SPEAKER_02 0:00

B V H C the frequency.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

I've never seen the process of how something comes onto the ballot. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this has been months and so many votes and so many ways that people have like council members have been saying their stances versus like the public coming in to the meetings to voice their stances. I was like, wow, this just it takes so much time and energy and money that now I'm like, how are we gonna vote now? You know, I'm like, where's the voter turnout gonna go? And all of this effort comes to what, you know? So that's really what I'm excited about.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Happy Friday, frequency listeners. I'm Shea Castle, bringing you more election content. This time we're in Longmont talking cops, council, and open space. The clip you just heard is from the host and co-founders of the Longmont City Council Recap Podcast. I have a full interview with Anna, Kaylee, and Erin that I'll post in a couple weeks. But for now, they're going to help me sort through your ballot along with a couple other guests. First up, 3A. This is a tax for first responders, aka Police and Fire. It's a 70-30 split between sales tax and property tax.

SPEAKER_05 1:21

So there was not much debate on whether this was needed, but there was a lot of debate on what are the impacts of that level of increase to sales tax or that level of increase to property tax and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

The 0.33% sales tax would add 33 cents to a $100 purchase or $3.30 for every $1,000 purchase made online or physically within the city of Longmont. The property tax would add roughly $75 per year to a home with an assessed value of $500,000, and $350 for a commercial property of the same value. Combined, the tax is expected to bring in $16.5 million next year, $10.8 from sales tax, and $5.7 from property tax. By 2036, that's expected to grow to more than $20 million annually for police and fire. The bulk of the money would go toward hiring more police, emergency dispatchers, and firefighting staff, 86 positions in total. According to a city spokesperson, Longmont plans to hire 43 full-time employees for the police department, 31 for fire, and 12 for support staff. That's a huge increase over today's staffing and funding. The number of firefighters and police employees will jump by 28% if 3A passes. And the combined public safety budget will nearly double from 22 million to 42 million by 2036.

SPEAKER_03 2:43

So it's been a running theme for a while that public safety just needs more support and a lot of financial support. And there's been a concern for overtime, especially with the fire department. And they're just putting in a lot of overtime hours. And the public safety tax is a tax to increase the funding to hire more police officers, more firefighters, more dispatchers, like for 911, and to buy more public safety equipment. And council seems to be pretty unanimous on this is important and this is needed. There's just more contested ideas on like, how do we fund this? Where do we pull the money from? Should it be a property increase tax? Should it be a sales tax increase? How are we gonna pull the funding for this?

SPEAKER_02 3:33

The last tax increase for public safety was in 2017, when Longmont's population was under 95,000. The city has added nearly 6,000 residents during that time. Longmont also has a smaller than average police force for a city of its size, according to FBI statistics. The tax money from 3A could also be used for public safety equipment, vehicles, and facilities, according to the ballot language. We'll keep moving down the ballot to 3B. It seems like a fairly straightforward ask. Should voters have to decide when the city wants to dispose or get rid of open space? But as always, context is everything.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

This ballot measure is happening because in 2025, the city of Longmont tried to do something that was good for the environment that would involve open space property, and there are people who oppose that. Hi, my name is Shaquille Obalal. I'm a resident of Longmont, and I help record the Side-Dish Longmont podcast. And generally I'm a person who has political opinions in Longmont about local policy.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

