SPEAKER_01 0:00

The frequency is frequently. Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, July 29th. 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 the Regional Air Quality Council. This summer, go wild for front-range air quality. Take simple steps for better air to help reduce ground-level ozone pollution and to protect your health. Taking public transit, carpooling, and combining trips, riding your bike, working from home, and going electric all help us breathe easier in the warm and sunny summer months. Know when it matters most by signing up for ozone alerts from the Regional Air Quality Council. Learn more at SimpleStepsbetterAir.org. Coming up, we're back at Boulder City Council to talk about a 30-year plan that could divert millions of dollars in tax revenue from the city's general budget to downtown redevelopment. We'll hear from the citizens who say that's a bad idea, as well as a proponent for downtown investment. But first, the headlines.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

If you hang on too tightly, you will become bound to the politics, not your values. Today I get to put that belief into practice. I've never believed in the indispensability of any individual in politics, and that is certainly applicable to me. But I believe in serving according to my values and with a sense of self-respect. And if I feel I can no longer do so, I will choose not to serve. I will not be a party to the surrender of our valuable airport land in perpetuity for no purpose, little consideration, failure to properly consider our alternatives, and entirely without the extensive community input that this subject requires. I will not be a party to elevating the interests of 50 to 60 resident pilots over what I regard are the interests of 107,000 residents. For once, simply being a recorded vote in opposition does not suffice. Accordingly, and in sorrowful protest, I am resigning as a member of the Boulder City Council, effective immediately.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

A Boulder City Councilman resigned mid-meeting on Thursday. Mark Wallach, first elected in 2019, tendered his resignation immediately following a vote on Boulder's airport. Wallach was among a group of residents advocating for the airport to be redeveloped into housing. The City of Boulder previously sued the Federal Aviation Administration for the right to do so, despite having accepted funds for the airport that the federal government argued requires Boulder to operate it as an airport indefinitely. The city's lawsuit was dismissed, and Boulder chose not to appeal. Thursday night's vote clarified that Boulder City staff could seek and accept additional federal grants in the future. Federal funds help pay for the operation and maintenance of the airport, which serves mostly small hobby planes, in addition to infrequently serving as a base of operations for fighting wildfires. Grants will still be subject to council approval. Wallach was the lone no vote on the matter, which he called a momentous and misguided decision. Wallach was elected to his third and final term as a council member last year and was set to serve through 2028. His seat will be filled in the November election, meaning six spots are up for grabs this fall. Erie residents are circulating a petition to overturn an oil and gas deal approved by the town council earlier this month. The split vote will allow SM Energy to drill under town land in exchange for property, $4.5 million in cash and share of production revenue. The deal was approved in a controversial second vote after an initial attempt failed in a tie. Citizens want to force the matter to a vote of the general public. They'll have to gather roughly 1,500 signatures. If successful, a special election would likely be held in December, according to Colorado Hometown Weekly. The newspaper also reported the consultant who brokered the deal submitted an invoice for his services for a total of $4.5 million. Read more at the link in our show notes.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Childcare is an infrastructure need in the economic sense alone. I mean, forget even just like the soul and spirit of the child. Thinking about childcare as a public good, big companies, they expect and need and rely on there being a healthy functioning system of childcare, but don't participate in making sure it's possible. It just becomes this invisible thing that we as parents, you know, have to kind of grapple with.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Boulder County residents will weigh a property tax increase this fall to fund the area's flailing child care support system. County commissioners last week advanced the tax to the November ballot. If passed, the initiative would raise an estimated $30 million per year to boost teacher pay, fund expansions of existing childcare providers, and subsidize care for low and middle-income families. The tax is estimated at $16 per $100,000 of home value, or under $10 a month, for a house worth Boulder County's median of roughly $750,000. Read more from Denver 7 at the link in our show notes. The clip that kicked off this headline was from Amy May of Treehouse Learning. Hear more from her about the cost of providing childcare in our July 1st episode. This next headline is a bit of personal news. I have been named one of the 2026 Women Who Light the Community, alongside other women in local media from the Daily Camera, Yellow Scene, and Boulder Reporting Lab. The awards are handed out by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce every year to women who have worked to address meaningful business, nonprofit, education, arts, and community needs. Recipients are chosen through a nomination process. I don't know who nominated me. Maybe it was one of you, my lovely frequency listeners. I continue to be grateful and humbled to be part of this community. I literally would not be here without your support, financial, emotional, and otherwise. Thank you so much. All the honorees will be celebrated at a September 2nd event. If you plan on going, please come say hi. I would love to meet you.

