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The frequency frequently.

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Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, July 22nd. I'm your host, Shay Castle. And this is the Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. This episode is brought to you by Central City Opera. Since 1932, Central City Opera has been one of Colorado's favorite arts traditions, bringing world-class talent to a 19th-century opera house in historic Central City. This summer, CCO is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the world premiere of the Ballad of Baby Doe. The show tells the scandalous historical love story of silver baron Horace Tabor, who left his wife Augusta for Baby Doe. The performance rocked Denver society and today remains a staple of Colorado history. You can also catch the marriage of Figaro, Masterclass, and CCO in concert this season, with the cast featuring talent from the Met, San Francisco Opera, and beyond. Tickets start at $32, and the festival runs through August 2nd. Visit centralcityopera.org to learn more. Coming up, we talk about potential wage cuts for bartenders, wait staff, and other tipped workers in the city of Boulder, plus the systemic and sometimes intentional barriers to their participation in the process that might leave them with smaller paychecks. But first, the headlines are not a little bit of a lot of people. Employees are attempting to form a union they say is necessary to protect themselves from staffing cuts and increased workloads. The Dolderado is one of the city's oldest businesses, in operation for more than 117 years. Last year, Nashville-based AJR Capital Partners bought a majority share of the business from longtime local hospitality magnate Frank Day. Workers told the Daily Camera that hotel management has held a number of, quote, union busting meetings targeting the lowest paid and Spanish-speaking employees. Hospitality Union Unite Here has issued a travel warning for all graduate hotels by Hilton amid alleged unfair labor practices at multiple properties. Hotel Dolderado is set to become a graduate property after its purchase by AJR, which owns the brand focused on college towns. Learn more and see updates from Unite Here at the links in our show notes. A lease for Colorado's second ICE detention facility is set to begin August 1st. As we previously reported on this show, a former 1200-bed prison in Hudson is being reactivated as Bighorn Correctional Facility. Geo Group, which operates the Aurora Detention Center, last week announced it had been granted a five-year, $528.7 million contract to operate the Immigrant Detention Center in Hudson. Activists have, for months, been showing up to Hudson's town meetings to urge local government officials to take action and stop the reopening of the facility.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

This is a concentration camp that's gonna have uh over a thousand bodies in there. This is just gonna be a lot of people going in to a place where they're not going to get the care, they're not going to basically be treated like people.

SPEAKER_05 3:50

Many other awesome bands.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

These are things that we've brought up to town hall, and we keep bringing it up because they don't want to put it on the agenda. So every single time we go to town hall, they refuse to put it on the agenda and they don't want to put it on the agenda. And uh we want them to listen to the public and give us a say. Their whole stance is just hands off. We can't do anything we don't know, we don't know, we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

That's Jennifer Montes. She appeared on our January 14th show to talk about her efforts to persuade Hudson's town board. Officials contend they do not have the authority to overrule the federal government. Read more from the Colorado Sun at the link in our show notes.

