The Boulder City Council on Thursday introduced five bills for the November vote – measures related to the Boulder Airport, city council pay, board meetings and city committees and commissions.
However, at a meeting Thursday night, the council did not pass any of the measures for a ballot. Council members requested minor changes to some of them, and the amended ballot measures could not be adopted immediately – they must go through a third hearing and a final vote on Sept. 5.
But the contours of this year’s ballot measures are becoming clearer as the council continues to focus on the details. Most of the discussion Thursday night centered on two citizen initiatives related to Boulder Airport and two alternative measures to those initiatives.
These measures aim to close the airport and transform the area into a neighborhood where 50% of the housing will be designated as affordable housing. Citizen activists distributed petitions for the measures and collected the more than 3,400 signatures needed for each of these measures to be placed on the ballot.
But at the request of the City Council, city staff negotiated with the citizens’ initiative to develop slightly modified versions of the airport ballot measures. The alternatives would retain the spirit of the original initiatives while building in a little more flexibility and ease of implementation into the measures.
Ultimately, the council voted 6-3 to keep the original wording of the airport ballot proposals. Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer and council members Mark Wallach and Lauren Folkerts were the three who supported the alternative wording.
When council members had to decide which of the two ballot proposals – the citizen initiatives or the alternative versions – to advance, one important difference was that if the council supported the original initiatives, they would come to the vote as citizen-initiated ballot proposals. If council members chose the alternatives, these would become council-initiated proposals, and there were questions about what it would mean for the council to advance its own initiatives for the airport.
In response to a question from Council Member Mark Wallach, City Attorney Teresa Taylor Tate said the council would not necessarily “cross its fingers one way or the other” by moving council initiatives forward. However, that did not alleviate all of the council members’ concerns.
Council member Matt Benjamin said he supported the original initiatives and wanted to respect the campaign’s original language, but he also said he viewed the council’s own airport initiatives as “usurping the very process we rely on to dictate land use in our community.”
While Tate acknowledged that it was unusual for the Legislature to proactively determine how the Council should zone a particular area, he did not support Benjamin’s description of “usurpation.”
The other three ballot bills, all of which would amend the city charter if passed, were first introduced by council members. One of those bills would allow the council to change, by ordinance, the terms of office, eligibility and meeting schedules for council members and commissions that do not have corresponding charter sections. That bill would take effect Jan. 1.
Council members decided Thursday to slightly change the language and remove a clause that requires board and commission members to be “known for their ability, integrity, public spirit and special suitability for service on their respective commissions.” The council voted to submit the amended measure to the Sept. 5 meeting.
Another ballot proposal would allow the City Council to call executive meetings for certain reasons, such as to discuss legal and negotiating strategies. Council members supported expanding this measure to clarify that executive meetings can be called to discuss finalists for key city positions, such as city manager or city attorney. This amended proposal was presented to the September meeting. Council member Lauren Folkerts voted against moving forward.
The other measure proposed by the council would increase council members’ salaries, with amounts calculated based on the annual median income in the area, similar to a discussion by the city council in Fort Collins. At a meeting in June, Boulder City Council members agreed to salaries of 50% of AMI for the mayor and 40% for other council members. That salary level would go into effect when a new council is sworn in in December 2026.
The mayor’s salary would be $51,100 if the raise is approved and takes effect this year instead of 2026, according to a 2024 income table from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority used by Boulder Housing Partners. The area’s median income is a statistic set by the federal government and often used for housing restrictions.
Council members voted to continue this ballot proposal and discuss it again at the September meeting. Wallach was the only one to vote “no” to moving forward with this proposal.
After a final vote on September 5, the items must be confirmed by September 6 for voters to approve or reject them on the November ballot.
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