Ryan Jamieson is running for Boulder City Council on a platform of climate resilience, simpler zoning, fiscal stewardship and housing affordability.
Jamieson served in the Army for four and a half years, including a tour during the invasion of Iraq, and received a Bronze Star. After leaving the Army, he earned a degree from Arizona State University.
Jamieson worked for about six years as an internal auditor at American Express before moving into cybersecurity. Three years ago, he founded Knit Security, which provides cybersecurity consulting and services to businesses.
Jamieson has made addressing what he calls the city’s “Kafkaesque” bureaucracy a central focus of his campaign. He proposes hiring a full-time, independent city auditor who would operate as “a peer to the city manager.”
“Both the Army and Amex were big lessons in navigating bureaucracy effectively, and my time as an auditor taught me the value of the role,” he said.
Jamieson opposes the city’s use of Flock Safety cameras and supports stronger enforcement of Boulder’s camping ban.
He also opposes the proposed $400 million Recreation and Safety Bond. Jamieson cites the lengthy and costly redevelopment process at Alpine-Balsam, where the city plans to build housing and a municipal campus, as evidence that Boulder should demonstrate it can complete smaller projects before taking on larger ones.
“I think we should prove first that we can actually execute against smaller projects before we take on bigger ones,” he said.
Politically, Jamieson describes himself as a pragmatist. He said he agrees with progressives on the need for more affordable housing and with moderates on supporting a strong business community.
“Whoever can help in making things work well, I’m happy to work with,” he said.
Jamieson moved from New York to Denver for work with his wife and son more than six years ago. The family moved to Boulder shortly afterward “because Boulder is awesome and we found ourselves making way more friends up here.”
Occupation: Cybersecurity consultant
Neighborhood: Newlands
Rent or own?: Own
Answers to questionnaire
Affordable housing: Market-rate homes are out of reach for many teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters. What would you do to create more housing these middle-income residents can afford? What regulations, if any, would you change to lower the cost of building or renovating homes?
Teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters want to live here, and we want them here, but the reality is that the majority can’t afford a detached single family home here. What can work instead is attached housing like duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, condos, and apartments near where they work. Montgomery County, Maryland is a lesson in what’s possible: they built a revolving construction loan fund that’s grown to $100M and since cheaper public money is replacing private equity they’re building mixed income projects without relying on tax credits. I also think community land trusts need a comeback so we can take our really expensive land costs out of the equation.
On Regs, I want an in-house rewrite that lets far more projects proceed by right, following the themes outlined in the BVCP, but that is tied with limits on rentals and is neighborhood aware to address some unintended consequences we’re seeing play out given changes to state law. I want to shift our green mandates to incentives so we’re not driving up costs on the housing we most need and fix permits and reviews that increase costs through delays and arbitrary revisions.
Homelessness: What is one approach Boulder has not tried, or has not tried at scale, to address homelessness that you would bring to the council, and how should the city pay for it?
Homelessness is not a uniform problem with a simple solution and I wish we stopped implying that we’re just “one weird trick” away from solving it. The reason someone becomes homeless could be financial, addiction-related, due to mental health, or simply just having nowhere else to go after home became unsafe or untenable. The team at All Roads does an amazing job navigating the intertwined reasons someone ends up at their door, but they put in huge amounts of work, and that’s what’s really needed: lots of time and lots of effort. I think we also need to be laser focused on the criminal elements that prey upon our homeless neighbors, selling them drugs and creating an even more unsafe environment for them. That requires tighter coordination between the city, county, and state criminal justice functions, from BPD to the county sheriff to our state courts. No one is served by keeping it easy to score fentanyl or meth on the street, and we can help the most vulnerable among us if we do a better job taking those drugs out of the equation.
Governance: Boulder is entering its third straight year of budget cuts while facing a roughly $400 million backlog of major facility needs. How do you assess the problem, and what specific spending, revenue or management changes would you support?
