This commentary is by Mark Wallach and Ryan Schuchard, members of the Boulder City Council who serve on the council’s Long-Term Financial Strategies Committee. They are writing in their individual capacities.
The day of reckoning has finally come. After many years of inadequately funding the city’s portfolio of buildings that house its various departments and provide services for the community, we are now faced with the dilemma of how to properly maintain them in an environment of financial shortage.
The city’s portfolio of 75 buildings that house our departments has collectively come to an advanced stage of life and requires immediate attention. Ten buildings are more than 65 years old, and the entire portfolio requires renovation or replacement.
A number of factors make this a challenging task. Our economy is heavily reliant on sales taxes, yet those revenues have plateaued. Meanwhile, federal and state funding for various services has declined, putting more financial pressure on the city. And finally, a substantial percentage of the city’s budget consists of single-purpose dedicated funds. In fact, 56% of our sales tax revenue is allocated to such single-purpose funding. Across the Front Range, only Aspen exceeds our use of dedicated funds, and this structure limits our flexibility to respond to emerging concerns.
How did we get here? Well, our current situation is not an uncommon one for municipalities. Infrastructure spending is often the stepchild of budgetary decisions, routinely prioritized after new programs and services. City councils like to make the lives of their residents better, and that often means elevating spending for projects that have visible results in the near term over investments to keep buildings and other physical assets in first-rate condition over time.
Are past city councils to blame? No, ALL city councils, including the current one, are responsible. No one gets a pass. But this council, this city manager and this staff have begun to move in a different direction, one that recognizes the fundamental importance of bringing our many buildings up to modern standards, and keeping them that way into the future.
Our needs are extensive. We have heard from hundreds of South Boulder residents about their desire for a new facility that maintains all of the amenities of the current facility. But those needs do not exist in a vacuum. We have fire stations that are currently in terrible condition — some occupy residential homes — and need replacement. Our Public Safety Building (the main police station) is well past its useful life and must be replaced if we are to have a modern, effective and motivated police force.
Across the city’s 75-building portfolio, deferred maintenance is widespread. Of those 75, 15 have the most critical needs for renovation or replacement. These include all three recreation centers, city hall and, most significantly, the Public Safety Building, which is in the worst shape of any building in the city’s portfolio. These five buildings together represent just under 50% of all requests for maintenance service across the entire portfolio. Each requires substantial investment. And, as noted earlier, we have six firehouses that desperately require modernization. (We have identified funding for two of them.) At a time when we are all focused on wildfire resilience, what could be a more important investment than modern, properly equipped fire stations?
Thankfully, last year the community voted to permanently extend the Community, Culture, Resilience and Safety tax to provide additional funds for infrastructure projects. This was an important first step. But as the council has been informed by staff, this will not be enough. Our infrastructure needs now exceed $500 million, against which we have identified funding for $100 million. The balance represents $400 million of unfunded capital expenditure needs of this city.
At the same time, Boulder’s provision of services — and our need to manage new issues and concerns — has grown over the last decade. Our modern budget reflects our efforts to address wildfire resilience, services to address the needs of the homeless population and public safety concerns, among many others. These expenditures are far greater than they used to be.
In Samuel Beckett’s classic play, “Waiting for Godot,” the first line is the statement “Nothing to be done,” describing the futility of changing the apocalyptic environment in which the characters find themselves. However, the Boulder City Council does not have the luxury of giving in to that sense of despair. We have a significant problem and something must be done.
Accordingly, the city is looking at a number of measures to address the situation. The first is to change the way we deal with infrastructure, and no longer bury the costs of maintenance behind other programs and priorities. Maintaining our infrastructure is a primary responsibility of government, and we need to properly carry out that responsibility, even if doing so impacts other programs and activities. We can no longer take the easy way out; the costs of infrastructure maintenance must be prominent in the management of our budget. Kicking the can down the road is no longer a viable policy for this community.
In addition, the city is also looking at revenue-enhancing measures to assist us in this endeavor. Yes, that may mean tax measures as well. No one likes it (we certainly do not), but sometimes there is little choice. On some social media platforms, it is not uncommon to hear people suggest that if only we would cut X% of our staff, we would have plenty of money. This is nonsense. We are talking about $400 million. Cutting staff positions would have no material impact on the funding of our infrastructure needs. This is not the time or place to review the tax measures under consideration; we are merely arguing that renovated recreation centers do not magically appear: They must be paid for, and we do not have hidden sources of revenue to make that happen.
Finally, we must continue to support the transition to an outcomes-based budgeting process in order to make our investments more transparent and provide more accountability for results. Better control over existing costs is imperative. We must support those services that give us the best bang for the buck and identify and curtail those that are ineffective. This transition to doing more with less is in process and must continue as we move forward.
