote to determine her replacement in the Ward 2 seat.
Fourteen qualified applicants were given five minutes to present during a special meeting last Tuesday, January 21. After the presentations, the council members each listed one to four candidates they believed should advance to the next round. Among the finalists, Popkin received the most votes.
Popkin is a member of the zoning and planning commission and Longmont’s Brownfields Advisory Committee. He is also a manager at RMI, which is a non-profit renewable energy think tank formerly known as Rocky Mountain Institute. Popkin graduated from the University of Maryland with a master of public policy degree in specialization in energy and environmental policy and a bachelor of arts degree in government and politics.
Popkin expressed his intent to talk face to face with constituents by going door to door and “experiencing” neighborhoods via walking, driving, and biking. A primary concern for Popkin is finding new areas for affordable housing development — he said downtown Longmont, Main Street, and the abandoned sugar mill site should be areas of consideration.
Other issues of concern for Popkin include sustainable growth, improving trust within the community, and preparing for climate change. Popkin is a vocal advocate of utilizing brownfields, which are properties that may contain hazardous substances or are contaminated, for solar energy installations and potentially other renewable energy projects.
In an article published by RMI in 2022, Popkin wrote that brownfields “are far more common than you may think, and include closed landfills, shuttered coal plants and mines, inactive steel mills, and abandoned factories.” The EPA estimates there are 450,000 brownfield sites across the country that may not otherwise be utilized.
Popkin is the founder of the “Brightfields Accelerator” program described as a “multi-year effort” to provide “targeted technical assistance, tools, and other resources to help local governments, site-owners, and community partners make smart and sustainable choices about the reuse of brownfield sites.” Last year, Popkin was a featured speaker at the University of Northern Colorado for a lecture titled “Beyond the Classroom: How Does the Clean Energy Transition Actually Happen?”
In 2022, the EPA awarded a $2 million brownfields grant to the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment (CDPHE) “in partnership with the cities of Longmont, Cortez, Firestone, and Lyons.”