This commentary is by Jill Grano, a former Boulder City Councilmember and former aide to Congressman Joe Neguse; Laura Kaplan, a member of the City of Boulder Planning Board; Lisa Morzel, a former Boulder City Councilmember; and Philip Ogren, a member of the City of Boulder Housing Advisory Board.
As Boulder faces soaring housing costs, traffic congestion and a strained city budget, we must ask tough questions about how we use our valuable land, rather than resigning ourselves to the past.
The Boulder airport sits on 174 acres of city-owned land, three miles from downtown. It’s a small facility primarily serving about 200 private plane owners, most of whom don’t live in the City of Boulder. There are no commercial flights and no cargo services. While the airport provides private flight opportunities for a few, it delivers ongoing pollution and noise to thousands of nearby residents. There are three other local airports within 10 miles of our city that provide similar and better services.
Last year, more than 3,400 registered voters in the City of Boulder signed petitions to put the airport’s future to a public vote. The ballot measures were withdrawn to allow time to clarify the city’s legal position. The city filed a lawsuit seeking an answer to this critical question: How long is the city obligated to run an airport on our land, based on past contracts signed with the FAA?
Recently, a federal court ruling dismissed the lawsuit. Airport supporters have framed this as proof that any further efforts to regain local control are futile. That narrative is misleading. The judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds, opining that no injury to the city had yet occurred. She noted that the city has known legal obligations to the FAA, which expire in 2040, which is exactly what the city itself acknowledged a year ago.
The real legal question is what happens after 2040. The FAA claims that Boulder’s obligations are “in perpetuity” unless the agency releases us. The city argues that after 2040, the decision is legally Boulder’s. The judge did not rule on this critical question. By dismissing the case “without prejudice,” the door is open for Boulder to appeal or refile when the issue legally ripens.
To give up the fight now and resume taking FAA grants would be a costly mistake.
Boulder stopped accepting FAA grants five years ago for a reason: These grants come with an obligation to operate the airport for 20 years from the date of signing, though grant dollars only cover a few years of infrastructure needs. If the city takes another FAA grant in 2026, we’d push our end date to 2046. Subsequent grants would push it further, locking future generations into this land use. By refusing FAA funds, we’ve banked five years toward local control. Taking a new grant would erase years of progress.
Even under the city’s highest estimates, airport funding is a tiny fraction of Boulder’s budget. Boulder should explore alternate funding options such as increasing airport tenant lease rates to market levels, instituting landing fees as Longmont is exploring for their airport, and pursuing grants that do not extend our FAA obligations.
This isn’t just about an airport. It’s about what Boulder can become. No other parcel in Boulder offers this readiness, scale and proximity for building a new neighborhood. Repurposing the site could accommodate enough mixed-income homes to meaningfully impact Boulder’s housing shortage, plus neighborhood parks, local businesses and transit connections. Unlike the airport, which runs at a financial deficit, a mixed-use neighborhood would generate millions in ongoing property and sales tax revenue that could support city services long after FAA dollars are gone.
Some 60,000 workers commute to Boulder daily from surrounding communities because they can’t afford to live here, a major contributor to traffic congestion. By creating workforce housing near job centers, Boulder can reduce traffic, lower emissions and foster a more balanced community.
Vista Village and San Lazaro mobile home parks, working-class neighborhoods, sit just south of the airport. These residents bear the brunt of aircraft noise and lead emissions from aviation fuel, while benefits flow overwhelmingly to a few private pilots and aviation businesses. This is environmental injustice: costs borne by those with the least political power for the benefit of a privileged few.
Airport boosters argue the Boulder airport provides critical emergency access, but emergency airplanes preferentially utilize larger, better-equipped airports nearby. No meaningful emergency functions depend on Boulder’s runways. Boulder does use emergency helicopters, which do not need runways or an airport.
Across the country, cities are reevaluating small urban airports that no longer serve broader public needs. In Santa Monica, years of community organizing produced an agreement to close the municipal airport by 2028, clearing the way for parks and community uses. Boulder could follow a similar path. This site could provide a transformative, visionary opportunity to build from the ground up for a more affordable, sustainable and equitable Boulder.
Whatever you might think is the best use of these 174 acres of city-owned land, the principle is simple: This land belongs to the people of Boulder. Its fate should be decided locally, not by the FAA. Will city leadership preserve our right to decide our future, or trade it away for a little grant money?
Utilizing the Boulder Airport to build more housing, affordable or otherwise, will not as the authors suggest do anything to reduce the cost of housing or reduce traffic congestion in the city of Boulder. Instead, Boulder will once again be discouraging business and will undoubtedly look back in horror at the short sightedness of this decision. As history has shown time and again, when residential housing is built around farms, active railroads or industrial facilities, it doesn’t take long before residents are screaming about the odor, noise and excessive environmental impact caused by these activities. The loss of sales and use tax revenues will not be made up by adding more housing rather the city will be on the hook to provide more police, fire and municipal services at a time when our sales tax revenues have flattened out or are declining. I believe it is time to take a fresh approach to urban planning. We need to embrace building up as opposed to building out. We need a better solution to public transportation infrastructure than what we currently receive from RTD and finally the City’s planning and transportation departments need to be become more progressive not regressive as they are currently focused. When are the citizens of Boulder going to stand up and push back against the left and right extremism. We get 50000 cars from outside the city entering Boulder every week day – creating bicycle lanes is not going to improve congestion it will worsen it. Slowing down the permit process or enacting often conflicting ordinances and building regulations doesn’t prevent development it only makes construction more expensive and leads to higher home prices and drives out small businesses from Boulder. Boulder it’s time to stop the failed policies of the past and start thinking about how our past and present actions are driving up housing prices and not improving the life of residents.
