BOULDERWEEKLY.COM
OCTOBER 27, 2026
ELECTION SPECIAL
2026
WAYS TO GET INVOLVED P.8
ON THE BALLOT P.10
BOULDER CANDIDATES P.17
Wildfire Prevention and Watershed Health
Protecting Colorado’s Outdoors
Wildfire risk reduction and water protection
Land and water conservation and sustainable outdoor recreation
Outdoors-Economy Workforce Development
Access to the Outdoors
To promote economic development, education, and workforce training
Grants to improve access to the outdoors for youth and families
Join more than 400+ community and conservation leaders across Colorado voting yes on Prop 137, including: Alpine Eatery Food Truck
Conservation Colorado
National Resource Defense Council Action Fund
American Rivers
Denver Activist Women’s Group
The Nature Conservancy
Bell Policy Center Colorado
Environmental Defense Fund
ProgressNow Colorado
Coalition for Climate Action
Great Outdoors Colorado
Voces Unidas de las Montañas Action
Colorado Fiscal Institute
Mountain Action Indivisible
The Wilderness Society
Colorado Working Families Party
New Era Colorado Action Fund
Western Resource Advocates
Attorney General Phil Weiser
“
U.S. Representative Brittany Pettersen (CD7) U.S. Representative Joe Neguse (CD3)
State Sen. President James Coleman (SD33) Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
State Rep. Jennifer Bacon (HD7)
See the full list of supporters: YesOnProp137.com/supporters
“Colorado’s outdoors belong to us all, and we must take care of it for future generations. That’s why I support Proposition 137, which would dedicate a portion of sales taxes towards conserving our lands, protecting outdoor recreation opportunities, and wildfire resilience.” — Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser
Find out how you can support Colorado’s land and water YesOnProp137.com
Paid for by Protect Colorado’s Land and Water, Prevent Wildfires | Tarn Udall, Registered Agent 2 OCTOBER 27, 2026
BOULDER WEEKLY
CONTENTS 10.27.2026
CONTENTS
04 COMMENTARY
An inside look at how the strategy, design, and execution of a political campaign informs voters about how a candidate will govern and communicate if elected BY BECKETT TAYLOR
06 NEWS 08 ELECTION 10 ON THE BALLOT
Ahead of the election, Boulder City Council takes on the 2027 budget BY EMMA HOUCKES Ballot processing is underway in BoCo, and locals are encouraged to get involved BY AVA HENRICKSON Proponents say Proposition 132 will save lives, opponents say it will do the opposite – and may accomplish something more sinister instead BY CECELIA THORN
12 DATA DUMP
USPS PO Box 1124, Boulder, CO, 80306 www.boulderweekly.com | editor@boulderweekly.com | October 27, 2026, Volume 1 | Number 1
Boulder County communities have put moratoriums on data center development, but how long can they hold the line BY SARA MEAD
14 BOULDERLAND
The 8.8-acre Alpine-Balsam redevelopment project represents the culmination of more than 11 years of planning, design and construction, as well as one of the most ambitious civic investments Boulder has undertaken in decades BY EMILY BERNARD
17 BOULDER CANDIDATES
A closer look at five of the six contenders vying for mayor, and the 13 contenders vying for the five seats on Boulder City Council BY BOULDER WEEKLY STAFF
29 ARTS & CULTURE
Oct. 21, 2026 marked the 57th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s death and his writing lives on in the voices of Boulder poets BY EVAN BORMAN
30 FILM
Longmont filmmaker Sean Mannion’s debut feature reached the Telluride Horror Show through borrowed cameras, donated meals and local support BY EMILY BERNARD
32 EXPLORE
The Arapahoe Glacier connects Indigenous homelands, Boulder’s early water system and a century of climate change BY EMILY BERNARD
34 EVENTS BOULDER WEEKLY
OWNER & PUBLISHER Meaghan Levy
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Douglas Sealfon
EDITORS Evan Reilly Ava Henrickson
PUBLISHING SERVICES MANAGER Jackie Duran
SALES MANAGERS Tisha Svoboda Danny Fletcher
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Emily Bernard, Evan Borman, Hannah Carley, Ava Henrickson, Emma Houckes, Sara Mead, Riggs Robertson, Beckett Taylor, Cecelia Thorn, Matt Weiner
As Boulder County’s only independently owned newspaper, Boulder Weekly is dedicated to illuminating truth, advancing justice and protecting the First Amendment through ethical, no-holds-barred journalism. Boulder Weekly does not accept unsolicited editorial submissions. If you’re interested in submitting an idea to the paper, please send queries to: editorial@ boulderweekly.com. Boulder Weekly welcomes your correspondence via email (letters@boulderweekly. com Preference will be given to short letters (under 300 words) that deal with recent stories or local issues, and letters may be edited for style, length and libel. Letters should include your name, address and telephone number for verification. We do not publish anonymous letters or those signed with pseudonyms. Letters become the property of Boulder Weekly and will be published on our website. Any materials sent to Boulder Weekly become the property of the newspaper. Boulder Weekly is currently available online at www.boulderweekly.com and will return to print every Thursday soon. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. ©2026 Boulder Weekly, Inc., all rights reserved.
