SPEAKER_02 0:00

B V H C the frequency.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I'm concerned that City Council did not do a critical job of evaluating the $400 million list. They simply took the list the city staff gave them and said, sounds good, let's take it to the voters. I think the city council needs to take a step back, figure out what the priorities are, what things need to get done, and propose a tax measure next year or the year after that the voters can digest that are for the things that are most important toward the community.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

We have an enormous facilities backlog, almost $500 million of work that needs to happen. It's going to cost us about $350 million just to keep the current buildings at the level they are for the next 25 years. So it is a cost savings over time, right? Is it a cost savings next year? No. But thinking at the government scale, over the course of decades to century, this does become a cost saving mechanism. So we are saving money for future generations. The same way that if 50 years ago, people have been putting aside money and keeping on top of maintenance for all of the buildings that we were buying and converting and renovating back then, we would be in a very different place right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Those are the voices of Bob Yates and Nicole Speer, who are making the cases for and against City of Boulder Ballot Measure 2K, the subject of today's show. Happy Friday, Frequency Listeners. I'm Shay Castle, and today we're diving into one of the biggest potential tax increases you'll vote on this year. If you're not a Boulder voter, don't worry. I plan to cover every single thing on your ballot over the course of the next month. Keep an eye on boulderfrequency.com for a more relevant episode, and feel free to take today off. You might still want to stick around, though, because failing infrastructure is far from a boulder problem. Lafayette, Longmont, Naiwat, and Louisville all have tax measures on the ballot this year. And while we are talking about a specific tax today, the larger underlying issues are government funding, shrinking towns, and who should pay for the bad decisions of the past and the critical needs of the future. Back to Boulder's 2K. So what is it? It's a property tax increase to allow Boulder to borrow $400 million for building and facility maintenance and repairs. Paying it back with interest will cost $650 million. How much you will pay depends on how much your home is worth. A $1 million home would pay up to $400 extra each year for the next 20 years. Commercial properties would pay about four times that, or $1,600 a year. However, Boulder doesn't have to borrow the money all at once and likely won't. This tax is meant to pay for constructing, repairing, and maintaining city buildings like rec centers, fire stations, and police headquarters. Those are big projects and will likely have to be undertaken one or two at a time.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

So these are likely to be phased in over time. So it may just be that one or two buildings would go first because they are the closest to being ready, and then that council for that year would approve the issuance of debt for whatever the amount would be for those buildings and that work. And that's the point where people would start to see it on their property taxes. I think people have the idea that we would immediately on January 1st, 2027, if this measure passes, start collecting the maximum property tax. And that is not true.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

That's councilwoman Nicole Speer again. I've chosen her and Bob Yates to be the voices of this issue because they have both served on council. They've looked at the city finances, they know how things work, and best of all, neither of them are running for election or re-election right now, which means they're likely to be a little more honest than someone in an active campaign. So what are all the projects? A full list is online with estimated costs. Find the link in our show notes. They are a mix of things that will directly benefit residents, like replacing the South Boulder Rec Center and adding a lap pool and more unsexy projects, like building new police headquarters and rebuilding the maintenance facilities where snowpiles and other city vehicles get worked on. Despite the high price tag, it's only a fraction of what needs done. Boulder owns 75 buildings with an average age of 50 years old. For more than a decade, staff have given repeated warnings that maintenance needs were mounting into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

It's kind of like with your house, right? You know that it's going to eventually need to get painted, the roof will probably need to be replaced, maybe the gutters cleaned out, some other things that you need to have done either on a regular basis or periodically every few years. And so we laid out in 2021, near the end of my time on council, a facilities master plan. Unfortunately, for various reasons, that master plan has not been adhered to. And here we are five years later, and we've got a pretty big backlog. We should start complying with that 2021 plan. But we also need to catch up on those facilities like the South Boulder Rec Center, where we simply have fallen too far behind. And that probably goes back more than five years. And so we will have to borrow money. We will have to issue a bond and we'll have to pay that back over time and we'll have to pay that back with interest. So there's no doubt that there will probably be a tax increase of some sort.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Even still, opponents like Bob see a lot on that list that look optional, like improving the Penfield Tate Municipal Building. Council meetings will keep happening there when the city's new Alpine Balsam campus is built. But most of the staff will leave their offices. The $30 million proposal is to repurpose those spaces for community gatherings or services.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

The city council members don't even have offices, but just the dais, the room where city council members meet and listen to community members. We need to have something like that, but all the other offices will be vacated. And so what city staff is proposing is that the only remaining really purpose of that building will be the city council meeting room, but that it needs a refresh and that we should spend $30 million refreshing that building. I guess I question that. If we're moving all the city employees out of the municipal building up the street to North Broadway, why not have city council meet there as well and repurpose that building or sell that building to somebody rather than spending $30 million for new council chambers? I used to serve on city council. The chambers are pretty nice already, and I'm not sure we have to spend another $30 million to have nicer council chambers.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Bob would like to see the city form a resident group to narrow down the list of projects and go for a smaller tax. That's what happened in 2011 when staff presented council with a $700 million maintenance backlog. Bob and 15 others met for months and eventually slimmed that $700 million ask down to just $49 million for 28 projects.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