As Shaquille hinted at, there is history to 3B. For many years, Boulder County has been trying to find land to build its own composting facility. Currently, all our local compost gets trucked many, many miles away to locations in Weld County. That adds emissions to the atmosphere from the heavy diesel vehicles and cost to composting. Last year, the county saw a solution in Longmont, where two plots of land were ideally situated. The problem is that one of them was zoned as open space, even though it's currently in use as a gravel mine. Longmont proposed removing that open space designation and transferring it to an adjacent parcel used for utilities and public works that would have allowed a compost facility to be built on the gravel mine site. But amid fierce opposition from the community, the plan was scrapped. The county has completely abandoned its efforts to build a local composting facility. Officials announced in September of this year.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Longmont, like a lot of other cities in Boulder County, has zero waste goals. We're trying to divert 75% of our waste from landfills by 2030 and 95% by 2050. There's also a well-known surge in the county to find a place to put a county composting facility so we can stop trucking compost across the count across Weld County. So in this process, the city of Longmont said, hey, let's replace this gravel mine with the composting facility. It helps us with our zero waste goals. It helps protect the environment. As a result, there was actually going to be more net acres of open space created. And actually, the public works land is next to a riparian corridor. So it was even more highly valuable as open space than this gravel mine would ever have been.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

3B asks for a vote of the people to dispose of any open space land. That can mean selling off open space, which happens very rarely, but it can also mean changing the zoning of the land from open space to something else, which was the case of the distal toll land swap. Today, disposal of open space requires review by Longmont's Sustainability Advisory Board and a vote of City Council. Shaquille said the distal toll issue is proof that the system works. Residents didn't want to exchange open space for utilities land. And ultimately, elected officials listened to them. The final vote to kill the swap was unanimous. Proponents of 3B say it gives more legal protections to open space land. That's how it was pitched at City Council anyway, who voted six to one to put the measure on the ballot.

SPEAKER_05 6:50

Of the ballot measures coming up this year, this has seemed like the least contested one. And I think in part because open space is already protected. But like you mentioned, this is a problem we see all around the world where resources or space that was designated as protected at one point can then later be used for something else, or that status can be changed. And so this is kind of a reinforcement of no, we wanted this protected and we mean it.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Shaquille recognizes he's likely in the minority and opposing 3B. But if we want meaningful climate action, he says, it means we need a government willing to make difficult decisions.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

There's no doubt, I think, in anyone's mind, that we are in a state of environmental crisis. There is really important work that needs to be done to protect the environment, both where we live and globally. And we need a strong, powerful government that is empowered to act to do this. Because the city of Longmont decided that it wasn't going to allow the composting facility on this land, for example, Boulder County has just decided that it's no longer going to be trying to cite a compost facility in the county. The county staff has given up on this because at every single turn, they get turned away by people who would rather our trash goes somewhere else than that we deal with it ourselves. And to me, that is not us taking responsibility for the environmental harms that we create as a community simply by existing. And I don't think that it advances the cause of environmental justice for us to say that it's okay for us to just send our trash somewhere else. There's a lot of public demand in Longmont for people to be able to use the city compost, for example, for their gardens or for their yards, or to use them in the many farms that provide CSAs and stuff at the farmer's market. But part of the reason that that doesn't happen is because it's very expensive to truck it to 8-1 organics and well county and back. The capacity to do that is just diminished because it is so far away. Whereas if you could just take your car to the composting facility on the edge of town, actually it would be much more accessible. And I'm sure people would, I mean, you can already get wood chips for free from the city, right? This would be just like that.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

3C and 3D are related. So we're discussing them together. 3C would implement a system called ranked choice voting in Longmont to elect the mayor and members of city council. We covered this a bit on Wednesday, but we're gonna dive into the specifics of how it works and why you're being asked about it. The point is to encourage a government that is more representative of Longmont as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

With ranked choice voting, instead of picking just one candidate, you get to rank the candidates in the order of your preference. So like first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. Your vote always starts off by counting for your first choice, but instead of whoever has the most choice wins, the winning candidate has to get above 50% of the votes. And so from a voter's perspective, what you're essentially saying is your vote always starts by counting for your first choice, but then you get the benefit of those backup choices, knowing that your vote will still count for them if your first choice can't win. It really opens it up and puts some power back into the hands of voters in terms of freeing them up to support the candidates they really like and then ensuring the winner truly does reflect the preferences of a majority of voters in the community. My name is Dylan Rankin. I run ranked choice voting for Longmont. I am a lifelong Longmont resident. And for the past two years, I have been leading an effort to bring ranked choice voting to Longmont City Council elections.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Because ranked choice is best for races with multiple candidates, advocates are also pursuing changes to Longmont's current election cycles. Right now, Ward 1 and 3 and one at-large member is elected altogether. In the next election cycle, ward two and two at-large council members are elected. The mayor serves two years. Council members serve four years.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