Boulder has made it arduous and expensive to open and run a business in town, which is a bold move for a city as heavily reliant on sales taxes to pay its bills as we are. Rewriting big parts of our municipal code and revising our permitting processes are a start to address the revenue side by getting new businesses into vacant spaces more quickly and getting more sales taxes in our coffers. As for the other side of the ledger, I worked as an internal auditor for American Express and it’s pretty clear to me that we need an internal audit team for our city, too, measuring performance of our projects and helping us understand if the dollars we’re spending are having a real impact towards what we want done, or if we’re vastly overpaying for an ill-defined project. So, let’s make it easier to get sales taxes in while clearly defining what it is we want them to go to, with measurements and reviews along the way.
Flock: Would you end Boulder’s use of automated license plate readers, yes or no? Why or why not?
I’ve worked in cybersecurity for more than twenty years and I’ve never seen a surveillance system that wasn’t eventually abused or a dataset that wasn’t eventually stolen. I understand the value of Flock to solve crimes related to automobiles and arrest criminals on the move. It has legitimate value there, which is important to note, and the data is valuable for legitimate law enforcement actions. But Flock devices record much, much more than just plates, and that data is collected and stored in a way that is repeatedly shown to be insecure or abused. Flock systems have been used to track Hispanics without cause at the behest of ICE, profile a Texan woman suspected of going out of state for an abortion, and even surveil participants at a No Kings rally. Flock profits by tracking all our movements, not just criminals.
I don’t want my car stolen. I also don’t want to live in a surveillance state. Insurance will pay for a stolen car, but what insurance do we have against abuse of our privacy?
Wildfire: Should Boulder adopt an ordinance requiring owners of existing homes and homeowners associations in high-risk areas to harden their properties against wildfire, yes or no? If yes, what should it require?
Is the city doing enough to push Xcel Energy to prevent or limit wildfire-related power shutoffs? What more should it do?
Hardening:
Yes, phased in, with the money to help people in place before any deadline.
Hardening one house doesn’t do much if the house next door goes up: the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety found a hardened home still has about a 90% chance of being lost when the one next door goes up. That makes this a neighborhood problem, not an individual one. The city needs to coordinate hardening efforts neighborhood by neighborhood to ensure we have a hardened perimeter that buys time for our first responders to extinguish any fire that threatens our town.
I’d base the ordinance on the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home standard and start with the high-impact items first: a noncombustible first five feet around the house, ember-resistant vents and soffits, noncombustible gutters with guards, and no wooden fence attached to the house. HOAs should handle common areas and shared fencing. We have to work together, and we have to work quickly, we don’t know when the next fire will happen on a windy day.
Xcel:
No. I’d push for undergrounding and hardening to follow the wildfire risk map instead of whatever’s easiest to build to start with. I’d want consequences written into the franchise when Xcel misses a benchmark, rather than another sternly worded letter. I also want to get the Public Utilities Commission to push harder on our behalf, because the Boulder isn’t the only city at risk of fire that Xcel services.
Local businesses and downtown: Many local businesses, especially downtown, are struggling with rising costs and stagnating sales. What city policy would you change to help businesses stay open and reduce commercial vacancies, and what would you do to bring more customers downtown?
City policy: Permitting. Businesses can spend months paying rent while navigating land-use, change-of-use, and building approvals, and shortening that is free rent relief. I’d widen substitution of use so more changes of use skip discretionary review, and use every flexibility available under the existing-building code so modest conversions don’t unnecessarily trigger whole-building upgrades. I’d also publish a plain-language guide for every permit and actual review times every quarter.
More customers: I supported the Downtown Development Authority, an established redevelopment tool in Colorado, and I’d bring it back built right this time, with the library district, county, and school district at the table early and the most likely first projects called out explicitly. I’d make pop-ups and events easier to permit, especially around Sundance, and put more officers on foot on Pearl and the creek path more frequently. Since 2019, downtown property values are down 19% and sales tax revenue is down 10%, and that sales tax pays for open space, fire, and human services, so this matters citywide.
Closer: Imagine it is November 2027, one year after your election. What is one specific thing you will have accomplished?
An independent City Auditor, appointed by and reporting to council, funded and staffed, with its first annual audit plan published. I think that’s realistic in a year, and it gives residents a way to check whether the city is doing what it says it’s doing, me included. Speaking of which, every November I’ll post on my website what I said I’d do and whether I actually did it, and November 2027 will be the first one.