This is a difficult community conversation, but a necessary one. As much as it is our obligation to provide the programs that assist so many members of the community, it is equally our responsibility to maintain the physical assets that make it possible to deliver those services. How we do this, and at what cost, will be perhaps the most important discussion we will have in the coming year.
What’s being spent on the balsam alpine west campus flood mitigation project and where did these funds come from
Ryan and Mark,
Thank you for writing this thoughtful and insightful piece. I would like to see full transparency on the true cost to the community of Alpine Balsam, without the fuzzy math that has been presented so far.
What is the actual total cost of the offices being built there, including the initial purchase price, carrying costs over the past decade, interest expense on the debt issued, demolition costs for the old hospital, renovation costs for the hospital building, office building, and parking garage, site work costs, and all other related expenses? Yes, we are getting affordable housing there, but at what cost? What is the real cost to the community on a per unit basis given the extraordinary expense of this project?
And what about the staff time and effort that went into putting this project together? Can the city do a true postmortem comparing the initial projected costs, including consultant and staff assumptions, against what the actual total cost will be?
This is especially important as the city tries to balance the current budget while already looking toward new initiatives like evaluating Area III, which will require significant consultant spending and staff time, diverting resources from the very budget discussions you are raising here.
I agree with your broader point: let’s fix our own house before chasing new shiny projects and initiatives. Please press the city manager to provide real, concrete, fully loaded costs for Alpine Balsam. I believe that level of transparency would better inform both council and the community as we evaluate future projects and spending decisions.
Transparency is anathema to city leadership regarding policies and processes. They don’t want interference. The entire city culture leans into this value of non transparency it seems — and it works for them because the less people know, the less they have to say about any given topic (unless it’s crime, of course). City council falls into place because they also don’t have much say in things that staff has been working on diligently for many years in some cases. Everything council acts on, all their information, comes from staff. Council often can’t agree on anything that requires independent thought because there’s so little time explore or make a case for solutions not fed to them by staff. I say this NOT to denigrate staff, but rather point out the flaws inherent in these challenging situations and overall approach to addressing problems.
This is one big reason I think having NINE members on city council is counterproductive. Why do we have so many? By comparison, Longmont and Fort Collins have seven members. Boulder city council can’t seem to address anything effectively that doesn’t come recommended by staff because there are too many cooks in the kitchen, too many half-baked ideas and conversations.
Thank you for your articulate and clear request.
I would add more in the name of transparency. This would include the CU South project, the cost and its status, especially with permits.
How much much did it cost to sue the FFA over the airport? How much are our yearly attorney costs for the appeal? I asked and was met with no answer. If the city is so broke why not start taking Federal funds again?
How effective is the BoulderMOD project in creating affordable housing?
If the libraries had stayed in the city system, would they have been on your list of city owned buildings with high deferred maintenance liabilities? I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the Library District recently requested that the building ownership be passed to the District. At least one City Council member issued a statement speculating that the Library District might want to sell the buildings, but given what you disclosed here, it seems more likely that the District needs title to the buildings to raise debt so they can pay for the deferred maintenance of the libraries. Can you tell us the amount of deferred maintenance liability, if any, that was transferred by the City to the Library District?
I’d like to know this also.
Wallach and Schuchard are right that Boulder can’t keep deferring infrastructure decisions and expect a different outcome. But if we’re serious about rebuilding trust and making disciplined investments, the public process we just witnessed isn’t getting us there.
At the recent study session, Council approved roughly $20 million for maintenance without any visible, itemized accounting in the public discussion—no breakdown of what facilities, what systems, or what specific needs those dollars are tied to. Maybe that work happened offline, but from the public’s perspective, it looked like a blank check.
Then last night, residents—many from South Boulder—showed up again. These are people who have been attending meeting after meeting for months, preparing comments, writing letters, and even gathering signatures in the thousands to support their community facility. They spoke thoughtfully and, yes, sometimes emotionally. That’s what happens when people care deeply about something they rely on.
What was hard to watch was not disagreement—it was the response. Council spent a meaningful portion of time emphasizing that criticism of staff would not be tolerated, rather than directly engaging with the substance of what constituents were raising.
At the same time, Council continues to emphasize the need for the public to “fill out a survey” so priorities can be understood. That’s difficult to reconcile with what’s already happening. When residents are consistently showing up, speaking, writing, and organizing at scale, asking them to complete yet another survey risks feeling less like outreach and more like dismissal—as if sustained, visible engagement still isn’t enough to be heard.
Respectfully, asking questions about how public dollars are being spent is not an attack on staff. It is the core function of oversight. When the public asks for clearer accounting, prioritization, or justification of scope, that is not criticism—it is exactly what good governance requires.
The optics matter here. When residents leave feeling unheard—dismayed, disappointed, and discouraged after months of engagement—it erodes confidence at the very moment we need it most.