Explore events happening in BoCo this week
OCTOBER 27, 2026 3
COMMENTARY
THE ART AND DESIGN OF POLITICS By Beckett Taylor Photos courtesy of Beckett Taylor
T
wo disclaimers. First, my agency and I are active in Aquiles La Grave’s campaign for mayor. We reached out to him with intent, knowing him professionally and socially, and believe in his platform, his acumen, his character, and his vision for the City of Boulder and the people in it. Second, I am listening to Kraftwerk while I write this because I am a 51-year-old creative director desperately seeking the balance between relevance and nostalgia. Over twenty years, my agency has sold a lot of things for lots of companies. But we have also dedicated swaths of our time and energy to positive societal change on the behavioral level. We rebranded and relaunched the All Nations Hotline, the first suicide and mental health line by and for Native Americans. We spearheaded vaccine campaigns with the CDC and Boulder County Public Health. We served as Out Boulder County’s volunteer agency of record for 5,700 hours before they rebranded with Vermillion as RMEQ. We’ve been part of six political campaigns for politicians you know and possibly (hopefully?) love. We’ve designed crisis communications for the US and British consulates in St. Petersburg, Russia, and have been arrested for climate activism. We are a woman-owned, immigrant-led boutique that takes our humanity very seriously.
ALL OF THAT IS TO SAY THIS...
I believe that 90% of the world’s problems can be solved through the lens of design, communication, and empathy. We are in the throes of a critical political season. As humans of Boulder County, we have the luxury of aligning on a broad spectrum of foundational values. ICE and federal overreach have no place here. We need a clear path for everyone to thrive in our communities, from education to housing to employment to healthcare. We believe in vitality and innovation and collaboration. But here’s the rub... in this landscape of shared values, the question becomes: How do we get there, and who can lead the way? Larry Olson, creative director and owner of Studio Lo, puts the whole thing simply: “Every election is a debate about the future we want and the values we’re willing to live by to create it,” he said. Brian Collins, co-founder of COLLINS, defines a brand as “a promise performed consistently over time.” Put the two together and a political campaign is a promise about the future, performed in public every day until the ballots are counted. I would posit: the strategy, design, and execution of a political campaign itself provides a lens to us, the voters, of 4 OCTOBER 27, 2026
how a candidate would govern and communicate if elected. Let’s look at what and who is on our local ballot through three lenses: strategy, identity and engagement.
VISUAL IDENTITY
Nationally, I trust you have all made up your minds. Just vote, for heaven’s sake. But moving closer to home, Nia Wassink, owner and principal of Prismatic Consulting, serves as campaign manager for both the “Yes on 1A” campaign and “Hands Off Colorado” which aims to prevent federal overreach with our communities and our families. You can see a clear difference in visual rhetoric and tone between these two pieces of collateral from the same consultancy. Nia explains that, unlike most local campaigns, both of these had the budget for robust polling, so they knew exactly how people felt before they designed a thing. “Polling doesn’t tell us what to believe. It tells us how to be heard as a campaign,” she said. “It shows what voters are telling us, and what they’re not. The campaigns that listen to both build messages that resonate and move voters.” You can see what she heard on the cards. 1A voters were optimistic about early development, so the card is teal and marigold, a hand-drawn sun and a grinning kid under the name Brighter Start. Counterintuitively, that makes 1A a “vice” decision. It’s kids. We want to say yes, and the bright visuals reinforce it. Hands Off is a “virtue” decision, something we must do, and polling showed government overreach landed harder than socially forward language. So the card leads with a red VOTE NO and a raised hand like a stop sign, and the copy keeps pointing at who holds the power: “giving the government more power over what care is available to parents and doctors.” The key is in the visible listening. Alone, either card reads as safe, and that’s fine. Side by side, you see a consultancy listening to the community each campaign serves.
For mayor, Jamo is a young, sharp Van Wilder clone who gives us a no-nonsense look at his core issues of surveillance and accountability with a no-AI, Gen-Z aesthetic that belies a very serious view of democracy, governance, and responsibility. Having met Jamo multiple times on the campaign trail, I want to emphasize that a vote for him is not trivial and it’s not wasted despite his youth. He maybe won the KGNU debate.
STRATEGY
Six people are running for mayor of Boulder this year, with another 13 running for council. Looking at their collateral, you immediately see lines of demarcation.
Below is Taishya Adams, who runs as a socially forward progressive/socialist with full endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America. She wears her cause on her sleeve, literally, showing up to the council dais in Palestinian colors in the days after the attack on Pearl Street and occasionally wearing a keffiyeh. Where Jamo hands you his issues, Taishya hands you her allegiances. You know exactly where she stands on the world’s issues, from climate to Palestine to equality. Where she stands on Boulder takes a little more digging, but her visual identity is warm and human-forward, and it promises she will fight for the populations she feels need her support. Her strongest piece of design is still the one she wears.
Aaron Brockett and Aquiles La Grave provide an equally stark visual contrast. Brockett, a homegrown incumbent, has mastered threading the needle between curious and established. His visual identity is safe and expected, which leaves room for his establishment endorsers and keeps his own presentation humble. Aquiles pulls from revolutionary imagery: heraldic lions, “Revolución” repeated like wallpaper, a ribbon reading “Noli timere,” be not afraid. The chaos is intentional. Big stacked type carries blunt messages, and the numbers do the arguing: $366 million in new city offices for 300 people, 29% commercial vacancy downtown.
