Departing transportation director warns of Boulder’s financial strain as street safety projects hang in balance

Natalie Stiffler, Boulder’s departing director of transportation and mobility, played a key role in advancing the city’s push to make its streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. 

During her tenure, the city completed its first protected intersection at Colorado and 30th, installed concrete curbs to separate cyclists from vehicle traffic on Baseline Avenue, and nearly finalized plans for a two-way protected bike lane on Iris Avenue.

Earlier this month, Stiffler resigned to join a professional services firm, where she will focus on statewide transportation projects, including the potential passenger rail line along Colorado’s Front Range. She is the city’s third transportation director to step down in three years.

As she leaves, the sorts of transportation projects Stiffler championed now face financial hurdles. Her departure comes as the city council reviews the 2025 budget proposal, which is leaner due to uncertain forecasts for key funding sources like sales and use taxes.

Her farewell serves as yet another financial warning for Boulder.

“I think one of our biggest challenges as a city over the next couple of years is to figure out our long-term financial strategy,” Stiffler told Boulder Reporting Lab. “We have a very limited budget to maintain the entire system and make improvements.”

In an interview with Boulder Reporting Lab, Stiffler reflected on her nearly decade-long career with the city, with her promotion to transportation director in 2023, and the challenges facing Boulder’s transportation department. Below is a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.

How has the department changed since you were first hired in 2014?

I’ve really appreciated City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde’s leadership these past few years. She’s focused on foundational work, like making the city organization more effective and creating a healthy workplace. You might recall the Tipton report, which pointed out a lack of psychological safety in public works. I was tasked with helping shift that culture and to promote direct, kind, and trusting communication.

We worked hard on fostering healthy conflict, where people feel safe to challenge each other. When I reflect on leaving, I feel good because the department has made real progress in this area. There’s always more to do, but we’ve taken big steps forward. 

The department has seen significant turnover. The previous director served about two years. Before that, the director served about six months. What do you think explains that?

I don’t have information about the really short tenure. And Erika Vandenbrande was driven by a family situation. But Boulder is known for being a challenging place to work because people are highly engaged and have high standards. But that’s also what makes it exciting and rewarding. I think that reputation helps attract some of the best talent. You get to do exciting and innovative projects that are usually kind of on the forefront of the industry. I would have stayed just to continue to get to work on cool and exciting projects with amazing people. But it was a professional opportunity that I couldn’t really pass up.

For several months, the city has been gathering feedback from the community around Iris and yet the general directive from the city council on this project is so clear. What do think about all the feedback in this case?

We live in a society that really leans on democratic processes. And so everybody wants to have a voice. I definitely can appreciate that and understand that we need to do really good community engagement, especially when the outcomes and goals are unclear. 

But one of the challenges with community engagement is that the longer it takes, the more expensive the process is. So is there a way to streamline some of the community engagement? I’m excited to see what they do with the next corridor, Folsom Street, because I think it will probably not be as long of a process.

On Iris, there was input that really shaped the staff recommendation that will go to council in a couple weeks. We heard about side street impacts early on. So we opened up the project to include improvements to side streets, like speed mitigation strategies that will slow speeds so people stay on Iris. We also heard about emergency evacuations. That really informed the options that we developed.

You have overseen the completion of several major projects. The protected intersection on 30th and Colorado is finished. Parts of Baseline have a protected bike lane. Iris is near the end of the planning process. What lessons have you learned from these projects? 

As long as we can continue to have political support with the Core Arterial Network (CAN) project [which seeks to make the city’s busiest streets, where most crashes resulting in serious injury occur, safer], we will be able to move things forward in a really focused way. All of our resources for enhancements are allocated for improvements for these corridors. And that’s different from the past.

I think the challenge that the city is going to have is around resources and funding. That’s why the long-term financial strategy is so important. Sales and use taxes are flattening and the cost of doing business —  wages, construction and materials — is up. We have a lot of infrastructure we need to take care of — pavement, bridges, sidewalks, signs, markings and all the things. And it’s just a very limited budget to be able to take care of the whole system. 

It’s interesting that sales and use taxes pay for road repairs. I don’t see the nexus between buying a pair of shoes on Pearl Street and fixing potholes, for instance. 

In 2019, the city had done a big community engagement process around transportation funding. There was consensus to move forward with a nexus study for essentially a transportation maintenance fee. [Previous discussions on a transportation maintenance fee would have imposed it on commercial and residential properties.] And I think there’s interest in dusting that off and seeing if there are things we can move forward with. 

Boulder wants to cut single-driver car trips down to 20% by 2030. We are likely going to fall short. What needs to happen to meet that goal?

There’s the land-use piece and the public transportation piece. I’m a big transit advocate. I think as a state, we need to be doing more around funding transit. We need to consider more than just RTD as a way to solve our transit needs. And I’m actually really excited that Boulder County is going to be kicking off a countywide transit plan in the coming year. That will be an opportunity to look at how the county, local governments and the state can play a role in delivering transit. 

Housing is always going to be expensive, even with building more housing, which I think we’ll continue to do. That has to come with a focus on additional transit service to be able to move people into and out of Boulder for jobs, recreation and school. 

Another city goal is to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. What is it like when you hear about a traffic death on one of Boulder’s streets? 

How is this still happening? I was watching a video this morning because a friend, his name is Eric Olson, lost his daughter, Sidney Olson, about a year ago. They live in Massachusetts. She was five years old and got hit by a truck and died. Yesterday, he was out riding his bike and got hit by a truck that ran a stop sign. He’s okay. About 7,500 pedestrians die in the United States each year. No other country has those kinds of fatal crashes. It’s just appalling. Somehow we accept that this is the society we live in. All I can do is just keep trying to contribute to communities in a way that hopefully changes that. 

If you can slow people down, then it’s unlikely that you’re going to kill somebody when you hit them. And so slowing people down and then protecting vulnerable road users are the kind of ways that we need to get to Vision Zero. Another big piece of it is also just distracted drivers. It just blows my mind that it is not illegal in every state across the United States to be on your phone texting while driving. We also need enforcement. We’ve expanded our photo radar enforcement, and I know people are getting those tickets and are pretty annoyed about it. But hopefully it slows people down. 

You accepted a job as senior vice president and transportation business leader for Colorado with WSP Global Inc., a global professional services firm. Why did you want this job?

This was an opportunity to just expand my own professional development. When you get into the bigger cities, the politics are different and the projects are just a magnitude bigger. It was an opportunity to learn new things and be challenged in a new way. 

A big focus will be on transit. The state is really focused on transit, both the Front Range Passenger Rail and expanding bus rapid transit. The city and county of Denver will focus on expanding their bus rapid transit systems.

What’s your parting message to the city? 

We will really need to balance taking care of the system while also looking for ways to improve it. I think we’ve done that. But it will get more challenging if we don’t figure out a financial strategy.