Five seats on the Boulder City Council, including the mayor’s seat, are on the ballot this November, and candidates are already staking out positions on some of the city’s most contentious issues.
At Boulder Progressives’ Raucous Caucus on June 6, candidates outlined their views on housing growth, homelessness, tipped wages, the future of the municipal airport and how to address a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall.
Mayor Aaron Brockett and Councilmembers Tina Marquis, Ryan Schuchard and Tara Winer are seeking reelection. Also running are former Councilmember Jill Grano, Boulder Library District Board of Trustees member Benita Duran and Rachel Rose Isaacson, a Sierra Club-Indian Peaks executive committee member.
Councilmember Taishya Adams, who did not attend the event, declined to comment on whether she plans to seek reelection. If Adams does not run, hers would be the only council seat on the ballot without an incumbent seeking another term.
Brockett is the only candidate who has publicly expressed an intention to seek the mayor’s seat so far.
This year marks the first even-year city council election since Boulder voters approved a 2022 measure moving municipal elections from odd-numbered years to boost voter turnout. Supporters argued the change would increase participation among groups that tend to vote at lower rates in local elections, including younger voters and CU Boulder students.
The Raucous Caucus serves as an early look at where candidates stand on issues likely to shape the campaign.
Housing, growth and homelessness
A proposed vacancy tax could reach voters this fall, putting housing, growth and development at the center of the election.
Those issues surfaced repeatedly during the forum. Several candidates emphasized the need for more middle-income housing, a longstanding challenge that often falls between affordable housing programs and market-rate development.
Winer said she would like to see some of that growth occur in Area III, a 493-acre parcel northeast of the city that remains largely undeveloped. She pointed to North Boulder’s Holiday neighborhood as a model.
Marquis said she wants to revisit the city’s land-use code and cash-in-lieu policies to encourage more housing types.
Most candidates also said they would support legislation similar to a state bill proposed this year that would allow residential lot-splitting to create more housing. Brockett and Duran said they would not.
All candidates opposed prohibiting meal programs and homeless outreach efforts in downtown public spaces, including Central Park. The question appeared to reference a recent consultant report recommending that services be concentrated closer to the All Roads shelter in North Boulder and touched on a broader debate about the visibility of homelessness downtown.
The discussion later turned to Sundance and how the city can ensure local workers and businesses benefit from the economic activity the festival is expected to generate. Several candidates also raised concerns about housing inflation.
“I think one of the biggest risks to the festival is us exploiting housing and commercial spaces, and actually pushing residents out of the city,” Grano said.
Duran said she has been working to ensure the economic benefits of Sundance reach local small businesses, particularly Latino-owned businesses.
Airport, wages and city finances
Another major topic was the city’s finances. Boulder is facing a second consecutive year of a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall.
“This is a structural deficit because of the federal cuts, we are also constrained by TABOR, and we also have a flattening sales tax,” said Rose Isaacson. She said the city’s long-term financial strategy should be guided by community input.
Marquis pointed to 4% cuts the city is making across departments and to potential ballot measures that could generate additional revenue to address hundreds of millions in deferred infrastructure maintenance.
Schuchard argued that Boulder should rely more heavily on property taxes and less on sales taxes.
“We’re way too heavy in sales tax versus property tax,” he said. “ There’s a way to make a transitional swap that will be equitable and will create a more stable, spending funding source.”
Some of the evening’s most revealing exchanges focused on two issues that have divided city council this year: the future of the municipal airport and the minimum wage for tipped workers.
In April, city council directed staff to keep the municipal airport open indefinitely, a decision that could make it more likely the city accepts future federal grants that would further limit its ability to close the airport. The decision was made through a straw poll at a study session, without a public hearing or an official recorded vote.
Asked whether it was appropriate to make major decisions through a straw poll, every candidate said no.
The airport debate may not be over. Last month, councilmembers voted to hold a public hearing on the airport’s future, creating an opportunity to revisit the earlier decision. Brockett, Duran and Winer said they would support accepting federal grants that could require the city to keep the airport open in perpetuity. Marquis, Schuchard, Grano and Isaacson said they would not.
Candidates also weighed in on a proposal that would allow tipped workers’ base pay to rise more slowly than the city’s overall minimum wage, an issue that has exposed tensions between restaurant owners facing rising costs and workers concerned about slower wage growth.
Grano, Duran, Isaacson and Schuchard said they opposed the idea. Winer, Marquis and Brockett said they remained open to considering it.
Marquis said restaurant owners have told councilmembers they are struggling with rising labor, food and rent costs following a 2024 council vote to increase the minimum wage by 8%.
Candidates also expressed skepticism about expanding surveillance technology and said they opposed systems that combine license plate readers with facial-recognition capabilities. The question was likely inspired by Flock, which provides automated license plate readers to the Boulder Police Department. Flock says its license plate readers do not use facial-recognition software.
The city has faced criticism and a Flock-related lawsuit from residents concerned about privacy and immigration enforcement. Boulder has opened a bidding process that could bring in alternative vendors.
Candidates were also asked about a commercial vacancy tax. A local group recently dropped its own ballot effort after receiving assurances that councilmembers would pursue a similar proposal. The version now under consideration, however, is expected to apply only to vacant residential properties.
Only Duran and Grano said they would also support extending the tax to commercial spaces.
Near the end of the event, Brockett was given a chance to speak on his final, so far uncontested, run for mayor. He said he hoped his legacy would be that “people can live here when they couldn’t before, their voices are heard in a way that they never were, and that we have a city government that’s looking after people struggling the most.”
Candidates have until late August to qualify for the ballot.