ENGAGEMENT
Most people hear “brand” and picture a logo, the way some people hear “marriage” and picture the ring. The ring matters. It’s the part everyone sees, the public signal that a promise was made. But nobody stays married because of the ring. The marriage is everything that happens after: who shows up, who listens, who does the dishes. Visual identity is the wedding ring. Engagement is the marriage. The Boulder Progressives show up for Boulder as a unified front, and Brockett is one of them. They lit drop together, throw events together and stick together, which is rarer and harder than it sounds. Their signature event, the Raucous Caucus, took over Twisted Pine Brewery in June. RSVPs were capped at 100 and filled up, and community members helped write the “tough questions.” The Colorado Democratic Party trains people to run for municipal office, and the Progressives run that playbook with real discipline. It’s a proven model, and they execute it well. BOULDER WEEKLY
COMMENTARY acumen. For Aquiles, engagement is an 8-bit boxing match where you pick your champion. It’s also “Strange Times,” a newspaper delivered by hand, door to door, carrying facts and perspective that no door hanger or palm card could hold.
Aquiles’s campaign, by contrast, has a hint of chaos, and that fits a coalition this wide. His supporters range from the founder of No Kings to large business owners, restaurateurs and Boulder’s creative community. Brockett’s endorsements read like a who’s who of the establishment leaders who got Colorado to where it is today. The unspoken battle is political experience and dues paid versus lived experience and entrepreneurial
SO WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THIS?
“Advertising can be shallow because it reduces ideas to sound bites. Complex issues deserve deeper engagement. Public debates and conversations with political leaders give us room to ask questions, challenge ideas, and make informed decisions,” said Olson. And he’s right. Sometimes real engagement happens by coincidence.
Dave Martus, (see below) who is running for council, is my neighbor . I like him. He’s no-nonsense, he calls “financial acumen and common sense” his superpowers, and his branding keeps that promise without any pomp. I know that from living next door to him. I just trust him to make good decisions and his brand represents that. But most of us won’t live next door to a candidate. In September, 17 of the 19 candidates sat for an arts and culture forum hosted by Create Boulder and covered by Boulder Reporting Lab, and every one of them said they support the arts. If, like me, you go a little cross-eyed trying to draw lines between candidates in a place as unified as Boulder, try judging their leadership and engagement styles
through their campaigns: their aesthetics, and how they actually engage with the public. It’s a good hint of what’s to come.
BALLOTS ARE DUE BY 7 P.M. ON NOV. 3.
Dave Martus
BOULDER WEEKLY
OCTOBER 27, 2026 5
NEWS
BOULDER CITY COUNCIL APPROVES 2027 BUDGET The budget addresses heightened economic uncertainty through a ‘lens of criticality’ By Emma Houckes Boulder Weekly
B
oulder City Council approved the 2027 budget in a 7-1 vote at their Oct. 15 meeting. The $552.6 million total budget includes a $417.2 million operating budget and a $135.4 million capital improvement fund. The 2027 budget was focused on balancing flattening revenue sources and addressing economic uncertainty which led to a roughly $6.3 million projected gap in the general fund, Charlotte Huskey, budget officer for the city of Boulder said. Questions from residents have arisen regarding budget transparency with the current budget cycle. At the Oct. 1 meeting, Councilmember Matt Benjamin described the process as “busted,” and echoed that same sentiment Thursday night. City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde said staff remains committed to continuing to improve the process, and said she hoped the council would consider a two-year budget cycle in the future. Rivera-Vandermyde also acknowledged the city’s finance team for receiving the Government Officer’s Finance Association Triple Crown Award. Huskey said the forecasted 2027 revenues reflect the continued trend of slow growth since the end of 2023. The total projected revenues expected $527.1 million.
Huskey said two notable changes include the Transportation Maintenance Fee, an estimated $3 million with implementation of this fee beginning in 2027, and the Recreational Marijuana Retail Sales Tax, to help offset legislation that reduced the city’s collection of marijuana revenues. She said this will bring Boulder “more in line” with neighboring municipalities. The $417 million operating budget, represents the second slowest operating growth at 2.35% since the pandemic period, Huskey said. Its annual growth sits below the U.S. and Denver forecasted inflation rates for 2027. Huskey said the primary costs in the operating budget include wages and benefits for city employees, internal services and existing city programs and services. She said the budget performed ongoing reductions and limited enhancements, using a “lens of criticality.” The results of the Fund Our Future feedback listed wildfire response and prevention as a top priority for 2027. “The city has uplifted these investments with over $10.9 million in funding within the 2027 recommended budget with highlights of yearover-year changes including a one-time increase of 300,000 to support the city’s wildfire ready top priorities,” Huskey said.
