Updated on Jan. 4, 2026.

Boulder Reporting Lab’s Boulder City Council Vote Tracker is a tool to help you better understand how your city councilmembers vote on a wide range of issues.

This project compiles all published meeting minutes from the city council term that began with the swearing-in on Dec. 7, 2023, the most recently completed term, and organizes them into a single, publicly available spreadsheet. This resource will be updated as new meeting minutes are released. A new council was seated on Dec. 4, 2025. Votes from the current term will be added as meeting minutes are released. Read our latest analysis of council votes (January 2026), and how they reveal that, despite their endorsements, voting blocs on the council are more fractured than they might seem. The tracker is designed not only to support our own reporting, but also to allow anyone to explore the data and conduct their own analyses.

Why this matters

Our primary goal is to give voters a clear, accessible way to see where councilmembers stand on key issues, especially in election years, when understanding what they actually did can help cut through the heat, emotion and rhetoric. This project promotes transparency, making it easier to track decisions made by elected officials. Currently, meeting minutes are only available in PDF format through the city’s central records archive, which makes comparing votes over time a challenge.

The tracker documents:

  • Formal votes on ordinances, housing projects, ballot measures and other city business.
  • Informal votes like “nods of five,” where councilmembers signal agreement to move items forward without formal votes.

What’s included

The spreadsheet is built using official, signed meeting minutes and includes details on:

  • Councilmember attendance.
  • Votes on various topics like housing, climate change and budget measures.
  • The most recently approved minutes.

The tracker does not yet include:

  • Call-ups for landmark alteration certificates.
  • Votes taken on consent agenda items, which are approved without discussion.

Here’s a chart highlighting some of the most high-profile votes from the past term.

Future plans

As this project evolves, we aim to expand the dataset to include:

  • Historical data from earlier councils to identify trends and provide context for current decisions.
  • A broader range of council actions, including consent agenda votes and additional informal decisions.

With more data, our community will gain a clearer picture of how decisions are made and where councilmembers differ on critical issues. This is the only public resource we know of for comparing Boulder City Council voting data.

Your input matters

This tracker is a community resource, and we welcome your feedback to make it as useful as possible. Please explore the dataset and share your thoughts with John Herrick at john@boulderreportinglab.org.