This commentary is by current Boulder County Commissioners Claire Levy and Marta Loachamin, and former Boulder County Commissioners Elise Jones, Deb Gardner and Will Toor.
We, current and former Boulder County commissioners, ask Boulder County voters not to sign the petitions being circulated to increase the number of Boulder County commissioners from three to five. While no doubt well-intentioned, we believe this idea is unnecessary, expensive and will result in less effective county decision-making.
Increasing accountability and transparency in government does not come from increasing the size of government; it comes from making systemic changes to elections and governance, which we support.
Different policy decisions do not come from increasing the size of government; they come from electing representatives, at every level of government, who truly reflect your values, which we support.
Increasing collaboration does not come from increasing the size of government but from electing commissioners who are committed to delivering the best in public service every day, which we support.
Bigger isn’t better. Here’s why:
1. Increasing the size of government won’t yield better results — but it will cost money. Proponents say more commissioners is inherently superior, but don’t have a coherent explanation for why that is. Growing government requires more tax dollars — more than $500,000 for additional commissioner salaries and staff support, based on today’s salaries. At a time when 63 people were laid off and 73 people took early retirement, do we really want to spend scarce dollars on adding more elected officials to the county budget?
2. Adding commissioners is not necessary to respond to the size of the budget or the complexity of issues. Whether there are three commissioners or five, each commissioner must analyze and synthesize information from professional staff, and then make good decisions by listening to fellow commissioners while compromising where necessary. This effort would just result in five commissioners doing the same work that was formerly done by three.
3. Bigger isn’t better for timely executive decision-making. We don’t have five governors, five sheriffs or five district attorneys, nor do we run businesses with five CEOs for good reason. Similarly, county commissioners function predominantly as county executives, making decisions on a myriad of contracting, personnel, facilities, budgeting and other topics on a weekly basis. Coordinating input from five commissioners would be cumbersome and more time-consuming, impeding nimble, responsive action.
4. Both five-commissioner scenarios result in more parochial decision-making. Under the current system, commissioners are required to live in different geographic areas but are all elected at-large — which mathematically requires winning votes across the county. Currently, all commissioners pay attention to the ENTIRE county. The public would be disserved if decisions regarding budgeting for social services, public safety, transportation, affordable housing, wildfire mitigation, open space and more were made only with regard to one’s district. Whether just three out of five commissioners or all five commissioners are elected solely from their home district, commissioners would be more focused on their district than on doing what’s best for the county as a whole. This would profoundly and negatively change the holistic and collaborative way in which decisions are made now.
5. Increasing the number of commissioners won’t provide greater representation for geographic groups that feel underrepresented. At just 46,000 total residents, there aren’t enough residents in all of unincorporated Boulder County to create a district dedicated just to them. Nor could there be a district dedicated to mountain residents, with the combined population of Nederland, Allenspark, Lyons, Jamestown, Gold Hill and Ward only about 5,000 people.
6. Changing to five commissioners will not inherently result in a more diverse county commission. Under the current system, voters across Boulder County elected our first Latina commissioner in 2020 — a long-overdue perspective in our county. Five commissioners elected by district would fracture existing communities of color across two districts, potentially diluting votes in order to have 66,000 residents per district. Adding two at-large seats will favor candidates who have historically had access to the party system and opportunity to run for office, diluting the vote of a nonwhite commissioner on a five-member board. We can achieve a county commission that is more representative of the county’s population through a deepening commitment to inclusion in the pipeline to candidacy.
7. With five commissioners, the voters of Longmont and Boulder will continue to elect a majority of the commissioners. As the two largest cities, Longmont and Boulder make up two-thirds of the county population. If there are five districts of equal population, Boulder and Longmont would each elect two commissioners. East-county residents would see their representation on the commission decrease from one-third of the seats to one-fifth. This would also be the case if three commissioners were elected from districts and two at-large; Longmont and Boulder would each elect a commissioner from their district and, with their larger pool of voters, control both of the at-large seats as well.
8. Increasing the number of commissioners won’t result in different policy decisions. If you disagree with commissioners’ policy decisions, elect different commissioners. Having five doesn’t guarantee any change in policy or make a different outcome easier to achieve; rather than having to win over two of the three commissioners to achieve a majority vote, as is the case now, you’d have to convince three of them.
Very few of these bullet points make much sense to me, and there’s a ton of specious reasoning here as well. So my takeaway message here is “Don’t dilute or diminish our power”. Though I did get a good laugh out of the fiscal authority angle, since scarcity of BoCo funding has a lot of do with monied/special interesting creating unaffordable local economies and hostly holding commercial spaces in perpetual state of vacancy to starve us of job opportunities as well. Not that any current County Commissioners want to talk about that whatsoever…but they sure were timely to discontinue air quality funding when we need it most despite that also costing a fraction of a percentage of the budget.
Wow! I suppose it’s not surprising that current county commissioners prefer to retain their full power by ensuring that only ONE person is the deciding factor in any vote they take out of the entire population of Boulder County. Moving to five representatives is only slightly more democratic, but does reflect what most other counties in Colorado have in place I understand. How can a move from 3 to 5 be so threatening? How can it be so much more expensive? How can it result in more parochial decision-making? I’m not buying these arguments.
Three is somehow the magic number according to the authors, but the points in the opinion basically argue for having only one county commissioner (save money, timely, could get 100% underrepresented rep, etc.). But obviously, one commissioner is certainly not going to be representative of the entire county. We can look at the other extreme — if we have a county commission that includes every single resident, then that would be the most representative government. That would be ideal representation, though not practical. So would going from three to five be more representative? Logically, it would be and still seems practical to implement.
I understand that the state legislature introduced HB25-1265 that will require
“…in a county with a population of 70,000 or more, the board of county commissioners (board) may consist of 3 commissioners from 3 districts, with one commissioner elected from each district by voters of the whole county. Alternatively, the board may consist of 5 commissioners, in which case the county may be divided into 3 or 5 districts, and the commissioners may be elected pursuant to numerous methods, including by district or at large or by some combination of both methods.
The bill modifies this discretionary system for any county with a population of 250,000 or more by requiring each such county to have 5 commissioners and 5 districts and to choose one of the following 3 methods for their election:
-5 commissioners resident in 5 districts elected only by voters resident in those districts;
-3 commissioners resident in 3 districts elected only by voters resident in those districts and 2 commissioners elected at large; or
-5 commissioners elected at large using the proportional ranked voting method known as the single transferable vote method.
The bill makes conforming amendments to statutory provisions concerning commissioner district and election petition statutes.”
Boulder County’s population is more than 250,000.
Kate:
You’re correct that last year a state representative from Highlands Ranch introduced the bill you referred to. It never made it out of committee last spring, and died. This year, he has introduced a similar bill, HB26-1203, which is pending. But we understand that its chances of passage are no better than the last attempts he’s made at this (he offers a similar bill every year). So, we are availing ourselves of current Colorado law, which allows the voters of a county to select whether they want to expand from three county commissioners to five.
– Bob Yates
Strikes me as odd that it takes 5 present and former County Commissioners to tell us that 5 County Commissioners is too many.