The $135 million capital budget includes major investments in maintenance and infrastructure, transportation and floodplain mitigation. Several residents spoke Thursday night against the South Boulder Creek Flood Mitigation Project, which is included as part of the capital improvement program. One resident said, “Sneaking approval of the project through tonight by hiding it in the 500 plus page budget document is just another example of the lack of transparency used to force the dam upon us.” Another said, “Not another dime for the damn dam at CU South,” while wearing a “Repeal CU South Annexation” t-shirt. Joe Taddeucci, director of public works for utilities, spoke to residents’ concerns about the CU South project. “I’ve been at the city for 21 years. I cannot think of another project that has had more process than this,” he said in response to residents asking for alternative plans. He also responded to what he said was “one of the most concerning narratives,” that the project will make flood danger worse for people downstream. “That is 100% not true,” he said. Council members generally agreed that they supported a two-year budget cycle. Councilmember Benjamin echoed
statements from the previous budget discussion. “It’s a busted process,” he said. Councilmember Tina Marquis denied claims that the budget is corrupt or mismanaged. She said the issues stem from timing and a need for better communication on priorities. Councilmember Nicole Speer echoed the same sentiment, claiming the budget process has become more transparent and equitable. Councilmember Taishya Adams was the only no vote for the 2027 budget. She said the budget does not reflect the realities of the escalating climate crisis or the city’s priorities. She criticized the stark difference in the police budget and the climate and Open Space and Mountain Parks budgets, claiming the police budget was too high with the city seeing fewer calls for service. She acknowledged staff’s work in the limited time window, but maintained her concerns. “I continue to be concerned that as a council we are not using the authorities that we have to ensure that the process is valid and reliable and that the budget is meeting our most pressing realities and our most pressing priorities.”
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BOULDER WEEKLY
OCTOBER 27, 2026 7
ELECTION BALLOT PROCESSING IS UNDERWAY IN BOCO Locals encouraged to get involved By Ava Henrickson Boulder Weekly
B
oulder County election workers are already hard at work processing early voting ballots. The Clerk and Recorder’s Office collects the votes from drop off boxes around the county and prepares them, in several steps, to be run through a scanner and counted. It all happens at the Ballot Processing Center on 33rd Street in Boulder.
Bins hold sorted ballots on the first floor of the Ballot Processing Center.
Only certain election workers have access to the upstairs area of the Ballot Processing Center.
They are sorted by machine according to geographical region, then each signature on the envelope containing the ballot is scrutinized by a human, who compares it to signatures collected in past elections or those on record with the clerks office. It’s this part of the process that can cause young voters some grief. If you
to do so.” Those young people, in addition to the elderly and others who have changed their signature over time, are encouraged to submit copies of their current signatures to the Clerk and Recorder’s Office. The instructions for how to do so are on their website. After the votes are sorted and the signatures checked, the ballots are then sent to the upstairs area of the center. There,
The Ballot Processing Center is located near the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder’s office, on 33rd Street.
The two-story center has an industrial hospital vibe, with just a touch of a prison thrown in. The high ceilings contain ductwork and pipes, all painted a crisp, clean white, capturing a sense of sterility. Fencing around certain areas, windowed rooms, locked gates and doors and badge-entry only screams of security, as do the cameras watching over the workers.
Humans, also known as bipartisan election judges, compare voter signatures to a database of collected signatures during the ballot processing process.
The process for processing ballots at the center is outlined on the wall at the center.
The ballots are brought in to the first floor of the secure area by certified bipartisan election workers in locked bins. 8 OCTOBER 27, 2026
don’t have any or only a few signatures on record to compare the signed envelope to, your ballot is kicked out of the counting pile and a letter is mailed to you, asking you to verify your ballot was sent in and that the signature is yours. “We really want young people to understand that they need to be on the lookout for a potential signature discrepancy letter from our office letting them know to let us know that that was them,” explained Boulder County Clerk and Recorder, Molly Fitzpatrick. “Because they still have the opportunity to have their ballot counted, they just have to take that extra step with our office
Election workers smooth out ballots and check for anything that could cause problems for the vote counting ballot scanners.
a machine slices the envelopes open and a human checks each ballot for anything that could cause it not to scan properly in a counting machine. Things like a rip in the ballot, taped up areas or a wine or coffee stain cause those ballots to be kicked to the side. Bipartisan workers recreate the ballot to ensure it can be counted. It’s at this step that humans also unfold the ballots and smooth the creases for a clean scan. The envelopes are separated from the ballots, so they no longer have
voter identifying information on them. The ballots are now ready to be scanned and counted by machines that are purposely not connected to the world wide web to prevent tampering. The machine will recognize and kick out any ballots that are double marked for the same candidate, or in cases where there were extra candidates chosen to fill a set number of seats, for example. Those ballots are then interpreted by election workers, a Democrat and a Republican, and the votes are recreated and counted according to the interpretation of what the workers think the voter meant. This is where it’s important to follow the instructions of how to correct your vote when you make a mistake on your ballot, so your intent is clear and not subject to human interpretation. The whole process takes hundreds of workers each election, and half of the jobs are available to Republicans and half to Democrats. Their names come from the parties themselves, chosen during the caucuses. Because there are so few registered Republican voters in Boulder County, the hiring process is opened to voters who are unaffiliated. The parties don’t historically provide enough workers to staff the election process, so the county looks to those who have worked for them before and even borrows workers from more conservative counties like Weld. Weld Country will in turn borrow some of Boulder County’s liberal workers, to create a bipartisan balance. The county really would like to see more young people get involved in the process. Right now, it’s mostly retired folks who staff the elections. There are other ways to be involved within the democratic process, including being a watcher. Watchers are also always welcome to come in and observe the ballot processing for themselves. “We love to have as many people involved in this process as possible,” Fitzpatrick said. “Political parties are responsible for appointing election watchers and so if you are a registered Republican or a registered Democrat, we tell folks to get in touch with their political party and sign up to become a watcher. “It’s great because it can happen on a timeline that’s convenient for that person. They can pop in for an hour or stay for the whole day and move about the facility and see different parts of the process. It’s a wonderful opportunity,” said Fitzpatrick. The office is doing tours of the center for voters each week leading up to BOULDER WEEKLY
ELECTION
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder’s Office is providing tours of the Ballot Processing Center during the week leading up to the election.