And at the end of that process, after listening to city staff and listening to city department heads and community members, our residence committee, just ordinary folks, came up with a list. It was $49, $49 million long of the $700 million original list. We presented that to city council. City council endorsed that without any changes. They then presented that to the voters in the fall of 2011. And the voters overwhelmingly approved that. It was 75% in favor of that ballot measure. And I think that was a really good process. There was a lot of community input. We eliminated those things which were probably nice to haves rather than gotta haves. I wish that the city council this year in 2026 had done the same thing. There's no doubt that there are some very valuable things on the $400 million wish list that's in front of the voters now. But I wish the city council and the city manager had gone through the same process that we did 15 years ago and engaged the community and asked them, well, which things on the list are really big priorities for the community that you're willing to pay for and which things are things that we probably don't really need or don't need right now. And I think if we had gone through that process, I think that would have been a much smaller measure on the ballot this year for taxes.

SPEAKER_02 8:12

Supporters of this year's bond measure, like Nicole, say that's part of the reason the list of maintenance needs is so large today. Take the 2011 group Bob was on. They were supposed to return with another tax measure for the 2012 ballot for some of the projects that didn't get funded, but that was scrapped in light of the economic downturn. Then the 2013 floods happened, diverting the city's attention and money away to recovery. Serious work on addressing the remaining maintenance backlog didn't begin again until 2014. Multiple projects that weren't tackled in 2011 had to be funded with subsequent taxes or are still not done today, including improvements to North Boulder Rec Center. Some of those are critical, like heating and cooling systems, windows and walls. But some are optional, such as a bigger weight room and redone showers and lockers. The city plans to combine the North Boulder Rec Center with the West Age Well Center, a cafe and hub for older adults, programs and services. Doing so will eventually save the city money since the Age Well building is old and also in need of repairs. If the Rec Center is already getting redesigned to accommodate those services, it makes financial sense to do optional upgrades at the same time, Nicole says.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

When we do repairs or maintenance or big projects, we're never just doing one thing. So the Northpolar Rec Center is a really great example of that. It's a place where opportunities are coming together. The West Aswell facility is beyond the end of its lifespan. It is in a high-hazard flood area. Its plumbing is failing, the building is falling apart. And it's not going to be an easy thing to rebuild there, given its location in the floodplain and everything that would need to happen to make it a safe facility there in 2026. So the opportunity at the North Pole Direct Center is really to think about consolidating, again, kind of like we're doing with the Western City Campus, to put multiple things together and make it a space where it can meet a couple of different needs within communities. The idea is really to lean into the things that community is using and asking for and to get them to a point where they're going to work for us for the next 50 plus years.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

The city is now saving for maintenance in its yearly budget for all new buildings, Nicole said. But it simply doesn't have enough money to pay for decades of deferred upkeep.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

With the backlog that we have, five years of savings is not going to tackle the maintenance that we still have to do. And nobody should have to work in a building where there is a potential for mold to be like growing in your room where you're having to cover up really important components of your work in plastic so that raw sewage doesn't spill onto them if there's a break. That feels like some basic things we should want for our workers, regardless.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Let's return to 2011 again and that $700 million in maintenance that needed paid for. Adjust that number for inflation, and today it would be over $1 billion. The city has asked voters for more than $250 million in infrastructure taxes since 2014 through the community culture resilience and safety tax. That was permanently extended last year, but it still leaves three-quarters of a billion dollars in buildings and facility needs we haven't touched yet, even without any new issues or service expansions. Another way to view it is as the inevitable outcome of a shrinking city. Boulder's population is declining, its taxes are drying up. It can't pay for all the things it used to. Well, maybe it can. That's up to you, the voters. But things will get increasingly more expensive as there are fewer people to fund them. Although they disagree on this particular ballot item, both Nicole and Bob know someone is going to have to pay for all that infrastructure eventually.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

There is no plan B for funding a new South Build Arec Center. There is no plan B for funding a new public safety building. This is it. And it's okay if voters don't want that. But that will have consequences in 10 or 15 years. Whether it's a facility that we just cannot keep open anymore because the maintenance costs are so prohibitively expensive, programs and services that we start having to get rid of, as maybe like a wing of the building needs to close or something like that, there will be costs. It's just a matter of when when we want to pay them and how we want that to go. I don't know that things are gonna get cheaper from here, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Also, this is the first property tax aimed at paying for infrastructure. Boulder has relied on sales tax in the past, but sales tax is regressive, meaning everyone who buys groceries or clothes or other necessities in town all pay it, and they pay the same as someone making more money than them. Property tax is paid by homeowners and business owners, to very politically active groups. So I think that's why the opposition is more vocal, just something to consider as you look at your ballots. Speaking of, those get mailed out starting today. Keep an eye out and keep tuning in every week as we cover more of what you'll be voting on. As always, thanks for listening.