SPEAKER_04 7:14

We have a budget that's an annual budget. So long-term projects often in every city, not just in Boulder, but in every city get kind of kicked down the road because we need immediate wins to keep the things going. And there's limited resources, and there's a lot that needs to happen today. Cities have limited tools for development, for building, for growing, for investing in themselves. The DDA is an opportunity to invest future funds, basically to borrow against future revenue to create some infrastructure projects that will benefit the district long term.

SPEAKER_05 7:53

This would be a 30-year commitment with options to extend to 70 using a financing tool that most Boulder residents have never heard of. And City Council will be voting on August 6th on whether to send it to a ballot where fewer than 2,500 people will get to vote on putting this in place. Most people who are residents of Boulder who voted for dedicated taxes for purposes, open space, transportation, general funds, libraries, and schools, these are taxes that will be impacted by the DDA. Most people have no idea about what's about to happen. And there's an open question about whether it'll turn out well for everyone or whether it'll be a drain on our resources.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Those are essentially the two main arguments for and against the formation of a downtown development authority in Boulder. They are being delivered by Mike Mills of Boulder Progressives, arguing against, and Chip, formerly of the Downtown Boulder Partnership, and now a consultant on downtown and urban development with Big Creative Consulting. We'll hear more from Chip and Mike in a bit. But first, let's dive into what a downtown development authority is and why we're talking about it today on the show. We'll start with the why. It's easier to explain. On Thursday, August 6th, Boulder City Council might refer the formation of a DDA to the ballots. That's normally no big deal. Elected officials refer election items all the time. Voters don't really need to know about them until October, when ballots begin to be mailed out. But that's the thing with a downtown development authority, or DDA. Not everyone will get to vote on whether or not they want one in Boulder. The only people who will receive ballots are residents, business lessees, and property owners within the district. As currently proposed, Boulder's DDA would cover downtown and University Hill, running mainly along Broadway and stretching west as far as 7th Street and east as far as Folsom.

SPEAKER_05 10:00

This is a geographically gerrymandered confined kind of sequestration of our funds. And there have been concerns about many of our taxes being dedicated funds. That's exactly what this is. It's not even for all businesses in the city, it's just for businesses in this particular district. And so the interests that business owners may have can have ripple effects through the whole city. If you own 10 properties that have 10 individual corporations, you get to vote 10 times on the ballot on whether to form a DDA. If your 10 properties are all under one corporation, you get one ballot. This is true for property owners who don't even live in the state or in the country. So there are issues of democracy in that process. But that's how the state law works for DDAs.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

That's Mike Mills again from Boulder Progressives. The political party, one of Boulder's most influential, sounded the alarm about the DDA in part because of the limited number of people who will get to vote on it. Due to the way state law is structured, votes are tied to properties, not people. That gives large property owners an advantage. I reached out to fact-check Boulder Progressives' statement on property owners getting multiple votes. City staff said claims were oversimplified. No one individual could fill out multiple ballots, but businesses can designate individuals to represent them. So real estate holding companies who own multiple properties registered under different LLCs could, in fact, get more than one vote. It's complicated, like everything about this topic. Let's get back to the basics of what a DDA is. Downtown development authorities are quasi-governmental entities that allow cities to take advantage of a type of financing known as tax increment financing, or TIFF. It essentially freezes tax revenue in a given area for 30 years. Any growth in tax revenue over that time would go exclusively to the DDA. That leaves less money for everything else the city needs to pay for: parks, police, fire, streets, snow plowing, etc., because normally that money would go into the city's general fund, from which it finances the majority of its daily operations. Other taxing entities would also be foregoing revenue growth over the life of the DDA. That includes Boulder Valley School District, the Boulder Library District, and Boulder County. That's where Boulder Progressive's concerns come in. Say Boulder's downtown tax revenue for 2026 is $10 million. It's actually higher than that, but round numbers are easier to explain. Boulder will continue collecting that $10 million every year for the next 30 years, with any taxes it earns above that going to the DDA. If tax revenue downtown is $20 million for a given year, that extra $10 million would not go to the city, but to the downtown district exclusively.