election day, and even the day after the election, as they continue to count ballots. They are also holding Election Champion events, where they educate the public on the entire election process and answer questions. They want the public to see just how transparent elections are in Boulder County. “We walk them through what’s true, what’s not true… those trainings are designed to empower people about what’s the role of the federal government, what’s not their role, why they can feel confident about elections,” said Fitzpatrick. For a list of the champion events and times for tours at the ballot processing center, go to the Clerk and Recorder’s website. To register to vote, go to the Secretary of State’s website.
Boulder County sorts out ballots that are meant for other counties and sends them along to the correct county. This map shows where the ballots were sent to in this election so far.
CLICK HERE
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder’s Election Division: https://bouldercounty.gov/elections/ Colorado Secretary of State: https://www.sos.state.co.us/voter/pages/pub/home.xhtml BOULDER WEEKLY
OCTOBER 27, 2026 9
ON THE BALLOT
THE FENTANYL FIGHT
Proponents say Proposition 132 will save lives. Opponents say it will do the opposite — and may accomplish something more sinister instead. By Cecelia Thorn Boulder Weekly
I
n recent years, fentanyl overdose deaths have decreased nationwide, but they’ve increased here in Colorado. In Boulder County, they jumped over 40 percent last year. Now a new ballot measure promises to help. But a growing number of law enforcement leaders and experts say Proposition 132 will have the opposite effect — and could be pushing something more dangerous onto our state instead. “This ballot measure talks tough,” says Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty, referring to its tough-on-crime approach. “But it falls woefully short of what we need in Colorado.” Most experts agree that increasing criminal penalties doesn’t deter drug use. And Colorado already did increase penalties for fentanyl distribution and possession back in 2022. And Boulder has a long-running harm reduction program, which distributes the overdose-reversing medication Narcan, among other lifesaving supplies. Some supporters of Proposition 132 say the measure will increase treatment options for drug users. But this claim is hotly contested. “It actually narrows the existing ability to get people into treatment who are struggling with addiction,” says Kyle Giddings, the deputy director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, which opposes the measure. “Right now under Colorado law, if you possess anywhere between one and four grams of fentanyl, you would be able to gain access to 10 OCTOBER 27, 2026
treatment, and you get a reduced sentence for a misdemeanor. But Prop. 132 narrows that to only people who possess one gram or less.” Boulder DA Michael Dougherty is also highly skeptical that this measure would boost treatment. “I think [mandatory treatment] will sound good to a lot of voters,” Dougherty says. “But the ballot measure includes zero dollars. So the jurisdictions that do not have treatment options available — and there are many — will not suddenly have new treatment options.” But the conservative group behind the measure is sticking to their claim. Advance Colorado, a political nonprofit which does not disclose its donors, spent millions paying professional signature-gatherers to collect enough voter signatures to get Proposition 132 onto our ballots this fall. Thanks to the organization’s success with ballot measures like this, Advance Colorado President Michael Fields is sometimes referred to as “the most influential Republican in the state.” Fields declined to be interviewed for this story, but he was willing to answer a few questions in writing. He says the measure will force the state to fund more treatment options for drug users. “If someone picks the treatment option, they can’t be denied it,” Fields wrote to us. “If it’s not funded in some other way (like a foundation), the state will have to provide it.” Nonpartisan state legislative analysts
disagree that the state would be required to pay for it. They do, however, estimate the hundreds of millions the state would have to pay in additional prison costs if the measure passes. But this would not require the state to pay for any new drug treatment, the analysts say. Regardless, Boulder County voters have been receiving text messages touting the additional treatment. These texts are believed to be emanating from Advance Colorado, or from another conservative political nonprofit called Common Sense America, which gave $250,000 to an issue committee called Brighter Colorado, which was formed in July to support Advance Colorado’s ballot measures. These text messages say: “Fentanyl deaths are up in Colorado. That’s because we aren’t providing enough treatment for users. Proposition 132 will increase treatment and save lives.” “It’s a mirage,” says Boulder DA Michael Dougherty, referring to the promise of increased treatment. “A complete mirage.” But in a more rural part of the state near Colorado Springs, another District Attorney says the measure would increase treatment — with or without funding — because of how prosecutors can use felony convictions as a tool. Douglas County DA George Brauchler is one of the few law enforcement leaders who support the measure. “Now we could say, we’re going to put you in a drug treatment program, and your incentive is if you complete this, we can make that felony go away,” Brauchler explains. If prosecutors can only threaten a misdemeanor, he says, like right now, then the offenders will often choose the misdemeanor and end up “back on the streets.” But CCJRC’s Kyle Giddings, who has been through mandated drug treatment himself, disputes this claim. “I would say 90 percent of people with a drug-related charge receive mandated treatment already,” says Giddings, who is now in recovery from his addiction. “And the whole burden of cost fell on me. The state and county paid nothing. I had to pay it out of my own pocket.” Giddings worries about how this will affect people with fewer resources. “Like our unhoused neighbors,” he says. “Who are now gonna be sitting in the city and county jails on felony bonds that they can’t afford. They don’t have the