SPEAKER_04 4:35

So compared to fast tracks in 2004, the costs weren't modeled out beforehand. We've already negotiated with the Class One railroads. Those operating costs are already locked in with BNSF Railway. And we move straight to design. And we focused on utilizing existing freight class one corridors and existing tracks that we are going to lease from the class one railways for delivering service. There is no need for right-of-way acquisition. We do not need to use eminent domain or condemnation. And so we sort of flipped the fast tracks model on its head. Fast tracks sold a great vision, and then they went to planning. We've done our planning and now we're ready to go and deliver.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Listeners might remember Sal Pace. He joined the Frequency in May to talk about Coco, the new passenger train coming to the front range. A plan released Monday shows Coco will cost $200 million annually to operate and up to $5 billion to get to full build-out. Voters will this fall weigh a tax to fund more frequent trips between Fort Collins, Denver, and Pueblo. Regardless of whether or not that tax passes, three daily trips are planned along that route beginning in 2029, with funding already secured via the RTD Fast Tracks tax voters have been paying for since the early 2000s. If you want to learn more about Coco, there are two town halls upcoming in Longmont and Boulder on July 23rd and July 28th, respectively. Find details on those and a link to our front range train episode in the show notes. Speaking of transportation-related meetings, residents of many Boulder County towns find themselves besieged by airplane noise. Citizens in Superior, Lafayette, Longmont, and Boulder have all petitioned their local governments to do something about those planes, with often limited success. Now, Longmont is hosting a town hall with that very topic in mind. What the city can and cannot do about airport noise is scheduled for 5.30 to 7.30 p.m. Monday, July 27th at Longmont Museum. Transportation Attorney John Putnam will be on hand to explain the powers and limitations of local government when they try to take on the feds. The City of Boulder is considering modifying the tipped wage offset. Does that collection of words mean anything to you? Unless you're an avid watcher of City Council, probably not. Let me translate it for you. Minimum wage in Boulder is $16.82 per hour, but food and beverage workers who earn tips get paid $13.80 per hour. The difference between the two wages is called the tip offset. Starting next year, Boulder is thinking about increasing the tip offset. Despite the word increase, it would actually mean less money for tipped workers. As a member of the working and not quite middle class, I consider wage cuts a big deal. So I'm devoting the entire week to this issue. Friday, we'll hear from a barista at a beloved Boulder breakfast spot and the manager of a dive bar to hear their objections to this plan and what they think the city should do instead to help local businesses like theirs. Today's episode is dedicated to explaining what City Council is doing and examining the ways in which workers are being shut out of the decision-making process. Let's start with why this is happening. Restaurant owners have lobbied elected officials for relief from the mounting cost of doing business. The calls for help increased after Boulder upped its minimum wage by 8% in 2025. That same year, Boulder's Judy Amabale sponsored a bill in the Colorado Senate to allow local governments to adjust the tipped wage. What exactly those changes might look like in Boulder are still to be determined. City Council took a preliminary vote on the issue June 25th and will hold a public hearing July 30th. But in an unusual move, they essentially left the ordinance as a fill-in-the-blank. They'll narrow down their options at the July 30th meeting. They could freeze the tipped wage in place, or they could allow it to increase as planned, just by less than originally scheduled. The other option is to leave it alone entirely. Without council action, tipped wages are set to rise to $15.15 per hour next year. Depending on what council does, workers could stand to lose thousands of dollars per year for full-time work at a time when they say tips are also decreasing amid an economic downturn. Some change to the wage is almost certain.

SPEAKER_06 9:22

There seems to be a majority, a close majority that's interested to change it. I don't know how much.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Now that we've established what council is considering, let's talk process. There are several things that are keeping workers from participating. Some of them are rules already in place, and some are deliberate choices made by your elected officials. First up is active outreach. This is something the city does or is supposed to do whenever it makes policy that impacts certain demographics. While reluctant to criticize his council colleagues or city staff, Ryan did agree the engagement process was not sufficient. Was council briefed on what sort of outreach, if any, has been done to reach tipped workers? I would say this is a group that by and large are tend to not be super involved or super present with in city matters.

SPEAKER_06 10:23

There was a little discussion about it in our um the most recent meeting we had that set the direction that we would be bringing this to a hearing. I'll be honest, I didn't find it very compelling, the amount of information and timeline that we're that we're giving folks that are impacted by this. This will happen now in really before students come back from CU.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

As Ryan alluded to, critics of the city have pointed out that nearly all action and discussion on this issue happened between semesters at CU Boulder. The city's online survey was open from April 21st to June 2nd. That's one week before finals through one month after graduation at CU Boulder. All three council votes on the tipped wage changes were scheduled during the summer. The majority of tipped workers in Boulder are older than college age, but CU students do make up a significant portion of the tipped workforce. As early as March, other council members were also petitioning for a process that included CU students to notes and audio shared from council planning meetings. Here's audio from a council planning meeting in May, in which Ryan attempted to shift the timeline. He was ultimately outvoted by his colleagues.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

There was a brief discussion. However, there was no consensus on the part of council about whether to wait for CU students to return or not.

SPEAKER_06 11:56

I suppose my take is it's a pretty large group of people who are affected. So I would prefer that we make an accommodation for four weeks or, you know, a month to let them speak for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

The second point I want to draw your attention to is the actual time of the July 30th meeting. It starts at 6 p.m., which is the regular starting time for council meetings. It's meant to accommodate a professional nine to five working schedule. But 6 p.m. is when a lot of tipped workers will be, well, working. That's an example of a systemic barrier to participation. Council didn't intentionally set the meeting during the dinner shift. They've always been held in the evenings. But council can and has moved meeting times before to accommodate other entities and events, like the Boulder Valley School District or County Commissioners. True, I've never seen them move an evening meeting to a morning or afternoon, but they could, if they wanted to. This time, they didn't.

