📚 Boulder’s proposed library district, explained

Debate over Boulder’s proposed library district is about to come to a head. Here’s what you need to know.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, David Farnan, director of the Boulder Library and Arts Department, agreed to slash his budget by 15%. It was among the deepest cuts to any city department in response to Covid-19. Farnan said he didn’t have much of a choice. 

“I had to lay off 66 people. But to be honest with you, if I were the city manager, I don’t know if I could have done anything else,” Farnan said. “Do we cut public safety? Would that have been a better choice?”

Nearly two years later, many of those cuts remain in place. The Canyon Theater is still closed. The adult literacy program, BoulderReads, is without a manager. And the Carnegie Library, the city’s primary archive for local history, is still understaffed, partially closed and running out space for historical documents. 

The city’s library funding has long been dicey, advocates for the library lament, and the pandemic only exacerbated the problem. 

“The biggest problem is every time there is a downturn, the library is the first one to get cut,” said Joni Teter, a member of the Boulder Library Champions and the city’s Library District Advisory Committee (LDAC). 

For years, Teter and others have been calling for the creation of an independent library district that would remove the library from municipal control. The district would become its own government entity — paid for with its own pot of money generated from property taxes — and would oversee a region with several libraries and a wider range of services.

The most recent proposal for a library district was developed by the 12-member LDAC, which the Boulder City Council appointed in 2021 to explore the creation of a district. In February 2022, the committee came back with a detailed recommendation for how to do so. 

This week, the Boulder City Council and the Board of County Commissioners will vote on a resolution to decide whether this proposal moves ahead.

The votes mark a major milestone in the long-running effort to shore up what proponents say would be a more sustainable funding source for the city’s libraries, and what opponents say could be an added financial burden — particularly on small businesses and residents already struggling to afford housing.

‘The work never stops’: Boulder’s top traffic engineer on the city’s shift in safety priorities from local streets to arterial roadways

Traffic hums constantly through arterial roadways like Broadway and 28th Street in Boulder. As the name suggests, these streets act as vital arteries that move large numbers of people — in cars, on bikes and on their feet — throughout the city on a given day.

The large volume of traffic on arterial streets naturally leads to more conflict on the road, and thus a larger share of accidents. The city’s 2022 Safe Streets Report found 65% of severe crashes are occurring on these major thoroughfares. 

As a result, the City of Boulder announced earlier this month it would begin shifting its transportation safety focus away from local streets and toward the development and improvement of the city’s Core Arterial Network (CAN) through “a connected system of protected bike lanes, intersection enhancements, pedestrian facilities and transit upgrades that will help make it safer, more comfortable and more convenient for people to get where they need to go via Boulder’s main corridors.” 

Devin Joslin, principal traffic engineer for the City of Boulder, spoke to Boulder Reporting Lab about the Safe Streets data, and what this shift will mean for Boulderites looking for safety improvements to local streets.

Boulder Reporting Lab receives Chronicle of Philanthropy reporting fellowship to examine local climate disaster relief and recovery through Marshall Fire fund

Boulder Reporting Lab (BRL) has won a one-year journalism fellowship to examine the unique role played by community foundations in climate disaster relief and recovery, through its reporting on the Boulder County Wildfire Fund. The fund, administered by the Community Foundation Boulder County, has raised an unprecedented amount of donations since the devastating Marshall Fire turned neighborhoods to ash on Dec. 30, 2021, destroying more than a thousand homes and displacing residents.