The Boulder City Council on Thursday, Sept. 12, provided initial feedback on the city manager’s proposed $589.5 million budget for 2025, highlighting some of their priorities and concerns as officials navigate rising costs and flattening revenue.
Councilmember Mark Wallach said the city needs more investment in wildfire resilience, citing Boulder Reporting Lab’s reporting on the growing challenges homeowners face as insurance companies raise rates or drop coverage due to wildfire risks.
“I think we’re going to have to be able to continue to demonstrate that we are acting aggressively to address this problem in order to maintain the interest of our insurers, who are looking to basically run away at this point,” Wallach said.
Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer questioned the city’s growing spending on its encampment removal program, Safe and Managed Public Spaces. The program’s budget is set to rise to $3.7 million, up from $3 million last year.
“I’ll continue to make this point that we’re spending more money every year on a program where the problem we are trying to solve just keeps getting worse,” Speer said. “We are seeing more tons of trash. We’re seeing more encampments.”
Councilmember Taishya Adams said she wants the city to find funding to sustain its Elevate Boulder program, which provides $500 a month to low-income households. The initiative, funded by the federal American Rescue Plan Act, is slated to end by January 2026.
Adams also asked about the city’s commitment to racial equity. “I’ve seen this word written, but I’m not seeing it in the budget anywhere,” she said. “I look forward to something that lets me know what are the specific investments in racial equity.”
Councilmember Tara Winer asked about the city’s $6.2 million investment in the Alpine-Balsam development, a project that includes municipal offices and 144 units of affordable housing. City officials emphasized the challenge of maintaining aging buildings.
“That the price tag will only increase as we delay and punt this down the road,” City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde said. “The buildings are falling around us.”
In the coming weeks, councilmembers will have an opportunity to provide more detailed budget recommendations. A public hearing on the proposed budget is scheduled for Oct. 3.
For more information, see our previous reporting on the budget.
The $3.7 million for the city’s “Encampment Removal Program” could be used instead to build a campsite for tents & vans. Like our National Parks it would include toilets & showers. The industrial land east of Foothills Parkway, along the RR tracks could become a “City Park Campsite”.
Exactly, Nancy. Seattle’s Low Income Housing Institute built tiny homes at $4500 a piece that include electricity, heat, light, and are insulated. They also have a community building with showers, laundry, kitchen, offices for case managers and security. City council could decide to redirect that $700k to that. Clearly, Seattle has a larger budget and problem with homelessness than Boulder, but if our problem is big enough to keep increasing the budget every year for sweeps, then we are just ignoring the problem. So much for all city council’s talk on outcome based evaluation and funding. The problem gets worse and we do more of the same and fund it more. Transitional shelter is needed even more since the Shelter, which experiences capacity issues year round, now has even more limited capacity than in past years (only 55 unreserved beds now), to meet an increased demand.
I’d like BRL to ask the city manager what concessions the city has offered (or is asked for) from Sundance. We can’t get potholes fixed and have a shortage of housing for families with children (so schools are in decline) but we want to host Sundance? Have you been to Park City? It is a resort town with nothing but tourists and Aspen expensive stores. Is that the direction we want Boulder to go?
Seems like it. What does Pearl Street Mall offer regular old community residents who are not wealthy enough to spend frivolously. Sundance would be another feather in that hat.
Paying lawyers to sue the FAA over an airport that only a minority of people want to close appears to be an exorbitantly wasteful expense. FWIW, I recently paid over a thousand dollars in local taxes while spending more thousands supporting a Boulder automobile dealer. Had I not been able to fly into the airport that money would have gone elsewhere.
If the unhoused population is growing every year, there would need to be more land and campsites built to accommodate that. They would also need city or county services for toilets, trash and water. This may also exceed last year’s budget.
Sanctioned encampments, if they are done right, move people out within a year or less to appropriate permanent situations. While it might be good to have more than one camp for different populations, they would not need to keep expanding because of the turnover. It would not serve everyone who is unsheltered, but it would make a big difference.
A campsite was just a thought. Perhaps some of the community jail cells could be converted into a rooming house for our homeless residents. We’ve run out of old motels to convert. A simple old fashioned rooming house
might cost less to build & manage than individual apartments.
Not cheap Nancy. Watch the Study Session on the budget last night. There is infrastructure on what you propose, and moving it the unhoused, like we do in Gaza. We don’t own that industrial land in EB. Look at Alpine Balsam, we have spent so many years paying that off, we have to sell off most of the affordables planned to market rate units to pencil it out. This is the reaction to senseless growth, approving many projects with subsidies and then having to pay the price at the budget. The city enters the real estate industry without the experience. Let the developer pay.
Sarah, you can’t talk about affordable housing for families after approving Marpa House from family friendly communal housing to student apartments for rent-by-the-bedroom (RBTB). That was the precedent for RBTB at the Millennium for Landmark Properties student housing out of Atlanta, after Berkeley kicked them out of that community. This decision by the Planning Board was the singular most destructive project you ever approved as a member for the future of affordability and DEI in Boulder. It blazed the path for the outrageously small “missing middle” 300 sf. spaces at 2206 Pearl. Now that’s not “family friendly!”
What’s more, appeasing the neighbors who tried to help the current Marpa residents buy the place themselves was seamlessly undermined by the Hill developer John Kirkwood who got the inside information to outbid them.
The suggestion of requiring the developer to install a sandbox was your response to the issue.
Phil – perfect explanation.
And Roxanne, nothing in the budget to fund hotel for overflow. Was it 50 died last year? How many this year? Ya can’t live out there.
Nancy, communal housing is correct. But the over-utilizers are a problem, and the bad problem that is growing. And that’s great they cycle through, but into an impossible market in Boulder.