Every so often, a generation inherits the bill for what an earlier generation built. That moment has arrived for Boulder, and for communities across the United States. The public buildings that rose out of the mid-twentieth century — fire stations, recreation centers, maintenance yards, and municipal offices — are all reaching the end of their useful lives around the same time. Colorado cities feel it too; Longmont’s 2026 public safety bond, for instance, is partly a response to $76 million in overdue capital and facility needs. Boulder is no exception, however much some former elected officials and candidates like to think of this town as uniquely immune. We are not. Our recreation centers, fire stations, and public safety buildings are outdated and failing, and they are costing more every single year just to keep running. The bond measure on Boulder’s November ballot is an attempt to deal with that reality. It is not glamorous, ideological, frivolous, or secret. It is what fiscal responsibility actually looks like for a well-governed, safe community. We say this as people who have spent years in the weeds of municipal finances: Nicole currently serves on the Boulder City Council and has long been a member of its Financial Strategy Committee; Mark served on the council and that same committee through 2026. We are writing in our individual capacities because too much is at risk in this election to let misinformation carry the day. Public buildings may not be an inspiring campaign topic, but they are the scaffolding of everyday life. These are the places where firefighters take off their boots after a long shift, where a family gathers for a swim lesson, where emergency dispatchers answer the call on the worst night of someone’s life. When those buildings fail, the costs show up in quiet ways: a window that won’t close, a musty hallway, a room closed for weeks because a pump broke. But the costs also show up in loud ways: an emergency response delayed, a beloved pool shut down, a worker injured by outdated equipment. The people who deny these problems are real usually do so from comfortable rooms. The people who work inside these buildings don’t have that luxury.
The facts are not hidden. In 2021, the city completed a Facilities Master Plan that assessed all 75 of its buildings. The findings were stark and should have been a wake-up call for everyone. The average building is 47 years old. More than half were built before 1970. Seven are over 95 years old. The city carries a staggering $55 million in deferred maintenance, money that was never budgeted but is now owed to the simple wear and tear of time. And if we do nothing but keep these failing buildings alive through 2050, without a single meaningful upgrade, it will cost $372 million just to keep the doors open. That is not a plan; that is a slow leak. These are not abstract numbers. They show up in the daily lives of city workers in ways that should embarrass any responsible government. Firefighters sleep in rooms with windows that no longer seal, letting in water and cold air. Public safety personnel try to keep up with modern emergencies from a building with malfunctioning, decades-old equipment and leaks so frequent they risk mold. Recreation staff manage facilities with deteriorating walls, failing mechanical systems, frequent closures, and inaccessible layouts. Utilities crews repair equipment that is decades past its lifespan, while the facilities department has to contract out repairs because our old buildings can’t accommodate modern vehicles. The South Boulder Recreation Center, a deeply loved community amenity, is threatened. So is the simple ability of our first responders to stay safe while keeping the rest of us safe. In an era of wildfires, floods, and deadly public attacks, this is not a maintenance trivia question. It is a public safety issue, a quality-of-life issue, and a moral issue about how we treat the people who serve our community.
Against this backdrop, two recent opinion pieces stand out for how far they have drifted from reality. One, by former councilmember KC Becker, and another, by Open Boulder board member Terri Brncic, simply deny these realities. They argue that Boulder cannot be trusted with capital investments because the city’s processes are flawed, its estimates are vague, or its accounting is suspect. These claims sound alarming. They are also inaccurate. Becker incorrectly claims that this measure gives the city council a “blank check” for spending. But the measure follows years of debate at council meetings, board meetings, and commission meetings, and there is a specific list of projects published on the city’s website. That list includes rebuilding the South Boulder Recreation Center, renovating North Boulder’s Recreation Center, constructing a modern public safety and emergency communications facility, upgrading fire stations, and addressing long-deferred needs at the Municipal Services Center and the Penfield Tate II Municipal Building. That is not a blank check; that is a line-item budget with public scrutiny. Likewise, the claim that the city “hasn’t produced real cost estimates” ignores the detailed, publicly available building condition assessments, lifecycle cost projections, and preliminary cost ranges for each project. These early conceptual estimates cannot be final construction numbers, because that is not how construction works in the real world. Concrete prices rise, skilled labor becomes scarcer, and timelines shift. Anyone who claims to understand municipal finance but refuses to grasp this basic fact is selling something. Once individual projects are authorized, scoped, designed, and competitively bid, the numbers will become final. Estimates that allow for flexibility are a safeguard for taxpayers, not a loophole. If critics want to hold the city accountable, they should engage with the actual documents—not invent strawman accusations to scare voters.
