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Ballot Questions 300-306: Should Niwot become a self-governed town?
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Ballot Questions 300-306: Should Niwot become a self-governed town?
Oct. 7, 2026
There are 6 ballot items (including 3 taxes) related to the incorporation of Niwot. They are:
Proposed Municipality of Niwot Ballot Question 300: Shall Niwot be incorporated as a municipality?
What does it mean? It’s pretty simple: Should Niwot become its own self-governing town (and all that entails), rather than being governed by Boulder County?
301: Shall a Home Rule Charter Commission be formed…?
What does it mean? Should a group of people be picked (you can vote for up to 9 of the 28 listed candidates) to write a draft set of rules that will govern Niwot, known as a charter? The proposed charter itself will be subject to a separate vote before going into effect.
302: Sales + use tax
What does it mean? Can the newly formed government of Niwot impose a 2.5% sales + use tax, which they estimate will collect up to $2.8 million in the first year, to pay for the operations of the town?
How much will it cost? 25c per $10 purchase, or $2.50 per $100 purchase. This includes online purchases from retailers such as Amazon
303: Property tax
What does it mean? Can the newly formed government of Niwot impose a 4 mill levy property tax, which they estimate will collect up to $900,000 in the first year, to pay for the operations of the town?
How much will it cost? $279 per year for a home worth $1.095 million (Niwot’s median), or $25.48 for every $100,000 of value. The tax rate for commercial properties is roughly 3-4X that amount.
304: Marijuana sales tax
What does it mean? Should Niwot tax recreational cannabis sales at 3%, up to an estimated $60,000 in the first year, on all sales conducted within the town?
How much will it cost? A 3% sales tax adds 30c per $10 purchase, or $3 per $100
305: Authorization to retain and spend all revenues
What does it mean? This is an exemption to TABOR, Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Among other things, it requires taxing entities to project how much tax they will collect before asking voters. Any amount collected above and beyond that amount must be returned to taxpayers.
A “yes” vote on this would allow Niwot to keep that excess revenue rather than issuing tax returns. Many communities have “de-bruced,” as the process is colloquially known, including the majority of Colorado counties.
How much will it cost? There is no additional cost associated with this. If tax revenue (property or sales) come in above the voter-approved estimates, that money will simply not be returned to taxpayers.
306: Authorization to increase debt
What does it mean? Should the newly formed town of Niwot be allowed to borrow up to $15 million, with up to $13 million in interest costs (for a total cost of $28 million) to pay for transportation infrastructure?
What will the money be used for? Per the ballot language, “the repair, reconstruction, improvement and maintenance of streets, roads, bridges, draining, sidewalks” and other transportation infrastructure
How much will it cost? There is no additional cost associated with this. It simply allows Niwot to borrow the money, to be paid back by anticipated sales + use tax revenue
Do all these measures have to pass in order for Niwot to become a town?
No — just 300. All other steps (like forming a charter commission) could be completed at another date, via another election.
However, if the funding measures don’t pass, there will be no way to fund a local government. Subsequent taxes would have to be brought to voters for approvals.
Are there any other costs of incorporation?
Donors to the Niwot Incorporation Committee are entitled to be repaid by the town for the ~$94,000 they have loaned the group. This repayment has already been incorporated into revenue projections.
Why you might want to vote for this
Proponents express frustration with Boulder County government and/or a belief that a more local government could provide better services and representation
It provides funding directly for roads and transportation (via Ballot Question 306, specifically; the other funding measures would provide general government revenue, not tied to any specific cause or project)
It would allow Niwot to set its own rules for virtually everything: zoning, land use, wages, etc. and allow them representation in regional bodies such as DRCOG or the Boulder County Consortium of Cities. (Niwot currently has a non-voting representative on the Consortium of Cities.)
Why you might not want to vote for this
It’s expensive, adding hundreds of dollars in taxes to property owners and residents
Opponents question the financial projections; the town may have to pass additional taxes to properly fund governmental operations. Larger governments are struggling to cover basic operations as tax revenue declines.
Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, October 7th. I'm Shea Castle, and this is The Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. We've got a longer show for you today as we tackle all the county's big news and swing over to Naiwa, where residents are battling over whether or not to become an official town. Skip straight to that story if you like, or stick around for the headlines. Here they are. Netherlands principal has been placed on administrative leave, Boulder Valley School District announced last week. The reason for the leave was not disclosed by the district, which said an investigation was ongoing into an unnamed incident that occurred during a weekend event. Caleb Melamed has served as the principal for Netherland Elementary since 2020. Last year, he was made joint principal of the elementary and middle high school. Prior to his time in Netherland, Melamed was a teacher at Lafayette Elementary. The story will be updated as more details become available. The plaintiff parents say the district abandoned its long-established process for assessing schools at a secret meeting on October 21st, 2025 that was not properly noticed, open to the public, or recorded. They are asking the courts to invalidate the September 22nd vote, approving the district's resilient schools plan.
SPEAKER_02
We're not asking for them to reverse it. We aren't all save our schools. We recognize declining enrollment is real. Something has to be done. But we're constituents. We're constituents of a government, and we want the government to show due process. You know, why this proposal? Why for 1%? Why 1900 students? Why the dismantling of local communities? These are significant concerns. We don't know. We were given one process, no alternatives, no justification, and then no questions were answered. So I think all of us would like to see the process redone in a way that democracy is at work, and it's not just we're being handed a decision. It's that we're actually fundamentally truly a part of the decision. This has felt like uh the decision was made and then the community was managed, and that has felt pretty gross. So a redo of the process, I think, would be an amazing outcome. My name is Teresa Schultz. I'm the mother of three children who go to BBSD. One of those graduated last year, and the other two are current students at Mesa Elementary. And I am a named plaintiff in a lawsuit against BBSD for closing four schools on a vote on September 22nd. And so I'm one of three of a coalition of schools who is asking for a more transparent process with BBSD moving forward.
SPEAKER_06
Boulder's public library district will cut up to 20% of its workforce as property tax revenue declines. As we reported two weeks ago, property values in downtown Boulder have declined roughly 20%. Home prices in the city overall are down about 10% since 2022, according to data from Zillow. The property tax rate has also been cut due to state legislation, leaving less money for government entities like the library district. The district was officially formed in 2024 after voters approved a property tax specifically to fund it in 2022. Property taxes are generally considered more stable than sales tax. Boulder has never before seen three years of flat or declining home values. Library trustee Adriana Bonikowski told Boulder Reporting Lab. Some 26 jobs may be eliminated. Read more at the link in our show notes. Speaking of cuts, the city of Boulder will eliminate 24 jobs, including 13 layoffs, as it seeks to close a $6.3 million gap in the 2027 spending plan amid declining property tax and sales tax. Some fees will also be raised and services cut. Think you could do a better job at balancing the city's budget? CU data scientist Brian Keegan has created a tool to let you do just that. Find it at BoulderReporting Lab.org or at the link in our show notes. Hear more from Brian on our Friday show when we talk about county commissioners. The town of Netherland is seeking to raise $20 million to complete its long-delayed purchase of Eldora Ski Resort. The $120 million deal was originally supposed to close in October 2025, but investors were not impressed with the financials of the original proposal. Netherland mayor Nicole Sterling told my colleague Tyler Hickman.
SPEAKER_03
The short answer of it is that when we went to market, it was kind of exciting in a couple of respects. One, investors were like, wow, this is kind of this is neat. And we need a couple of things in order to really structure this deal well. One of them was we would really like a stronger security tied to the assets. Basically, what this means is investors were saying, if something goes wrong, what are we able to capture as the asset? And we didn't have any type of security attached to the asset because we actually, we when we first started this process, we didn't think well that we could as being a public entity and that there were restrictions involved. But the second thing that they also asked was hey, there's a lot of debt attached to this because we had built in other things like financing some of the capital improvement projects. And because we recognize that there are certain projects over the lifetime of the mountain that actually help it produce more revenue. And so they said, there's a lot of debt in here. And so one of the things that we also started to work on was reducing the amount of debt. And then third, because we had a lower snow year, the investors said, well, you know, it would be really great to be able to model against this reduced snow year. Before this, it was all speculation. Nobody knew, nobody had the actual data as to what a down snow year would look like. And so, in many respects, it was like, actually, what a blessing now that we have actual data that we can model against and know what a down snow year looks like. And so we took those three things, and those are the three things that we've been working on since April in order to make this deal more resilient.