If we are facing a problem of this scale, then the public needs to see Council doing the hard work in real time: asking specific questions, testing assumptions, and clearly explaining decisions. Defending staff in general terms is not a substitute for that.
Accountability isn’t about conflict—it’s about clarity. And right now, the public is asking for more of it.
Yvonne Castillo, Right on.
Thank you for that precise, cogent description.
Plus – it’s now a paid position by the people of Boulder. They literally are paid by the people of Boulder to listen to and respond to the people of Boulder.
The city has hired way too many employees. How about an article comparing other same size cities (or larger) and their # of employees and budget? 30 people in Marketing and Communications making 100K+ each is a bit much. Start trimming the fluff. As for deferred maintenance, the city has $$ to spend on a 100 million dollar Alpine-Balsam project but no $$ for basic road and building repair. Apparently, the city owns some of the properties that house employee offices and those will be sold (to whom and for what is another issue). Others are rented. Will all that “savings” and “selling” even come close to the $$ being spent to make themselves more offices? Why is money being spent on Iris right-sizing when 19th street from CU to Iris is in dire need of resurfacing so that bikes aren’t forced to ride in the street lanes due to the poor condition of the bike lanes? Many more use this street to get north/south than Iris will for east/west. Our city needs a good dose of DOGE (yes, accountability and slicing the fluff). How about a Citizens Finance Oversight/Audit Committee? Other towns have them. As for Parks ad Rec, the centers make revenue which should go back into paying the employees and maintaining the buildings. Yet, they are asked to cut another big chunk of $$ from their budget– the city takes a cut from he rec centers. Look into that! We the people need some investigative reporting to stop this spending nonsense. How in the world does council and the city manager balance their own home budget???? How do they pay their credit cards?? If this were a private business it would go under. Shameful at best, how our city spends….
Re: budget woes—whatever happened to the 12 million the city saves each year from not funding the library (now funded by the library district)?
It’s time to restore accountability, transparency, and trust in our city government. Our city charter already provides for a City Auditor, now is the time to implement it.
When taxpayers ask for basic oversight and are met with defensiveness, it signals a deeper problem. For too long, we’ve seen the prioritization of high-visibility, ideologically driven “vanity” projects while essential maintenance has been deferred. As the consequences of that neglect become clear, we need honest acknowledgment and a course correction.
This isn’t about politics; it’s about responsible governance. We need leaders who treat taxpayer dollars with care, welcome independent oversight, and make decisions based on long-term community needs, not short-term political gain, whether to please a base or advance a personal activist agenda.
We need more accountable leadership, priorities that reflect those of the community, and a clear return to the core responsibilities municipal government is meant to serve.
Yvonne’s comment raises important issues that the city is ignoring. We’ve had several performative surveys, the weird sticker posters, and various meetings about the alleged funding problem and “end of useful life” of Boulder’s rec centers with no meaningful action. When most residents live in houses significantly older than the rec centers, the unchallenged assumption that rec centers are “past the end of their useful life” is simply ridiculous. Sure, rec centers and other buildings require maintenance just like homes, but residents depend on our government to (1) allocate budget to and (2) actually perform this maintenance. If the city has not done so, we need to know why and what steps are being taken to solve this massive oversight or malfeasance.
Mark and Ryan, this voter needs more than vague statements about building conditions. What exactly are the conditions at, for instance, the Public Safety Building? Do they really, materially diminish BPD’s modernity, effectiveness, and the motivation of officers on patrol? How about an opEd that enunciates what you’re talking about.
This classic government-speak commentary opens by saying that “our economy is heavily reliant on sales taxes. ” No, it is not. Municipal bloat depends on sales taxes. These taxes have plateaued and may well fall, strangled by City hostility to the automobile. Every day Boulder makes it more unpleasant to travel into, out, or inside town, in favor of bicycles where there are no bicycles. The “multi-modal” transportation fantasy is destructive to commerce in this valley. The City’s 75-structure “building portfolio” is absurd in a no-growth town of 110,000, and a quarter of that population at CU. Live within your means! The land under these buildings constitutes the majority of total value — in many cases all of it — so start selling, let buyers scrape the junk and recommit to housing, and redeploy City buildings where land is relatively cheap, on the east and north periphery.
The library district freed up $15 million annually from the previous library funding. That money should be set aside to help pay for these expenses. Instead, it got swallowed up in the annual budget.
These are good comments and questions. As an almost lifelong resident of Boulder, I am having trouble understanding how we got here. We are now a community with an abundance of multi-million-dollar homes, and tiny, expensive apartments, that is planning to host an enormous festival for which we are being asked to leave town so tourists can rent our homes. And, now we’re told the city’s municipal facilities are falling apart and we can’t afford to fix them. How can we have gone from a functioning municipality to this state of affairs over the past ~10 years? There is some kind of mismanagement or incompetence at work here. I hope there is a shift in our city governance so we can get back on track and make Boulder work for its residents and taxpayers.