The Alpine-Balsam redevelopment is another attack that doesn’t survive contact with the facts. Brncic argues that because the city could not instantly satisfy her demand for a single compiled table summarizing twelve years of spending on the multi-phase Alpine-Balsam project, voters cannot trust the city with any capital project. That is not a reasonable standard. Alpine-Balsam includes land acquisition, demolition, flood mitigation, site infrastructure, multiple buildings, and future housing phases. These components were approved in different years, funded through different local, state, and federal sources, and tracked in different systems—exactly as they are in every city of any size. The fact that the city asked for time to compile this information is not evidence of mismanagement. It shows a complex project being documented responsibly at a time when staff capacity is strained. Brncic appears to believe she is uniquely entitled to receive voluminous information on demand, even though staff’s current focus must be on preparing the 2027 budget. Perhaps the council could move funding from wildfire mitigation to add staff dedicated solely to her future information requests—but that would be an absurd use of taxpayer dollars. More importantly, Alpine-Balsam is not a warning about capital investment. It is a warning about what happens when a city inherits aging buildings and tries to modernize them to current standards. The city purchased the site in 2015 after the hospital closed, largely because neighbors wanted the city to guide the area’s future rather than hand it to a private developer. Renovating a 1960s medical office building to meet today’s accessibility, energy, safety, and workplace requirements is expensive. Pretending otherwise does not make the costs go away. It just makes the problem worse.
Becker’s nostalgia for the 2011 bond process is equally misplaced. That relatively small bond focused on a narrow set of renovation projects. The 2026 bond addresses a $400 million maintenance backlog across 15 buildings, some of which need full replacement. The scale is different, and the process differs because the problem differs. Over the past five years, the city has held public meetings, published extensive materials, conducted polling to understand voter priorities, and referred the measure in open session. Public engagement did not disappear; it was elongated to reflect the scope and complexity of a more-than-fifty-year facilities backlog. This is not a story about a hidden plot; it is a story about a community coming to terms with deferred responsibilities. Capital projects cost money, and none of us want to pay more in taxes. Those are both facts. But there is also a cost to failing to invest in the recreation centers, fire stations, emergency communications systems, and public facilities we all rely on. That cost shows up when city workers leave for communities like Longmont that are willing to invest in their safety. It shows up when families and older adults move to cities that provide modern amenities like pools and recreation centers. It shows up when shrinking revenues are increasingly consumed by emergency repairs, leaving almost nothing to mitigate the economic, climate, and social risks we face. We will all pay for this bond one way or another. The only question is whether we pay now, with a plan and a price tag we can see, or pay later, with interest, in lost services, broken equipment, and a diminished quality of life.
This November’s question is simple, even if the politics around it have become messy. Will we face the facts, invest in the infrastructure we need, and work together to build a city that we and future generations can rely on? Or will we let misinformation lull us into believing that the cost of doing nothing is free? No one likes seeing a ballot measure with a big dollar amount attached. No one wakes up hoping to pay more taxes. But pretending that the buildings will somehow fix themselves, that the leaks will seal themselves, that the fire stations will become safe again without investment—that is not fiscal conservatism. It is magical thinking with real consequences. The cost of doing nothing is not zero. It is the growing price of emergency repairs, the loss of experienced workers, the closure of beloved community spaces, and the slow decline of public safety. The people who oppose this bond are not offering an alternative plan. They are offering an illusion. Boulder has always been a city that tries to live up to its own values: caring for neighbors, protecting the vulnerable, preparing for the future. Voting for this bond is a way of honoring those values in the most concrete way possible. It is an investment in the firefighter who runs toward danger, in the child who learns to swim, in the dispatcher who stays calm in a crisis, and in the community that will still be here long after the campaign signs come down. The facts are on our side. The future is too. We just have to show up and build it.