Boulder City Council entered its last term with six members endorsed by the Boulder Progressives, suggesting a unified majority. But voting records tell a more complicated story. On contested votes, outcomes were most often shaped by five councilmembers, while a sixth, despite sharing the endorsement, frequently broke from that bloc on the council’s most divisive issues.
That’s one takeaway from Boulder Reporting Lab’s analysis of votes cast by the city council from the time it was seated on Dec. 7, 2023, through the end of its term in late 2025. During that period, the council included Mayor Aaron Brockett and Councilmembers Taishya Adams, Matt Benjamin, Lauren Folkerts, Tina Marquis, Ryan Schuchard, Nicole Speer, Mark Wallach and Tara Winer.
The analysis is based on a vote tracker Boulder Reporting Lab launched in 2024. The tracker is based primarily on official, signed meeting minutes. It also includes some less formal votes, such as a “nod of five,” which are not always reflected in the minutes. In those cases, vote counts were gathered directly from council meetings.
The tracker includes more than 120 votes on ordinances, resolutions, site review applications, executive sessions and other matters that came before the council. It captures how individual councilmembers voted, when members were absent and how votes split.
With a new council seated in December 2025, here are six takeaways from the previous term. Those patterns may help inform how voters assess the next round of races, as Boulder heads into another election for five seats in 2026, including mayor.
Coalitions
At first glance, the balance of power on Boulder City Council appeared straightforward. Six of the nine members serving during the last term were endorsed by the Boulder Progressives, a local organization that lists housing affordability, transportation safety, homelessness and labor issues as top priorities.
Those members were Mayor Brockett and Councilmembers Adams, Benjamin, Folkerts, Schuchard and Speer.
However, when looking only at nonunanimous votes, instances where councilmembers disagreed, that bloc voted together only about 30% of the time, indicating a looser coalition than the endorsements alone would suggest.
A closer look shows a more consistent five-member voting bloc. Brockett, Speer, Folkerts, Benjamin and Schuchard voted together on about 63% of nonunanimous votes. Adams aligned with that group far less often, breaking from the bloc on questions related to the war in Gaza, minimum wage, micro-unit housing and the creation of a short-term rental license for the Sundance Film Festival.
Looking at the full record, councilmembers voted unanimously more than 70% of the time when considering 122 votes taken during the last term. That percentage ignores absences, meaning votes were counted as unanimous even when one or more councilmembers was absent.
The most contentious issues
The council split 5-4 on just two votes, both of which cut across the council’s political blocs. One involved the decision to call up a site review application to build 45 “efficiency living” micro units at 2206 Pearl Street, after the Planning Board had already approved the project.
Calling up the application triggered a public hearing and meant councilmembers could vote to deny the site review plan application. Wallach, Marquis, Winer, Adams and Schuchard voted to call it up.
The council later approved the project 7-2, with “no” votes from Adams and Wallach.
The other 5-4 vote was on the “Folkerts amendment” that would have set the city’s minimum wage 15% above the state minimum in 2025, with the goal of matching Denver’s wage by 2027. Brockett, Speer, Folkerts and Schuchard voted in favor of the amendment, while Adams, Benjamin, Wallach, Marquis and Winer voted against it. The measure failed, and the council later approved a lower local minimum wage.
Other narrow 6-3 decisions included suspending in-person meetings at the start of 2025, approving a site review application for the St. Julien Hotel expansion, and voting to revisit the city’s investment portfolio.
In those votes, councilmembers endorsed by the Boulder Progressives did not vote together, with members breaking from the group depending on the issue.
Councilmembers Marquis, Wallach and Winer have been endorsed by groups such as PLAN-Boulder County, which has long advocated for protecting open space, and Boulder Elevated, which supports creating more affordable low- and middle-income housing and enforcing the city’s camping ban. That group of councilmembers voted together about 56% of the time.
Priorities
Housing affordability is one of the most pressing issues in Boulder, and it emerged as a top priority for the council based on the number of votes taken.
The city council voted on eight housing-related ordinances, making housing the most common single category of ordinance votes. These included repealing growth caps, amending rental license rules to address nuisance issues, allowing duplexes and triplexes in low-density neighborhoods, repealing occupancy limits, loosening restrictions on accessory dwelling units, allowing short-term rentals during the Sundance Film Festival, and imposing a new fee on demolition and rebuild projects.
‘Call ups’
The council rarely decides to call up housing projects after they have been approved by the Planning Board, triggering a public hearing that can add time, uncertainty and costs for developers.
The projects the council did call up include the Williams Village II project, which involved demolishing the Dark Horse. The council later approved the project, agreeing with the Planning Board. The council also called up the efficiency living unit project on Pearl Street and later approved it, again agreeing with the Planning Board. Councilmembers also called up a site and use review application for a project in the Goss-Grove neighborhood, overriding the Planning Board’s denial and allowing the project to proceed.
The council never denied a site review plan for a housing project.
In all, the council effectively approved about 1,400 housing units at the concept plan phase, the earliest phase of review, and more than 900 units at the site review phase, closer to construction. These projects include apartments, townhomes, independent living units and housing intended for students.
Council approval does not mean developers moved forward with the projects.
Attendance
Boulder Reporting Lab’s vote tracker covers 55 city council meetings during the last council’s term. It does not include study sessions, which are meetings when the council does not cast formal votes.
The two councilmembers who attended every council meeting were former Mayor Pro Tem Folkerts and Councilmember Marquis. All councilmembers attended meetings virtually at least once. Mayor Brockett and Councilmember Winer each missed four meetings, the most for a councilmember that term.
Despite those attendance patterns, all councilmembers were present for meetings in which issues came down to a narrow single-vote margin, suggesting they generally showed up when it mattered most.
Executive sessions
In 2024, voters approved a ballot measure allowing all nine councilmembers to meet in private executive sessions. Since the measure took effect at the start of 2025, councilmembers held eight executive sessions during the previous term.
The subjects of those meetings included negotiating contracts with the police union, legal advice related to the Sundance Film Festival, guidance on metropolitan districts, emerging federal guidelines under the Trump administration, and how to manage meetings following disruptions related to protests over the war in Gaza.
This is really good! Tracking actions and data for the city is great. We also have data in the city on usage of facilities (auto traffic) bicycle traffic by street/intersection, pedestrian traffic, library usage, police data on arrests and actions, sales tax collections by category, parking revenue, etc. All of the operational results. Start creating actual data summaries so we can see how we are doing. Good work.
Hey John and BRL. This is great work and very informative. It clearly shows the NextDoor crowd, who claim that the “Progressives” are some sort of monolithic block, are in fact not.
It would be great to expand the visual table to include the airport and other land use issues. This is where councilors who are labeled “conservative” or “progressive” have broken rank and voted for or supported initiatives different from what their labels would suggest.