SPEAKER_06
You can read more about the restructuring of the deal in a story from Tyler and Mountaineer reporter Chris Kelly at the link in our show notes. Colorado Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Phil Weiser is suing the federal government again, this time to stop the opening of a second Colorado immigrant detention center in Hudson, about 30 miles east of Boulder County. Weiser is challenging the lack of environmental review and permitting to convert a former federal prison into a working detention center. Activists have been asking the town of Hudson to conduct its own review and permitting process at the facility, which has been vacant since 2013.
SPEAKER_01
They do have water waste problems. They have problems with their roads. They already don't have roads that can sustain vehicles with that kind of weight. They don't have enough stuff on their law enforcement to begin with. They have a lot of zoning issues and problems within the town itself. So all of these things combined, how do they know that as a town that they can sustain something of this magnitude?
SPEAKER_06
That's Jennifer Montes, an advocate who's been attending town meetings in Hudson for more than a year to oppose the detention center. Hear more from Jennifer in the January 14th episode of The Frequency. Boulder's $400 million bond has gotten a lot of attention for its high price tag. We covered it Friday on the show. Find that episode at Boulderfrequency.com. So it might surprise you to know that the most expensive local tax on the ballot is actually in Naiwat. It's 4,300 residents are weighing whether or not to become their own town officially and get out from under the thumb of Boulder County.
SPEAKER_07
The problems that we have, the roads, the local wage, the home size issues, they're all sort of one size fits one size fits all policies, and they're not. If we were a town, we would just have the ability to control them directly. My name's Nick Little. I am the president of the NYWAT Incorporation Committee, and we are an all-volunteer organization that is working to incorporate the town of NIWOT into our latest municipality in the state of Colorado.
SPEAKER_06
Nick quickly went over a lot of the issues NIWOT is hoping to address through incorporation. Let's start with minimum wage, because that's the issue that drew Nick into the fight. Along with local farmers, NIWAT businesses led the charge to get Boulder to roll back its planned minimum wage increases. But Nick and others want NIWOT to go further, reverting back to the state's minimum wage, which will be nearly $2.50 less per hour in 2027 than Boulder County's.
SPEAKER_07
And so it's still an issue that we would like to correct. And we successfully pushed back against Boulder County and got them to temporarily they have paused their minimum wage increase, but they st we don't know if it's going to come back at any point in time. And out of that effort, we started looking at incorporation as another policy to investigate. And so some of those folks had been working on incorporation in 2019. So they basically, myself and them, we merged together and we became the NIWAT Incorporation Committee.
SPEAKER_06
Another issue driving incorporation is Boulder County's cap on home sizes. NIWAT has some of the largest and most expensive homes in the area, but not everyone in the town is wealthy.
SPEAKER_00
Incorporation is a very expensive undertaking. As is off the bat, they're proposing a 2.5% sales tax. This will apply to everything you buy in town and everything you buy online. It'll even add a new 2.5% tax to car purchases. So on a 50K vehicle, that'll add $1,200 to the TAP. So we have a lot of concerns about the cost for people. My name is Ari Adler, and I am the committee chair for Neighbors for Naiwat, a political campaign committed to opposing the incorporation effort here in Naiwat.
SPEAKER_06
Ari is talking about the cost of incorporation. There are six separate measures related to incorporation, half of them are taxes. To pay for the new town and government, Naiwa is asking voters for a property tax increase, a new sales tax, and a tax on cannabis sales. Altogether, they could cost residents up to $1,300 per year, according to estimates from both the pro and anti-campaigns. Even the low-end estimates from pro-incorporation advocates could be nearly $350 annually. That's simply too much for the folks living in condos or on fixed incomes, Ari says.
SPEAKER_00
You said Naiwatt's one of the wealthiest parts of Boulder County, which is true. There's like a 22,000 square foot home up the hill. This is really highlighting the differences in Naiwat because I live in Old Town and our homes are in the like seven, eight hundreds. There's Cottonwood Park West and Cottonwood condos. Those condos are like 300k. And there's a senior living center that I speak with folks all the time. They're like, I'm on a fixed income. If this happens, I will have to leave Naiwa. And we can talk about the roads. That's fine. But we also need to talk about what this does to our town if we're going out of our way for an initiative that we know is going to price people out. And when we're talking about community, like that's community, is making this place as much a place for all as we can. So there really are different parts of NIWAT that feel very differently about this.
