The North Boulder Library held its grand opening celebration on June 29, marking the culmination of a decades-long effort by many across generations, including Lisa Morzel, who served nearly 20 years on the city council. Her library journey began in the 1980s and, according to Morzel, started with a small nudge and ended in 2019 with helping secure crucial funds to fill a stubborn funding gap and complete the project.
In 1988, Morzel was chatting with her neighbor, librarian Laurie Watkins, about the envisioned library in North Boulder per the 1982 Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan. Morzel told Boulder Reporting Lab she began attending library commission meetings that year.
“I started asking, ‘When is the north library going to be built? I’m really looking forward to it,’” she laughed. “I was pretty naive.”
Morzel, a Boulder resident since the mid-1970s, was part of the North Boulder Community Coalition, formed in the late 1980s to shape the community’s future. One of their successes was preventing North Broadway from becoming a five-lane highway in the early 1990s, Morzel said.
The coalition emphasized the need for a community anchor, ideally a library. But in the early to mid-1990s, Safeway was looking to build a marketplace with two and a half acres of stores and over five acres of parking, according to a report from the North Boulder Community Coalition in 1993. “A lot of us thought, ‘That was the stupidest idea ever,’” Morzel said. “That is not a good use of our land.”
The coalition was able to push back Safeway’s development, according to Morzel, and 2.76 acres were donated to the City of Boulder in 1997 for the purpose of becoming the site of a library branch. Morzel ran for Boulder City Council in 1995, centering her campaign on bringing a library to North Boulder. She served on the council from 1995 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2019.
“There was no way I was going to leave the city council without a North Boulder Library,” Morzel said. She explained that she had support from many other city councilmembers and community members along the way, including real estate agent and library commissioner Ann Cooper, Councilmember Angelique Espinoza, Councilmember and restaurateur Tom Eldridge, and Boulder Library Director Marcelee Gralapp, who served in the position for nearly four decades and died in 2019.
But the years piled on. Whenever city funds were potentially available for a North Boulder library, other pressing public needs, like a fire station, took precedence.
A turning point came in 2014 with voter approval of the Community, Culture and Safety tax, dedicating 0.3% of sales to Boulder infrastructure. Initially short-term, the tax was extended in 2017 and 2021, now called the Community, Culture, Resilience and Safety tax.
Over the years, the tax collected $5 million for the North Boulder Library. In 2019, Morzel said she helped secure an additional $700,000 to facilitate its construction by putting forward a motion that rededicated the allotted funds initially approved for installing front doors to the municipal building. By the end of her term in 2019, architects were being hired to design the library.
“Sometimes you have to wait a long time for your vision to finally come into view,” Morzel said. “It’s going to be very exciting to see it finally open.”
The North Boulder Library had its grand opening celebration on June 29 and is now open to the public.
Read: North Boulder Public Library set to open nearly 30 years after first envisioned
“There’s been one misstep after another, but things finally came together,” Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said in his library opening speech. “We now in North Boulder have this as a phenomenal piece of social infrastructure.”
Morzel was in attendance, alongside other members of the North Boulder Community Coalition. “It’s a congratulations to the whole community,” she said.