SPEAKER_06 12:51

I think from the standpoint of advocating to do it, if we're gonna do it, let's do it sooner than later so that businesses and others know what we're doing, so that there's stability, there's certainty.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

To be fair to the city, the initial vote was delayed to allow a longer time frame for community engagement, but it doesn't appear to have had much impact.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

We've now done a number of canvassing events and gone out and talked to the workers, and what we hear from them is frustration. Some of them have known about it, most don't.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

That's Alejandra Beatty, president of the Boulder Area Labor Council. Alejandra and others have been organizing in recent weeks to try and convince council not to cut wages. Alejandra points to the inherent unfairness of tipping as a practice. Originally imported by English aristocrats and those that hope to imitate them, tipping became widespread in the U.S. after the Civil War. Companies like railroads could avoid paying newly freed black workers a wage. Even today, study after study shows tips are not spread equally. People of color and people with visible disabilities are routinely tipped less. That means changes to base wages will be felt more by those workers.

SPEAKER_03 14:05

It continues to be a racist system. So we shouldn't be doing anything that exasperates that and adds to it. And an additional change in the tip of credit, and what I call reducing the sub-minimum wage, is doing just that. Exasperating a system that really we should actually all vote to not do that. And I would encourage restaurants to consider cool tips and other more equitable means to make those adjustments.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Alejandra sees a troubling pattern when it comes to government action on wages. Boulder County last year rolled back its planned minimum wage increases at the behest of business owners and farmers. Farm workers in Colorado will soon have to work 56 hours per week before qualifying for overtime. Thanks to legislation passed this session. Those rules go into effect January 1st, the same time any changes to Boulder's tipped wage would be implemented. The timing is ironic, Alejandra says. Given Sundance's debut in Boulder mere weeks later, she worries it could boil over into strikes or walkouts.

SPEAKER_03 15:12

So this is boiling into a labor dispute. Like we should not be paying workers less pay when we're talking about an influx into this town of lots and lots of people. To me, it still feels like it's the same conversations that we had during minimum wage. Of if we want to build a better economy for everybody, are we so sure that we're doing this right?

unknown 15:39

It feels like there's a gap somewhere. Why don't we have a plan that starts to address some of what's going on for these restaurants?

SPEAKER_03 15:48

And sometimes I feel like, well, that's because the plan might include taxing some of our own rich people. And I think there's a bunch of them that don't want to see that happen. And I think that's what's going on behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Ryan, too, opposes changes to the tipped minimum wage, preferring to focus on solutions to help businesses without punishing workers. The son of convenience store owners, he said it's been a journey to arrive at his current position.

SPEAKER_06 16:14

We have such great affordability challenges. It's very hard to live in town and be a wage worker here. It's hurting our economy. It's hurting the services that we have. It's undermining our ability to run the town effectively, that we we don't make it affordable enough for people who work here to be able to live here. So I have changed on this and come to find that it's just so much more fundamental that we are helping workers, doing the most we can to help workers to try to be able to afford to live here and have a life here. I think our best chance is to try to rise tides by doing things that are good for business and not taking it from the workers.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Like how do you even speak at the July 30th meeting and let council know what you think they should do with wages. It's not easy to navigate if you're not used to it. To help you out, we'll drop step-by-step directions in our show notes. Thanks to Ryan and Alejandra for speaking with me. Tune in Friday when we hear from the biggest voices missing from this conversation, the workers themselves. We're ending today's show with a quote from Ben Soy of Holy Fool. Holy Fool is the sponsor of Lucifer's Last Rodeo, the DIY music festival happening in Denver this week, July 23rd to 26th. Find tickets and info at Bluciferfest.org and listen to my full interview with Ben on the June 19th episode of The Frequency. Before you go, here's one more thing.

SPEAKER_05 17:58

This is maybe a little bit harsh, but it's like if you watch the Grammys, a lot of the music that like sort of gets reinforced in that major sort of industry is just primarily it's it's propping up what we already know or what we used to believe. There's not a real heart to it. But when you go to like the unknown songwriter that like is way too weird and way too angular for like the mainstream stuff, it's just like, oh, there's something really vibrant going on there. So yeah, more and more just as I witness and friendships and community with songwriters you've never heard of and probably likely will never hear of, because it that it normalizes that value of like the arts are supposed to be participated in. It's not for these sacred anointed people over here. It's just like for it's for all of us, for normal folks, right?