The Boulder City Council last week directed city officials to draft a 2024 ballot measure to increase councilmember pay. Councilmembers said they hope the additional pay will allow more people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to serve on the council.
Councilmember compensation is determined by city code and is adjusted to account for inflation. Currently, councilmembers make about $1,000 per month, plus benefits. Some have said they work as much as 30 hours per week. Depending on the hours worked, the pay can fall below minimum wage, resulting in people serving on the council only if they have the means.
“In my ideal world, we’re not just increasing council pay, we’re also decreasing the workload,” Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer said during the May 9 meeting. “Because if you have a full-time job and kids and you’re trying to be on council, we need to try to get the work down to 10 to 15 hours a week.”
The exact terms of the ballot measure remain to be determined. But it will likely tie council pay to the area median income. In 2022, Fort Collins voters passed a ballot measure increasing council pay to 50% the area median income, or about $37,600 per year, according to the city.
An initial vote on which measures councilmembers will refer to the 2024 ballot is expected in July.
The compensation ballot measure was one of many discussed at last week’s study session.
A majority of councilmembers indicated they would also like to refer a measure to the 2024 ballot that would allow councilmembers to go into executive session to discuss certain city business, such as personnel matters and legal advice. Executive sessions are not open to the public or press.
Councilmembers said they are already having private conversations with the City Attorney’s Office on an individual basis, which is allowed, rather than as a whole council, which isn’t.
“We’re having all these discussions,” Councilmember Matt Benjamin said. “We’re just doing it in the least-efficient way possible.”
Councilmembers also directed city officials to begin “starting the evaluation” for a 2025 ballot measure to conduct city council elections using a form of ranked-choice voting. This voting method, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, was used in the 2023 election to elect city mayor. The council wants to consider all council candidates being elected this way.
The voting method is intended to ensure winning candidates have the support of a larger portion of voters. In a more typical plurality voting system, a candidate wins if they have the most votes, even if it’s a small percentage representing a minority of voters.
In 2025, councilmembers may consider financial ballot measures.
Last week, they discussed measures that would tax second homes and vacant commercial properties, which could impact thousands of properties, according to city officials. They also considered imposing a sin tax on tobacco, alcohol and marijuana to pay for mental health programs. Officials said one goal would be to provide a “price signal” aimed at reducing consumption of these substances, even though they are considered addictive. Preliminary estimates indicate a 1% tax increase would generate about $3 million per year, according to city officials.
Separately, a group of housing advocates is seeking to place a measure on the 2024 ballot that would close the city’s airport. A separate but related measure would call for the redevelopment of the land into a “sustainable, mixed-use neighborhood,” ensuring “at least 50% of on-site housing units” are permanently affordable for low- to middle-income residents.
The proponents are collecting online and paper signatures. According to the city’s online signature tally as of May 10, they have collected 87 for the measure to close the airport and 82 for the measure to turn it into a neighborhood. The proponents need 3,401 signatures by May 29 for the measures to appear on the 2024 ballot, according to a city election official.
… absolutely raise!!! David Prowell / long time local. This is a uniquely wonderful idea and I believe it should have already happened.
No on executive sessions. If everything is transparent, it’s fair. The world would be a better place with authenticity and honesty.
I understand there’s problems with the on-line petitioning on the airport, so many hard copies signatures are being preferentially gathered. However, the numbers go unreported on the on-line site. That’s not right, and I don’t even support either petition.
If council is paid AMI, consider a case in point. 2206 Pearl charges 80-120% AMI translating to $1700-$2600/mo. for a 300 sf. micro-efficiency apartment without parking, and that was a year ago. AMI’s rising all the time. And it converts to market rate after the first party vacates. The city, as of the budget study last week, has many unfunded liabilities and depleted STR. The rent’s too high. R Gallery’s leaving, Arts and Crafts Co-op and Art Hardware. There are “for rent” and leasing signs on practically every upstairs commercial space on the 14-15th block of the mall. Charging for commercial vacancy should have been done long ago. The “Sophomore” restaurant between “Salt” and “The Kitchen”, never even made it to “Junior.”