SPEAKER_06
Right would prefer Naiwat pursue a public improvement district to address its roads, known in short as a PID. PIDs for road paving are common throughout Boulder County. There are two on this year's ballot in the Sombrero Ranch and Summerlin neighborhoods, but they're not cheap. PIDs can run to nearly $1,000 per home per year in property taxes. Incorporation proponents like Nick say they can deliver an entire government for that amount.
SPEAKER_07
So at some point in time, roads are going to get fixed. So while incorporation might seem expensive, it is actually relative to the other alternatives to fix the roads, is much cheaper. And additionally, you get much more benefit because if you just fix the roads using a public improvement district, you only get the roads. If we incorporate, we can solve some of these other problems like minimum wage, home size, and we can control our own land use.
SPEAKER_06
For instance, Naiwatt's modeled government has just three paid employees with salaries that aren't competitive with neighboring municipalities. And the projections assume a lower interest rate for borrowing money than a new government is likely to get. One of the ballot measures, issue 306, would allow the newly incorporated NIWAT town to borrow up to $15 million plus $13 million in interest. Nick admitted some of the financial assumptions and projected salaries might be low, but he insists there's wiggle room in the budget to cover those costs if they end up being more than expected. Opponents like Ari aren't convinced. They think NIWAT will need to raise taxes to stay functional and deliver on all they promise. Either that or start cutting services and events. They don't have to look far to see bigger and better funded local governments struggling to pay their bills. Boulder County and City are both facing budget shortfalls and cutting staff. And Longmont, Erie, Lafayette, and Louisville all have taxes or tax extensions on the ballot this fall.
SPEAKER_00
And incorporation is the wrong tool for the job because it creates a whole new government for fixing potholes. And the issue is small town governments often struggle to pay the bills. When they can't pay the bills, they either raise taxes, and if the voters say no to taxes, then they're stuck either annexing land or developing more just to pay the bills.
SPEAKER_06
He also worries about turning over control of zoning and land use to a new town council that may be dominated by business interests. Right now, NIWAT is under the county's control, but as a home rule municipality, local elected officials would have full say over what can be built and what must be preserved. An incorporation committee, also headed by Nick, has raised well over $100,000. That includes $94,000 in loans to be repaid by the town if the incorporation vote is successful. Four people donated $10,000 each, while another single individual loaned $12,000. The list of donors includes business owners like Nick himself, Left Hand Valley Courier owner Bruce Warren, and the owner of NIWAT's Cottonwood Shopping Center.
SPEAKER_00
One thing people should keep in mind is that incorporation is effectively permanent. Once this is created, it's not going away. The NIWAT Incorporation Committee has chosen an approach to do a whole lot of things at once. Not just incorporate, but incorporate as a home rule charter to debruce, pass a bond, and you're funding an entire government. People feel that this process was very rushed and very underplanned.
SPEAKER_06
For proponents like Nick, the unknowns of a new venture are better than continuing under county leadership, he says, isn't set up to run a town like Naiwat.
SPEAKER_07
At the end of the day, it's like what it's really about is who knows best for Naiwat, right? Should we leave it to the commissioners and whatever, whatever they want to do? They're designed to govern a county, right? So it's it's not like a knock on the commissioners or anything. It's like their job is to have multiple cities that they're keeping an eye on and then an overall county. And so NIWOT, like we are a town in everything but name and authority. So the idea is that by incorporating, we end up with a voice to where we can make choices that are best for our community locally here rather than having to rely upon the commissioners.
SPEAKER_06
Thanks to Nick and Ari for speaking with me and answering my follow-up questions via email. You can find more information on all six ballot items in our show notes. Join us Friday when we explore the push to add two new county commissioners. Before you go, here's one more thing.
SPEAKER_08
My name is Chris Winter, and I'm an environmental lawyer, and I work at the University of Colorado Law School. So I serve as the executive director of a research institute there that focuses on natural resources law policy, and it's called the Getchus Wilkinson Center.
SPEAKER_04
Great. What is one thing that is inspiring you or giving you hope right now?
SPEAKER_08
Oh, that's a great question. Well, I work with young people every day at the law school. So the students at Colorado law are amazing. Many of them come to the law school because it's got such a well-regarded environmental law program. So I get to mentor, work with, interact with students who really care about the future of environmental protection and conservation. They care deeply about climate change. So for me, that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, you probably have one of the like most hopeful careers of people I talk to, I'd say.
