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 the Boulder Progressives’ Raucous Caucus on June 6, candidates began to outline 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 re-election. 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.
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.
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 in Boulder, a longstanding challenge because it often falls between affordable housing programs and traditional 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.
Candidates also 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 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,” said Grano, who also works in real estate.
Duran said she has been working to ensure the economic benefits of Sundance reach local small businesses, particularly Latino-owned businesses.
Another major topic was the city’s finances. Boulder is facing a second consecutive year of a multi-million 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 sharpest questions focused on issues that have divided city council this year, including 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 issue could return to council soon. 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.
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 Safety, 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 an effort to place such a measure on the ballot 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 it would be that “people can live here when they couldn’t before, their voices are heard in a way that they never were, and then we have a city government that’s looking after people struggling the most.”
The deadline to qualify for the ballot is in late August.
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 More Mobility, an organization that advises local governments on multimodal transportation 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.