funds to pay the bonds. They don’t have the funds for the treatment.” So when they can’t complete the treatment, he says, they’ll be convicted of a felony, and face a mandatory sentence of eight to 32 years in prison. And the threat of suddenly facing long prison sentences doesn’t affect only people who are unhoused. Proposition 132 makes all fentanyl offenses a felony — even if the person didn’t know their drugs contained fentanyl. Boulder DA Michael Dougherty mentions how college kids often consume fentanyl by accident, thinking they’re taking a Xanax. And under Proposition 132, “distribution” is broadly defined. “So one college student handing fentanyl to another college student,” Dougherty says. “The sentencing [would be] the same for them as it is for a hard-core dealer, which is eight years to 32 years.” Under current law, a judge would be able to weigh evidence regarding this person’s knowledge and intent. But under Proposition 132, this person would no longer be eligible for reducing their sentence by completing drug treatment. “It makes everyone a distributor,” Giddings says. The most recent nonpartisan legislative analysis shows that Proposition 132 would put an additional 1,000 people behind bars in Colorado by 2030. But Douglas County DA Brauchler says the idea of people sitting in prison for low-level possession charges is “mythology,” because people who are charged with possessing small amounts are generally offered a plea deal. “Nobody is required to prosecute someone and send them to prison for eight to 32 years,” Brauchler says. “But those prosecutors who have a case and say, this dude needs to go to prison, now they’ll have the tools to make that happen.” Opponents point out that prosecutors already have this tool: under current law, high-level dealers already face eight to 32 years. This remains unchanged under Proposition 132. And Brauchler’s view about offering plea deals troubles people like Vincent Atchity, the president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado, a nonpartisan nonprofit which normally doesn’t take a stand on ballot measures. “It puts all the power in the hands of prosecutors,” Atchity says. “And if you have a wonderful prosecutor who really BOULDER WEEKLY
ON THE BALLOT loves people of all kinds and all colors, maybe you can trust them to divert people [with plea deals].” But the reality, he explains, is that this will target some populations more than others. And minorities are not the only groups that will be disproportionately impacted. “How they wrote this ballot measure, it wraps people who get convicted of possession into the habitual statute,” Giddings explains. “Meaning, if you have more than one conviction of possession, your sentence could be increased times two, times three. So the unhoused folks who can’t afford to complete the treatment will suddenly get convicted of a felony. So they pick up another charge. And the ballot measure is written so you cannot use the treatment option more than once. So if you get convicted again, you get a habitual, you’re going to prison for 8 to 32 years.” This poses another problem for a state already dealing with overcrowded prisons — and an ongoing budget crisis. Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee has already been looking at contracting with private prisons to provide additional space, because it’s cheaper than buying or constructing a new state prison from scratch. The state’s reliance on private prisons “will only increase if this ballot mea-
BOULDER WEEKLY
sure passes,” says DA Dougherty, who opposes private prisons because “allowing profit into the justice system […] undermines integrity, effectiveness, and public trust,” he says, and private prisons “have a troubling history of health and safety risks to inmates and staff.” But over in Douglas County, DA Brauchler doesn’t see this as a problem. “I know private prisons can be a bogeyman for some,” he says. “But honestly, if you’re a drug dealer, and you’re dealing fentanyl that can kill people, do we care if it’s a private prison or a state prison? Why do you care?” Brauchler disagrees with Boulder DA Dougherty’s view that private prisons pose a danger to our society’s ethical ideals and to prison inmates and staff. “I mean, profit’s baked into everything we do,” DA Brauchler says. “Maybe if we encouraged DOC [Department of Corrections] to think in terms of the bottom line, and maybe if we incentivized them to try to turn a profit, they’d put out a better product, and we wouldn’t have so many people who reoffend.” Here in Boulder, DA Dougherty was surprised to hear that DA Brauchler advocates for private prisons. Dougherty believes we should abolish all private prisons — including the two Colorado already uses. But private prisons are big business.