A tax on addictive substances adds insult to injury. Eliminate the vices, eliminate the tax. The high utilizers in the homeless population are crisis level, expensive and virtually impossible to stop. The vices don’t pay for their social expense. Convicted swindler Lefferdink proved this after he tried to escape the Colorado Building he built in a helicopter. He started trying to build a hotel at the site of the Justice Center, but the liquor license fell through, that was aborted and he went bankrupt. Justice prevails.
“Lefferdink literally sailed off into the sunset, with his female assistant, on his yacht “Sea Wolf.” But the law caught up with him, again, for additional fraud and conspiracy charges. He served time in prison, then died in Carson City, Nev., in 2003, at age 85.”
Increasing pay doesn’t decrease workload. Nicole’s comment doesn’t make any sense.
Nicole is working on a separate process to decrease workload
Definite YES on Council pay. It’s easy to hate on politicians, but more importantly:
1) We want to make it possible for working people, average people to be on Council!
2) The pay increase is meaningless in terms of budget.
Yes for Executive Sessions. Some matters have to be discussed privately.
Unfortunately, Buzz, raising council pay won’t result in a more diverse council than we have now. Voters made it abundantly clear that they want relevant experience on council (Remember the four guys who didn’t make it?) They aren’t going to vote for candidates, diverse or not, who don’t have experience on board or commissions. Unless there is a bevy of well qualified diverse candidates waiting in the wings for increased council pay, future city councils will look just the same as this one. So the question is do we want to raise pay for well established professionals who are already above AMI.
I do not believe council members should get a raise. The city budget is tight already and the council is not a representative body. I experience great frustration over decisions they make without regard for the opinions of Boulder citizens. This happens over and over on many, many issues.
totally agree!!
This is rich coming from the current council, several of whom don’t work and are independently wealth and are not of retirement age. To substitute for work, the salary would need to be $4-5k a month, and voters aren’t approving that. Forget rank choice voting, it is time for the council to be divided up by districts.
Secrecy is the problem Buzz.
Sarah, I don’t see a comment for Nicole.
Yes yes yes on executive sessions. City council meetings need to be more coherent. There is too much confusion and talking past each other. This happens because they don’t understand what each others concerns and positions are, and they don’t have anywhere near enough time to hash it out in council meetings.
If the council didn’t endlessly micromanage and trust the work staff generates .they could work less hours. If they insist on raising pay then we should reduce the council to 5 people and have a system more like the County Commissioners.
If there are going to be sin taxes I suggest the Department of Defense contracts be taxed. After all Boulder is number 3 in Colorado for DOD contracts and I am sure none of them are fair trade, organic or inclusive. This explains why none of our elected officials on any level have said anything about the Gaza special military operation.
If council just accepted all staff’s preferred options then they would just be phoning it in and rubber stamping what staff wants to do. That may work sometimes, but it’s usually not a great process. Voters didn’t elect staff. We elected council to represent the the voters who elected them, and make progress on major issues of importance. Council has a lot of ideas, priorities and preferences that they need to explore in order to get anything accomplished. If staff is not open to that, or is impeding those efforts, then that is a problem. Staff’s work with council needs to be more streamlined and specific instead of deluging them with endless details that aren’t relevant to decison making. Cooperation and efficiency are key. While staff may be policy “experts” in their areas, they can’t call the policy shots. That is council’s job.
Council should be quality control, should help in processing communication from the community and should show leadership by not governing through bullying such as when it reversed the occupancy vote. The hubris is overwhelming.
Meanwhile the climate catastrophe proceeds.
Council is tasked with making policy decisions — not just overseeing the quality of what staff chooses to implement. They were also within their legal rights with the occupancy vote, and it’s a moot point anyway with the new state law. So much ado about nothing. Just too bad they had to waste so much time on it.