Opinion: We need council members who will actually fix our broken budget process

The list of Boulder’s financial messes keeps growing. What follows is a brief summary of some of the bigger issues. What is clear to me from looking at this is that it will take some very serious reorganization, including not only how things operate, but also how both the City Council and staff members fulfill their responsibilities. It is unacceptable to continue with business as usual.

Ben Binder is a civil engineer and has been following the South Boulder Creek project carefully over the years. He recently pointed out to the City Water Resources Advisory Board, “The City’s Capital Improvements Program Guiding Principles specifically state that capital programming should ‘maximize efficiency of investment demonstrated by measurable cost/benefit analyses.’

“Yet I have not found a current cost/benefit analysis for the South Boulder Creek project in the information provided to the WRAB. If staff has not prepared and provided you with such an analysis, then staff has failed to supply the Board with a fundamental piece of information needed for you to perform your duties and expressly required by the City’s own CIP Guiding Principles.

“That omission is particularly important because the economics have changed substantially, and available evidence indicates the project’s cost exceeds its benefits by tens of millions of dollars.

“The South Boulder Creek flood control project was barely cost-effective when it was first approved, and the cost was $22.3 million while the benefits were $26.3 million. The City now estimates the project cost has increased from $22.3 million to $76.5 million. At the same time, the Frasier Meadows Retirement Community, which was responsible for a major portion of the 2013 flood damages, has spent millions floodproofing its facilities, thereby decreasing any calculation of avoided damages.”

Next, Open Boulder did an analysis of the gigantic Alpine-Balsam project: “On Sept. 9, 2026, the City of Boulder released a detailed cost reconciliation for the Alpine-Balsam project. This summary presents the key figures from that release and flags a set of observations and open questions the city has not yet answered.

“The city spent a total of $366M on the Alpine-Balsam site with the intent of achieving two specific objectives: 1) developing 144 units of affordable housing and 2) consolidating city services into a Western City Campus (WCC) encompassing 138,500 square feet of office space across the Pavilion and Brenton buildings located on the site. To understand the all-in economics of these two separate projects, the $366M needs to be split between them. The city has yet to provide this breakdown.

“The city has stated the two projects occupy roughly the same acreage on the site, with slightly more going toward housing. Splitting the shared costs (land, infrastructure, parking and hospital deconstruction) evenly on that basis puts roughly $61M toward housing (net of $9M in market-rate parcel sales) and $297M toward the WCC.

“No matter how you slice it, though, the result is the same: the problem isn’t how the costs are divided. It’s the total: $422,000 per affordable housing unit, vs. a $120,000 benchmark for city-funded affordable housing. And $2,142 per square foot, all in, vs. $782/sf Google paid for comparable finished space in 2021. In summary, ‘Two goals, one budget, zero cost-effective outcomes.'”

Then there’s the biggest budget disaster: the $400 million in deferred maintenance of City buildings, plus $250 million-plus of interest on the proposed bonds to finance this. Recent councils totally failed to address this backlog, while allowing the hiring of hundreds of additional staff members, to no particular benefit that I’ve seen. Fortunately, we can vote “no” on the bond this November. As I’ve pointed out before, reducing much of this staffing would easily save enough to pay for this without borrowing gigantic sums.

The final insult is the current attempt to increase “cost allocation.” Instead of charging dedicated funds like Parks, Open Space and Transportation just for the actual costs they impose on other city departments, like payroll, bookkeeping, etc., the City started, in effect, extracting more and more of the money dedicated by citizen vote. Now the city has plans to further increase this amount over the next six years.

In my opinion, the council should require the city manager to go back to the original system. Let the dedicated funds choose their own better and cheaper course to provide such internal services that work best given their mission.

The next council has a huge job ahead, not just to resolve all of this but to address the potentially nasty conflicts that will occur. Remember the quote, “Change causes upset.” And these will be big changes!