2024 Priorities for the City of Boulder

The BVCP update is a major city and community undertaking, and provides significant opportunities to support smart, sustainable, equitable, and affordable housing development. In particular, we believe the plan update needs to make it easier to build multi-unit buildings, to foster more mixed-use developments, and to focus future development near transit.

Allow multi-family housing by right on all residential lots. Direct staff to study potential options for implementing a program that would enable infill projects to move ahead for duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes - particularly in existing single family neighborhoods - via density bonuses, streamlined review, lower impact fees, tax deductions, and more.

Rezone business districts to permit residential and mixed-use developments. Redevelop strip malls and other business zones by rezoning into mixed-use commercial and residential areas.

Accelerate flood and fire mitigation for high-risk areas. Increase funding to the “Vision” level in the 2022 Comprehensive Flood and Stormwater Master Plan and prioritize expert engineering and risk management guidance when designing infrastructure and practices for mitigating flooding and wildfire risks.

Expand by-right development with form-based codes. Expand form-based codes that exempt residential and mixed-use projects from discretionary reviews and eliminate the requirement for Planning Board-level Form-Based Code review.

The State of Colorado has identified housing as an issue of statewide concern. As such, a number of bills have been proposed in 2023–2024 to address the lack of housing and high housing costs. Boulder Progressives thinks that the city can be a leader in pushing for greater access to housing statewide and shaping policy that will benefit both Boulder and the state in the long term.

We believe that simply eliminating parking mandates is the best, simplest, and most sensible approach. We also feel that the effort to properly manage and price public parking should go beyond just the NPP to encompass all publicly-owned parking supply, including parking garages, city lots downtown, parking at parks and recreation centers, etc., and should include updates of our off-street parking mandates and transportation demand management (TDM) policy.

Though traffic signals control all of the most dangerous intersections in Boulder and have a major effect on the safety and equity of our transportation system for all modes, we have no approved policy specifying where signals should go and how they should be designed and operated. In the absence of such a policy, signalization decisions have been made ad hoc, typically by a single engineer, and not always in a manner most consistent with our TMP and Vision Zero goals.

Create an official city board to oversee homeless services and make recommendations to HHS and to City Council directly. Given the complexities of the issues at hand, the magnitude of the need and of the city's investment, and the key nature of nonprofit providers to the work being done, the city should implement a Homeless Services Board that consists of nonprofit partners and people experiencing homelessness.

Ensure that there are enough indoor spaces for every person to sleep at night. On any given night there are somewhere between 250-500 people sleeping outdoors in the City of Boulder, and there is simply nowhere for them to go. We must fix that.

The city has now committed to spending $1.6 million for the Day Shelter, but the vision for that space is not consistent with the budget and does not appear well positioned to make a substantial impact on the number of unhoused residents spending their days on the streets.

By establishing a safe, transitional living space with peer support, case management, and various services, city council will be able to offer both recently unhoused and chronically unhoused residents a living space and community that meets people where they are at and helps get them housed. SOS is designed to maximize successes for residents of the camp while also offering a much-needed alternative.

Enable Tiny Homes as a legitimate option for long-term and transitional housing. Tiny homes have grown in Colorado and around the country as a solution to provide secure transitional housing, particularly for populations that might experience barriers to utilizing existing shelter resources, including veterans, women and transgender people, and people with families or pets.

Boulder does not have showers, toilets, water fountains, or handwashing stations that are accessible to our unhoused population. We also do not have enough trash bins, recycle bins, or needle receptacles for adequate maintenance. We can dignify the experience of homelessness very quickly and simply, and in so doing we can also alleviate many of the visible signs of the homelessness epidemic that we know are most frustrating and impactful on our community.

At the time of Chief Herold’s 2023 departure from the Boulder Police Department, Deputy Chief Redfearn was asked to step in as Interim Chief. In the months since that interim appointment was made questions have been raised by the NAACP and other community members about his suitability for the role.

The Police Oversight Panel (POP) has been hamstrung at every stage of their work, and despite the promise of long-overdue reforms, the changes have served to undercut and disenfranchise the POP even further from the work it was put in place to implement.

While Boulder describes its police department as forward looking, it releases less data and information than many other police departments and therefore lacks the accountability that is the hallmark of reimagined and progressive departments. The city should commit to the accountability reforms.

In 2023 Boulder County raised the minimum wage and implemented an annual wage increase schedule to allow the county to reach $25 an hour by the year 2030.

Boulder Progressives supports a minimum wage increase and annual schedule that is at least commensurate with the county, and we would be likely to support other proposals that would increase wages in the city to an amount which is higher than the county given the city’s higher cost of living.

The current pay for City Council members is a significant barrier to people running for office who are not wealthy or do not have the flexibility to dedicate substantial amounts of time for little pay.

In 2021, Boulder launched a first-in-the-world style of online petitioning system for municipal initiatives. While the system is a great achievement, the online format has many shortcomings that may prevent any group from ever using the system again. The city should protect its investment in direct democracy by fixing some of the major flaws.