Here are the likely candidates so far
Aaron Brockett grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee, a small college town. He attended Swarthmore College, where he majored in music and met his wife, Cherry Anderson. In 2003, they quit their jobs and moved to Boulder. They bought a townhome at the Wild Sage co-housing community in North Boulder’s Holiday neighborhood. They co-founded the software development firm Charon Software. Brockett served on the city’s Planning Board from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, he was elected to the Boulder City Council and was appointed mayor in 2021. In 2023, he was elected mayor.
Benita Duran, a public affairs consultant and member of the Boulder Library District Board of Trustees, served as an aide to Denver Mayor Federico Peña, the city’s first Hispanic mayor, from 1983 to 1991. She later worked as Boulder’s assistant city manager from 1993 to 2002. In 2019, she ran for city council in a crowded field of 15 candidates on a platform centered on housing density and bridging cultural and political divides. In 2022, she became director of equity and engagement for the National Civic League, a Denver-based nonpartisan nonprofit focused on local democracy and civic engagement. She now runs her own public affairs consulting firm.
Jill Grano, a real estate agent and community organizer, was elected to the Boulder City Council in 2017 before resigning in 2019 to become community affairs director for U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse. In April, she earned a master’s degree in urban geography from CU Boulder, writing a thesis on housing. She chaired the campaign for Boulder’s 2022 ballot measure to move city elections to even years, a change intended to boost voter turnout. Before serving on the council, she was a board member of New Era Colorado, a nonprofit focused on get-out-the-vote efforts among college students. Most recently, she worked with Gov. Jared Polis’ office on increasing rental housing availability during the Sundance Film Festival.
Tina Marquis served on the Boulder Valley School District’s District Accountability Committee, after volunteering at Foothill Elementary School, and later she was elected to the district’s Board of Education, where she served four years as president. Marquis has served on the board of CU Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs and volunteered with the Democratic Women of Boulder County. She was first elected to the Boulder City Council in 2023.
Rachel Rose Isaacson first ran for the Boulder City Council in 2025 while working as a barista at South Side Walnut Café. She serves on the Sierra Club-Indian Peaks executive committee and as pollinator ambassador with Cool Boulder. She graduated from Antioch College in 2019 with a degree in political economics and later earned a master’s in public administration and leadership from Ohio State University. Isaacson also served as treasurer for 2023 council candidate Aaron Gabriel Neyer.
Ryan Schuchard is originally from southern Oregon. He and his wife moved to Boulder in 2019 to live a “car-light lifestyle” near the Rocky Mountains. In the early 2000s, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan. He has since worked as a consultant for Business for Social Responsibility and is a founder of Moreworks, an organization he said “advises local governments on building stronger communities and climate resilience.” In 2021, he was appointed to the city’s Transportation Advisory Board, which advises the Boulder City Council on transportation issues and was elected to the Boulder City Council in 2023.
Tara Winer was born and raised in Brooklyn. She and her husband raised three daughters in West Philadelphia before moving to Boulder. She became involved in local politics by serving on the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board and the Community, Culture and Safety Tax Working Group. She works as a senior brand manager at ePromos Promotional Products, a sales and marketing company, and serves as member of the Downtown Boulder Community Initiatives, the charitable arm of the Downtown Boulder Partnership. She was first elected to the Boulder City Council in 2021.
Correction, June 8, 2026 2:39 pm: A previous version of this story referred to Ryan Schuchard's organization as "More Mobility." The title of the organization is Moreworks.
I hope there are several more people who are willing to run for City Council as I believe we need a change in direction. I’m sure all these candidates are civic-minded and (think) they want the best for Boulder. I also appreciate the difficulty of the job. But, it strikes me that few, if any, of these folks have lived in Boulder for very long and they seem to have come in with an agenda that is the opposite of what councils prior to roughly 2000 worked so hard to preserve (limited growth, open space, small city vs urban atmosphere, strong middle-class resident base, etc.). Almost everything that has happened in the past 25 years has made life less enjoyable in our city, especially for long-term residents (although the decrease in quality of life affects everyone). Add to that the fiscal irresponsibility that has occurred, and I simply can’t see how maintaining the status quo would behoove us.
The paddle-raise format at this forum didn’t leave much room for nuance.
Last July, City Council unanimously approved the Clutch Report recommendations, which included moving food and supply handouts to the All Roads Day Center rather than continuing them in Central Park. Incumbent Council candidtaes Brockett, Schuchard, Winer, and Marquis all voted for those recommendations.
The reason this question came up is that some individuals and nonprofits, such as Feet Forward, have chosen not to comply with city requests to move and discontinue distributing food and supplies in the park.
So I think this question and the reporting was a bit misleading. I know that some council members may support continuing limited outreach services in the Civic Area, but it’s not accurate to suggest that all of them support continuing food and supply handouts in Central Park. The yes/no paddle raise didn’t really capture those distinctions or the unanimous council vote that occurred last July.
The reporting was not misleading. The story accurately reported how the candidates answered the question that was asked at the forum.
Correction: The paddle raise was misleading. Most local political issues are far too nuanced for yes/no responses, and this was a perfect example. The incumbents’ response contradiction to the Clutch Consulting Report, approved by all council members including the 3 incumbents, probably indicates this topic deserves further investigation and understanding as to what the candidates’ positions truly are. Lightening round paddle raises are clearly not the best way for voters to learn about candidates.
Good summary, thank you. No candidates addressed Boulder Comp Plan, which the Big Picture-Long-term intentions for our Boulder Valley. Let’s look at Big Picture, 5-50years forward, gather many perspectives from everyone who lives here. Seven generations will appreciate our visionary place now called Boulder…which belongs to many tribes: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Navaho, Utes, Kiowa, many come here for collective knowledge, marriages, love.