In 2025, the private prison industry poured millions into political nonprofits and campaigns, and saw record profits, largely due to expanded ICE detention. And another one of Advance Colorado’s ballot measures would increase ICE involvement in our state. Because the group’s ballot measures would dramatically increase money flowing to private prison companies, some people are asking questions. Advance Colorado President Michael Fields rejects these questions. “We have received zero dollars from private prisons,” Fields wrote to us. “That is a completely made up attack.” But Advance Colorado still doesn’t reveal their donors. And CCJRC’s Kyle Giddings points out that a lobbyist for the GEO Group — the private prison company that just received a multimillion-dollar contract to reopen a shuttered private prison here in Colorado — is the of the same guys who started Advance Colorado. So Giddings isn’t afraid to talk about the intent of Proposition 132. “It’s an evil policy,” he says. Advance Colorado President Michael Fields disagrees. “The intent is simply saving lives,” he wrote to us. Giddings is unconvinced. “Then why did they write it this way?” he asks.
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OCTOBER 27, 2026 11
DATA DUMP WELD COUNTY DATA CENTER APPROVAL FUELS CALLS FOR STRONGER GUARDRAILS By Sara Mead Boulder Weekly
NOT SO FAST
G
REELEY | As communities across Colorado weigh the economic promise and environmental costs of data centers, a Weld County approval and an October 8 town hall in Greeley have sharpened questions about water, electricity, noise and public oversight for readers in Boulder and Longmont. While Boulder County does host a few smaller data and enterprise facilities such as Kyndryl Boulder Data Center, Earthnet Inc. and the CU Boulder Space Science Center, local governments have thus far aggressively blocked them due to concerns over their immense resource consumption. The meeting in Greeley centered on Global AI (Colorado) LLC’s plan for a hyperscale data center at the former Kodak/Share Stream site in Windsor. Weld County has approved a Use by Special Review permit for an initial 27.5-megawatt facility, even as nearby municipalities impose temporary moratoriums or power limits while they develop rules for the fast-growing industry.
THE HIDDEN FOOTPRINT BEHIND THE CLOUD
Melinda Latouri, professor emeritus of geography in Colorado State University’s Department of Ecosystem Science 12 OCTOBER 27, 2026
and Sustainability, opened the forum by describing data centers as the physical link between land and water and the virtual world of information services and data processing. Although facilities vary widely in size, she said, they share four defining considerations: scale and location, ownership, cooling and heat, and power and reliability. “We have a spectrum of data centers that are composed of power, land and water,” Latouri said. Land and power needs generally rise with facility size, she explained, but water consumption depends heavily on the cooling technology and on whether water is used at the site or indirectly to generate electricity. A full accounting must include water withdrawn for raw materials and chip manufacturing, consumed during operations and discharged afterward, including whether it is treated or recycled. “Where is that water coming from, whose water is it, and then what happens with that water downstream?” Latouri asked. Location, she added, is critical. Using global and county maps alongside the project site plan, she showed that Global AI acquired a 438-acre industrially zoned parcel, with 41 acres designated for the first phase. The site borders single-family housing, green space, agricultural land and the Cache la Poudre River.
Colorado communities are responding in different ways. In unincorporated Boulder County, the commissioners unanimously passed a moratorium on data center and detention center applications on June 2, for up to six months. The code does not currently define data centers as a use, set a scale, or designate zoning districts. With consideration to prohibiting them outright, staff drafted an amendment to be reviewed by the Planning Commission before going to the commissioners for a final decision. In Longmont, the city council voted 6-1 to cap data center energy use at the lower 5% of regional grid capacity or 100 megawatts which is effectively a hyperscale ban. These changes don’t apply to the cities of Boulder or Longmont. Louisville and Lafayette have their independent procedures as well. In Northern Colorado, Berthoud and Brighton approved 12-month moratoriums on data center applications while evaluating pressure on water and power systems. Loveland adopted a 12-month pause and suspended applications for facilities using at least 10 megawatts or industrial cooling. Larimer County has extended its moratorium three times while drafting regulations, and Longmont has capped new proposals at 100 megawatts. Weld County, by contrast, approved the Global AI permit despite substantial public opposition; most of the 270 recorded comments raised concerns.
79.3 and 84.7 dB(C). “This facility isn’t even built yet,” he noted. “[These measurements] are coming from the neighbors.” Stearns also challenged claims that closed-loop cooling means a data center does not use water. In such systems, liquid circulates past densely packed chips, absorbs heat and cycles back. Before it can repeat the process, however, that liquid must be cooled by a secondary system, often air-cooled pipes or cooling towers that evaporate water. “It comes from the heat ejection, not cooling the chip,” he said. That dynamic can make arid regions attractive to operators because evaporation is more efficient in dry air, Stearns said. “So, the places that are the most water-stressed ends up being the places (cooling systems) are the most common.” The GAI application materials describe a closed-loop system requiring an initial 65,000-gallon fill and about 6,500 gallons of annual replenishment. Stearns argued that off-site water use tied to electricity generation and the supply chain also deserves scrutiny. The project’s possible scale intensified those concerns. Stearns said Global AI plans to expand the Windsor operation to between 100 and 200 megawatts, a substantial share of the company’s stated 1,000-megawatt portfolio goal. The first phase would include 11 backup diesel generators to support 27.5 megawatts. “This is a power plant,” he said, urging an independent review of contradictions in the application and sufficient time for officials and residents to evaluate the details.
