Scott Rendleman is a first-time candidate for Boulder City Council running on a platform of climate resilience, particularly wildfire preparedness, stronger trust in government and more affordable housing.
Rendleman has practiced law for nearly 30 years, spending much of his career representing healthcare providers in medical malpractice cases, according to his LinkedIn profile.
At an Aug. 26 Boulder Chamber candidate forum, Rendleman said he supported creating a Downtown Development Authority, which would use a portion of new tax revenue to invest downtown. He opposed Boulder’s proposed $400 million Recreation and Safety Bond and a statewide sales-tax measure to fund passenger rail.
Rendleman has identified increasing the housing supply as one of his priorities. However, he was among the candidates who did not support developing roughly 10,000 additional homes by 2032, the number the Denver Regional Council of Governments estimates Boulder needs to meet demand and prevent rents and home prices from rising further out of reach.
Rendleman moved to Boulder with his family in 2011 because he considered it “the best place in America to raise a family and pursue our careers.” He lives in Newlands with his wife, son and daughter.
Occupation: Attorney
Neighborhood: Newlands
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?
I would support policies that provide incentives to our first responders and our teachers to live Boulder. We will need to build more missing middle housing, including duplexes, triplexes, smaller homes and homes with some land to appeal to the variety of buyers in this market. Development of this housing also could occur, carefully, in the Area III planning reserve. To reduce costs for these homes, I support review and revision of regulations that make smaller, moderately priced homes in order to make them easier to build. I would also support developing relationships area realtors or having an internal buyer’s agent available for first responders and teachers that would accept a reduced commission of 1.25%, similar to what happens in Boulder’s affordable home program.
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?
I support expansion of the rapid exit / rapid resolution approach recommended by the 2025 Clutch Report. I would support dedicated staff working through All Roads Shelter to assist with identifying and transporting a person to a safe place to stay. If someone has family or other support in another community, staff should help connect that person in that community. Staff should also work with veteran groups to assist members of the homeless community who have served in our armed forces. I would recommend funding these efforts through the city’s homelessness budget, along with funding from county and available state funding.
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?
These ongoing problems will require creative and flexible thinking on how we address the deferred maintenance backlog. We should first identify which properties in Boulder’s facility portfolio we can sell or repurpose for permanently affordable housing. We should then follow a prioritized and phased plan that puts building serving residents first. I do not support the $400 million bond, because the deferred maintenance backlog and the Alpine Balsam cost overruns have Boulder residents not trusting that the city will spend the money wisely. As far as management changes, I support a pilot of an independent performance monitor to identify where tax money is achieving its purposes and where programs need improvement.
Flock: Would you end Boulder’s use of automated license plate readers, yes or no? Why or why not?
At this moment, no, I am not ready to end Boulder’s use of automated license plate readers. The license plate readers can help police find missing people and investigate serious crimes. These are legitimate public safety purposes. As a lawyer, I look at what are a person’s expectation of privacy in public. A person’s use of cell phones, which transmits much greater information than a license plate, must be taken into consideration for an expectation of privacy weighed against the benefit of legitimate police investigation. That said, given the cases of abuse of FLOCK, we should require an audit trail of the system that shows who accessed the system. We should also put in place enforceable restrictions on information sharing. Finally, the city should prohibit the use of FLOCK as a monitor of political engagement or immigration enforcement.
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?
No, it’s not time for mandates that existing homeowners must retrofit their homes to meet Boulder’s Wildland-Urban Interface Code. Homeownership is already expensive, and homeowners should be given time to fully implement the Code’s recommendations that were adopted just two years ago. Several insurers are already expecting Colorado homeowners to engage in wildfire hardening for insurance discounts. This process should be allowed to play out. In addition, we can have home sales in the Wildland-Urban Interface should include a WUI Code compliant disclosure which could become a point negotiation between buyer and seller.
Is the city doing enough to push Xcel Energy to prevent or limit wildfire-related power shutoffs? What more should it do?
The power shut offs that occurred in December 2025 demonstrate that more needs to be done with Xcel. Boulder businesses had to close, and many restaurants lost food inventory. Residents too lost power and experienced significant interruptions in their daily lives. Residents and business need earlier accurate notices and updates during an outage. After each major shutoff event, Xcel should report to Council what the planning was before the shutoff, how long the shutoff lasted, whether the shutoff duration was timely predicted and whether the shutoff was for the shortest time possible. Council should also press Xcel for recommendations for improvements in all phases of a wildfire-related shut-off.
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?
I would support a reconsideration of the Downtown Development Authority to focus on assisting businesses open or expand downtown or on University Hill. I would prioritize making it easier to open or expand a business in an empty storefront by reducing overlapping and unnecessary regulation, which tend to lengthen review of applications. Reviews across departments of business applications should also have a dependable schedule. The delay that business owners encounter because of city review needs to be half of what it currently is.
Closer: Imagine it is November 2027, one year after your election. What is one specific thing you will have accomplished?
I will have voted with other members of City Council to pilot an Office of Independent Performance Monitoring that will begin reporting on which city programs are achieving their intended function and which city programs need improvement.