So what do you suggest?
There are several other, and less expensive and more available, parcels of land that the city has access to if building is the solution. There are also public/private partnerships, when the city would make a large enough down payment on an existing property that the remaining mortgage would be affordable to the target audience. That would not require the city to get directly involved in construction. Also, just because we have a lot of folks commuting into Boulder doesn’t mean they want to live here – people choose where they live for lot of reasons (schools, family, proximity to spouses work, etc.). Not everyone is into the “Boulder ethos”.
There are a number of logical disconnects in what you stated. But I do agree that transportation utterly sucks in Boulder, traffic congestion is getting ever worse, and there are no plans that will improve that. We needed light rail here ten years ago but that will likely never happen.
Thank you explaining the details of receiving or not receiving the FAA grants.
I agree with everything the authors write and will continue to support this vision . I disagree with everything Mr Peters claims. I look forward to our community debating this as much as we need to in order to get clarity and move forward well before the 2026 FAA grant signatures are due. Thank you.
Why doesn’t anyone mention the City Golf Coursexas a potential site for massive development, closer to downtown and far more accessible without further disruption to the transportation network?
For the city to ‘keep the option to litigate” until 2040 will require 10s of millions of dollars to support the airport that would normally be covered by Federal grants. Add the millions to sue the FAA, and Laura and company are asking the city to bet $20-30 Million or your tax money on a gamble that the city would win the lawsuit. Other cities have placed that bet and lost. Is that the type of gambling you want the city to do with your money?
60000 in commutes into Boulder daily? Exactly how many housing units would it take to eliminate that? And? How many of those in commuters would be able to buy living space in Boulder even with public support? And?? How many new jobs and needs for government services would those new residents demand?
And? What can we do about the tens of thousands of CU Students who live off campus, thus putting additional strains on housing within the city? Can the city require CU to require on campus housing for all single students as it does now with freshmen?? That alone would free up enough housing space for most of the in commuters.
Maybe our airport is not the best use of the land, however will not filling it with more housing increase the demands on our already stressed infrastructure? Enlarging Boulder ‘s housing footprint could have negative consequences as well. How do we know the land won’t be “overdeveloped”? I support not taking further FAA monies to potentially position Boulder to have more say in how the land should be used. If in the future, the land can be used for other purposes, those options need to be carefully reviewed. 174 acres is a big space and poses the potential to be abused, negatively impacting Boulder, if not prudently developed. Big money interest needs to be balanced with Community needs. Is the City Council up to that challenge?
Is the city council up to that challenge? Not likely. They simply follow staff’s recommendations.
Here we go again
I support keeping the current airport, which I have lived nearby for 30 years. Even more, I suggest expanding Boulder airport capabilities to include upcoming air taxi services, and so forth. Imagine hopping a quick, cheap air taxi to DIA or downtown Denver.
Let’s not foreclose future possibilities by making stupid choices today. Yes, Boulder still needs more housing – but look elsewhere.
The Sundance Festival will be here in a few years. I realize the Boulder Airport is not large enough to accommodate very large private planes but wouldn’t it be to Boulder’s advantage to have at least some of the attendees land and stay in Boulder, rather than add to the commuting numbers from the airports within the city’s ten mile radius? Also, I live nearby and the road infrastructure to accommodate all the traffic, because there is no current public transportation, will be a nightmare, especially as parents drive their kids to school each morning.
If the poor could afford an airplane hobby and were causing the news and lead polution, it would have closed down long ago.
The opinion piece here substantially misrepresents the legal outcome from the City’s recent lawsuit. Broadly, the city made two claims related to the “Quiet Title Act” (federal law that gives parties the right to get clarity on property claims from the federal government) as well as arguments that the FAAs interactions with the cities have violated the City’s constitutional rights. The QTA argument was the city’s best legal shot.
However the September 15th, 2025 ruling from Hon. Wang in fact did substantially dismiss the QTA claim. “B. Disputed Title At its core, though, the QTA waives the government’s sovereign immunity only “to adjudicate a disputed title.”… The Motion to Dismiss is respectfully GRANTED to the extent it seeks dismissal of that claim.9”
Only the far more tenuous constitutional arguments were put ‘on hold’ until they are ripe in 2040.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cod-1_24-cv-02057/pdf/USCOURTS-cod-1_24-cv-02057-0.pdf
Voters should understand that the probability of eventually prevailing in the legal battle against the federal government has shifted from uncertain to extremely slim based on the September 15, 2025 federal court ruling and that the cost required to get to an opportunity to continue to pursue the lawsuit has greatly increased (previously 5 years of airport operation, now 20 years of airport operation as well as likely substantial CapEx for durable items that could be shifted around for a 5 year period but not a 20 year period).
Has anyone addressed what appears to be a helicopter training center at our “not very quiet” airport. I dont mind helicopter use, but the constant weekend wap-wap added to the “touch and go” practice runs that sound like wannabe dive bombers, continue to get on my nerves when I’d enjoy a nice weekend day of yardwork. Does this heli school exist, or is it my imagination?