Opinion: We desperately need new City Council members

Let’s start with the city budget. In the last 10 years, Boulder’s budget went up 85% — 39% after adjusting for inflation — mostly in the last 5-6 years. And we had almost no population growth.

My first thought was that there must have been a backlog of capital projects to be done. But then a friend did an analysis of the city’s staffing levels. This is measured in “full-time equivalent” staff members, or FTEs. Here’s what he found:

In 2019, Boulder had 1,252 FTE’s per 100,000 residents. In 2025, we had 1,493 FTE’s per 100,000. That’s an increase of 19% per capita in six years! And during that time, the city stopped running the library; that accounted for a decrease in need of approximately 78 FTEs. For comparison, Fort Collins has only about three-fourths as many FTEs per 100,000.

Are our council members even aware of this massive increase in money spent and staff hired? For a test, some months ago, I sent my analysis to an apparently knowledgeable council member. After clarifying that, yes, I did take inflation into account, the conversation went nowhere. We deserve to know what the justification is for these prodigious increases.

We are faced with this problem getting worse in the future. The council put on the ballot for this November a permanent extension of the existing 0.3% sales tax, along with the ability to borrow $262 million (almost $2,500 per resident) against this future revenue. This money will go to undefined “capital improvements,” except that up to 10% can “fund a grant pool for non-profit organization projects,” also rather undefined.

The existing tax expires in 2036. So the only reason to extend it now is so this council can borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on whatever “capital improvements” they want, with no constraints, no comparative analyses required, and no further citizen say. So, for example, it might be used to reduce the number of lanes on Iris Ave., limiting the ability of people to get crosstown or to escape in the case of a wildfire, just for some bigger bike lanes.

A responsible council would have first come up with their list of specific investments, so we citizens could know what this money will pay for. But now it’s just “trust us, we know best.” And our massively increased communications staff (which has more than doubled in size!) will, no doubt, try to sell whatever “good ideas” they come up with if the tax and bond measures pass.

I bet some major dollars will also go to trying to convert Boulder into “15-minute neighborhoods.” A few weeks ago, I went to the only open session of the Community Assembly, a city-organized group of some 40+ locals who are supposed to guide this fantasy.

After many months of meetings, there is still no agreement even on the definition of a “15-minute neighborhood.” Apparently, no quantitative work done on, e.g., how many people it takes to support a supermarket, what percentage of people already within 15 minutes do bike or walk, etc. That should have been done first. No fault of the citizen participants, but this appears to be a huge waste of time and money. Expect a ringing endorsement.

Another ill-thought-through money-raising scheme is the recently proposed Single Family Housing Expansion Fee. The idea is to charge people who want to add on to their house, e.g., because their family has grown. Allegedly, this is to compensate for the increase in housing costs due to such expansions. So, the less well-off of us who could only afford a smaller house, but now have the need to expand, will pay this fee. But those better off who bought larger houses won’t.

Of course, the council still refuses to raise the jobs-housing linkage fee so that job growth pays for the affordable housing it needs, a much more impactful and fairer charge that could be increased by around 4-5 times, per the KMA nexus study of some years ago.

Finally, there’s the newly proposed Transportation Maintenance Fee that I just heard about. Apparently, the city has done a “nexus study” to justify it. Too bad that they refused to do one for the use of our “impervious surface” flood control fees to pay for the ill-conceived South Boulder Creek dam. It would not have survived; there is no “rational nexus” because almost all the water comes from outside the city.

My conclusions: Vote “yes” for some new blood on the council, and “no” on the tax and bond issues.