SPEAKER_05 13:04

The city will continue to receive the same dollar amount it receives the year before the DDA is formed. It's not adjusted for inflation as the DDA exists for a minimum of 30 years. Now think back to Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. He went into suspended animation in 1967, woke up in 1997, decided he was going to grab a nuclear missile and hold the world ransom for what?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Here's where Chip and Mike agree. Foregoing tax growth in the larger city budget is the major trade-off of a DDA, Chip says. But it's one he believes is worth it.

SPEAKER_04 13:47

My argument for it is this is one of the few ways that you can invest in bigger projects. For example, I'm fixated on the bathrooms downtown on the Pearl Street Mall. They're outdated, they need to be redesigned. Who's going to pay for that? The parks department or the cajit or everything, we can put some of the money from that budget aside every year until we save enough money to redesign the bathrooms, which are for everybody, not just for tourists. But if you have a mechanism that says, okay, we have funding that we're going to borrow so we can reinvest in capital projects that we don't otherwise have funding for. But yeah, the trade-off is we're locking in our tax base in this district.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Downtown is a major contributor to Boulder's budget. In 2025, the downtown area accounted for 10% of all city sales tax. But downtown is struggling. We've all seen the empty storefronts and heard of the vacant offices. Post-COVID remote work has pushed office vacancy rates downtown to as high as 40%. Without workers, restaurants and stores have seen huge declines in sales. Downtown sales tax is 10% below pre-COVID levels when adjusted for inflation, according to the city, which brings us again to the DDA.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

Through tourism, but also through game nights, through sales tax, through sundance, all of the things that generate revenue for all of the programs, the rec centers, the homeless services, or whatever the issues are, the things that the city needs to and does fund, a lot of that comes from the commercial districts and specifically downtown. Again, this is the way we're going to invest in future infrastructure if we are going to do this. This is an opportunity to create something for future generations. And there is a trade-off. Would that future growth happen if we don't invest in this infrastructure? Or does the investment create the growth that otherwise wouldn't exist? That's really the argument. And I think reasonable people can disagree on that.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Mike and the Boulder Progressives aren't necessarily disagreeing with the core concept of a DDA. There's simply a lot that isn't understood or known yet, they say. Staff have been exploring a DDA for years. Chip even suggested one for the Hill when he was head of downtown Boulder. Council discussed the project in March of this year and was briefed again in late May. But members of the public, including the Boulder Progressives, want more time before Council hands over a major financial decision to a small fraction of property owners, businesses, and residents.

SPEAKER_05 16:36

I'd say we need to hit the brakes here. There is this issue that we do have a lot of empty offices where people used to work and they used to go to lunch downtown and shop. That's impacting people. The question is whether the DDA is the right tool to address that office vacancy crisis.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

Thanks for hanging in there through this complex topic. Taxes and city budgets aren't the easiest things to understand, but they are so important because they determine so much about your daily life that often goes unseen or unappreciated. What your roads and parks look like, how much or little snow plowing gets done in the winter. To some extent, the businesses that close are open. The tax dollars that fund all that ultimately come from your pocket. Where Boulder chooses to spend your money is absolutely something you should care about and have a say in. If you are so moved, Council will be voting on this matter Thursday, August 6th. We'll drop instructions on how to participate in that discussion in our show notes, along with links to Boulder Progressive Statements and other helpful media coverage. My conversations with Mike and Chip were far more extensive than could be included here. Find the full interviews at patreon.com slash Boulder Frequency Pod. We're ending today's show with a clip from Sean at Boulder Food Rescue. We'll be featuring Boulder Food Rescue on our Friday show. Before you go, here's one more thing.

SPEAKER_03 18:08

I feel like I've been seeing a. I don't know if awakening is the right term. Or more just, or embracing might be a better term for it. I've been a fairly politically active person for almost all my life. It's a common occurrence that I kill the mood by bringing up the thing going on in our world politically that is frankly messed up, that is just an injustice that I'm like, we need to be talking about this. How is this not something that we're talking about right now? Whether it's chatting with friends or reconnecting with family or at work. And something that has been inspiring for me recently is I feel like I am seeing not only more and more people do that, but I'm seeing more and more response to when I do that, of people being like, yes, let's latch on, let's talk about this, even though it's going to really bring down the mood. All the organizing that I've been seeing is also deeply inspiring, but that doesn't feel deeply new. Like those people have been doing that work, and I don't want to undermine their work by any means with what I'm saying. But what's been inspiring is not the people who are like stepping up to lead, but the amount of people that I'm seeing who are stepping up to be a willing follower. And that has been really cool to see what I'm doing.