I will consider voting for a tax increase AFTER I see the city make real and meaningful budget cuts!
Thanks for the piece, but it fails to address one of the root causes: Boulder’s low-density development pattern forces the city to maintain more buildings, fire stations, and service infrastructure per resident than a denser city would require.
The research on this is extensive (see Smart Growth America and the Halifax Regional Municipality Study). Low-density development consistently produces less tax revenue per acre while demanding more infrastructure per capita. This article reads like a case study.
You note that six fire stations need modernization. In a denser city, fewer stations cover an equivalent population, because each station’s response-time radius contains more residents. Every station operating in a low-density zone costs more to run per person served than one in a compact neighborhood. The same logic applies to the 75-building portfolio. More square footage per resident means more deferred maintenance per resident.
The tax and budgeting proposals are short-term responses to a structural problem. Infill and mixed-use development along existing service corridors would expand the tax base without requiring proportionally more infrastructure. Denser population also means fewer vehicle miles traveled, which reduces wear on the roads the city is already struggling to maintain. We have a chance to implement truly forward-thinking fiscal policy, we just have to be willing to admit that we can’t do it without density.
So many great points made in these comments. Something I’ve never understood is why we don’t have more private investment in projects in Boulder. In my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, philanthropy makes all large public projects possible. There’s a beautiful new downtown city park thanks to the wealthiest in town pitching in. Why can’t the millionaires who live here donate to the rec centers, etc? A town filled with impossibly wealthy people and yet, somehow, we are broke and can’t even have public swimming pools.
It’s due to a mix of entitlement mentality and incomprehension. Not unlike the high tech billionaire bros engineering the AI revolution to the detriment of all of us except those positioned to make yet more millions and billions. This sickness of spirit and soul permeates Boulder on multiple levels. It’s just selfishness and greed writ large.
The city constantly is raising taxes by using fees which don’t need a city wide vote. The fees have a greater impact on the lower end of the economic population. Meanwhile the city has at least six corporations with over 1 Trillion dollar valuations. These include Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook(Meta) and Tesla. How about trying to get money from the upper end of the economic spectrum? Just make up a fee like the city does to people with lower incomes.
As noted by others, I understood that the Alpine /Broadway complex was intended to address the worst city facilities, bringing departments together in one place and getting rid of old buildings. The project cost more than expected (didn’t seem to do basic due diligence), sat vacant for many years discussing options for use, and I’m not sure what the current goal is for the site and how it addresses the city infrastructure problems. In your description of worst needs, this new facility doesn’t seem to address any of those. Council needs to build some credibility with the community by providing information on this project and the true priorities before you can have any expectation of support for future projects.
Alpine Balsam(AB) is a project that should have been nixed as soon as a clear budget picture was coming into view showing flattening revenues. At this point, once complete, the property should be sold to private investors and revenue spent on projects that benefit the community and have more impact to existing City facilities. A major part of the City’s projected funding for AB were substantial increases in property taxes year over year. Since the state capped annual property tax increase at under 4% (City was looking at 14+% increases annually 😮 ), the City has been scrambling to cover AB’s massive cost and other outstanding obligations, like deferred maintenance and debt repayment. Now the City is issuing more bonds, syphoning dedicated funds from departments by significantly increasing general fund allocations without any returns, and consolidating departments for access to dedicated sales taxes to boost mismanaged departments. The big, long-term kicker – a ballot measure to create one bucket of sales tax revenue to be arbitrarily distributed by City management to fund transportation, parks & rec and open space departments. Also, what I have heard from trusted sources is for regular city staff at AB, there are no dedicated, personal desks or offices unless in a leadership or favored position. The space is built out for a hybrid work schedule, meaning 3 days in the office and 2 at home. Without dedicated desks, staff needs to reserve their work space, which is a monitor on a desk and chair, for the day they plan to work in the office. Possible staff will also need to pay to park personal vehicles, but general parking for staff and fleet vehicles in that area is another issue(good luck AB adjacent neighborhoods…!) From what I heard from people at the City is that a large portion of City staff is not excited about AB and are seeking alternative work spaces. Another thing to note, and it has been a while since first learning about it, but the City may be working on a rebrand. Mainly for the centralized AB office for uniformity across departments, and likely Sundance influenced. It’ll replace any existing branding unique to departments or initiatives. It’s another opportunity for staff and leadership to spend on a project with relatively low return for the community. Arguable if the city needs a full replacement of existing branding at times of revenue concerns, but optics and marketing seem to be more important than fiscal restraint and constituent centered spending. But hey, nothing to see here. The great people of Sundance will save us!