And so if that sounds over-engineered to you, it's because it is. And 3D on its face, all it does is adjust city council election cycles to simplify them. So that in one year it's all of our at-large representatives up on a ballot, and then in the next year, it's all of our ward representatives up on a ballot. So everyone's voting in the same kind of city council race at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

3D is dependent upon 3C's passage. That is, if 3C fails, 3D also fails, regardless of how many votes it gets. If 3C passes, but 3D fails, Longmont will still implement ranked choice voting, but it will potentially limit the benefits. Having the whole city vote at once for at-large seats will offer the best chances of proportional representation, according to Dylan.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Multi-winner ranked choice voting is actually, as an election nerd, the better form of ranked choice voting because instead of picking the one winner that most broadly represents the community, it actually picks a group of winners who, as a collective, represent the community even better. In a community, for example, that happened to be two-thirds liberal and one-third conservative, and you used ranked choice voting to elect three people on the same ballot or off of the same ballot, you'd likely end up with a group of winners that consisted of two liberals and a conservative. So that way everyone has the representation and the elected body really becomes a little microcosm or a little representative sample of the overall community. But it allows for both majority rule but also minority representation.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Ranked choice voting is not new to Colorado. Boulder and Fort Collins use it to elect their mayors. Salt and Telluride had it in place long before front-range towns started adopting it, and resident satisfaction is high. 72% of Fort Collins voters surveyed said they were happy with it, and 62% wanted to expand it to more elected offices. There have been statewide campaigns to adopt ranked choice voting in Colorado. They drew the backing of some very big money, but the efforts ultimately failed. In Longmont, the push has been entirely grassroots. Dillon has been working on it for two years while studying political science at CU Boulder. Born and raised in Longmont, Dillon first learned about ranked choice voting in middle school. He successfully switched student government at Silver Creek High School to ranked choice and believes Longmont would be strengthened by having a system in place to ensure diverse representation.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

I'm a math person, I'm a numbers person. And so my in middle school, my civics teacher gave me a book on alternative voting methods like ranked choice voting, and I really, really, really kind of fell in love with it at that point and was like, wow, so a lot of the problems with our politics are not our fault. They're like structural. And so I was like hooked at that point. It's interesting that it happened this way, but we elected probably one of the most representative city councils in Longmont history this past election cycle in 2025. And we have one of the, if not the youngest city council in Longmont history. There is a much better mix of renters to homeowners. Demographically, there is good representation for Longmont's Latino-Hispanic population. We were able to kind of by chance luck into a very representative city council. We wandered into something great. Let's structurally make sure we work that to achieve that in the long term.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Find more information about all these ballot issues in our show notes. Thanks again to Dylan, Shaquille, and Anna, Kaylee, and Aaron from the Longmont City Council Recap Podcast. If you're in the Longmont area, I cannot recommend their show highly enough. I look forward to having them back on and sharing more of their story with you once we've gotten through the election season. Join us next week when we dive into the six ballot measures Louisville voters will be weighing and do a final run-through of Boulder County ballots for the last-minute voters out there.

SPEAKER_04 14:33

Obviously, it's a volunteer project and we're we just want it to be helpful and useful. And I think people who share it with people who are interested, and especially people who are interested who can't attend city council meetings or maybe are not already plugged into those meetings, I think is awesome. So that's probably the number one ask. And then just like any kind of podcast media project, like a follow, a subscribe, a rating, a review, all of that is awesome. We have a substack that people can subscribe to there or like anywhere people get their podcasts. That's great. But I think the main thing we've been saying is like if you know somebody who cares about what's happening in Longmont and who lives here and wants to know what's going on, just send it to them.