APPROVAL UNDER THE MICROSCOPE PRESSING PAUSE BEFORE POWERING UP Kevin Stearns, an independent investigative researcher and founding member of the Colorado Citizen Observers Project, argued that the county’s review did not adequately address the project’s potential effects. He pointed to conflicting figures and late submissions in public records, the absence of a cost-benefit analysis and procedural limits that placed some broader concerns outside the formal scope of review. Noise was one example. Weld County’s limit for data centers is 65 dB(C), but Stearns said the figures in Global AI’s application did not capture the low-frequency, infrasonic sound troubling residents. He cited readings taken at fence posts along the project perimeter—52.7, 74.4,
Candidate for House Representative in District 64 Mo Dower said temporary moratoriums give local governments breathing room to understand an industry whose technical and infrastructure demands can overwhelm small councils and planning staffs. “Why should every municipality be rushing around trying to slow this down,” she asked. “Shouldn’t we just put a pause on [data centers] entirely at the state level?” The question drew broad support from the audience and opened the question-and-answer session. Residents raised issues involving zoning, water rights, the local costs of BOULDER WEEKLY
DATA DUMP diesel backup generation and the source of power for the project’s initial phase. Participants also discussed a petition seeking a referendum on Weld County’s decision and proposed requiring community-benefits agreements for future data center applications. The debate reflects a larger challenge confronting communities nationwide: data centers underpin cloud computing and artificial intelligence, but their benefits and costs are often distributed unevenly. At the Greeley meeting, speakers argued that officials need clearer,
facility-specific information about environmental impacts, utility demand and public costs before approving projects that could operate for decades. For those gathered, the immediate request was not a permanent ban but time: time to audit applications, reconcile conflicting claims, draft enforceable standards and determine who bears the risks. Their message was clear: A moratorium can provide that time before decisions about land, water and energy become difficult to reverse.
Melinda Latouri demonstrates the spectrum of the physical footprint of data centers to participants of a recent town hall in Greeley.
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BOULDERLAND ALPINE-BALSAM: WHERE A HOSPITAL ONCE STOOD, A NEW COMMUNITY WILL GROW By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly
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he wrecking ball never came. Instead, the former Boulder Community Hospital disappeared piece by piece. Over two years, crews dismantled the sprawling campus while residents shared memories of births, surgeries and final goodbyes. For generations, the hospital had been a place people turned to in moments of crisis and recovery. Now Boulder is asking the site to serve a different purpose. The 8.8-acre Alpine-Balsam redevelopment will bring 217 homes, including 157 permanently affordable apartments, alongside a new Western City Campus, flood-protection infrastructure and expanded pedestrian and bicycle connections. Purchased by the city in 2015, the project represents the culmination of more than 11 years of planning, design and construction, as well as one of the most ambitious civic investments Boulder has undertaken in decades. Together, those efforts aim to address challenges that have grown increasingly difficult to ignore: housing affordability, transportation access, climate resilience and fragmented public services. Like the hospital before it, Alpine-Balsam is rooted in the idea of care. The difference is that instead of treating individual patients, it is designed to address broader community challenges, from housing instability and transportation barriers to flood risk and access to public services.
A VISION FOR A DIFFERENT BOULDER
The transformation begins with reclamation. Nearly 94% of the hospital’s materi14 OCTOBER 27, 2026
al was diverted from landfills during deconstruction. Steel from the building was reused in projects including Fire Station 3, allowing pieces of the old hospital to remain part of the city it once served. That same philosophy extends into the redevelopment itself. Project renderings show tree-lined streets, wide sidewalks and bridges crossing a landscaped floodway. Native plants line pedestrian pathways while apartment buildings draw inspiration from Colorado’s natural landscape. Residents can walk to parks, transit stops, shops, city services and workplaces rather than relying entirely on a car. The vision is optimistic and intentionally so. City leaders hope Alpine-Balsam can demonstrate that affordability, sustainability and walkability do not have to compete with one another, creating a model for the kind of neighborhood many communities are struggling to build. Whether Boulder can translate that vision into lasting results remains the central question. Ambitious plans are common. Successfully delivering affordable housing, maintaining accessibility and preserving long-term affordability is considerably harder.
on Boulder seniors and people with disabilities,” said Kurt Firnhaber, director of Housing and Human Services. “The second phase in 2027 will focus on families and workforce residents.” The affordable apartments will serve households earning between 30% and 80% of area median income. More importantly, Firnhaber said the affordability restrictions will remain in place permanently. Unlike many affordable housing developments financed through tax-credit programs, which eventually convert to market-rate housing, Alpine-Balsam is intended to provide long-term stability for future generations. That permanence matters in a community where housing costs have steadily pushed more residents toward the margins. Still, affordability remains difficult to create. “The cost of building housing is getting more expensive, and HUD is not expanding vouchers nationwide,” Firnhaber said. “All housing authorities are struggling with this.”
WHAT HOUSING MEANS HOUSING STABILITY IN TO RESIDENTS AN EXPENSIVE CITY The need is clear. According to Redfin data from late 2025, a household needed roughly $172,000 annually to afford a typical Boulder home, while renters needed nearly $100,000 annually to keep pace with market rates. City officials believe Alpine-Balsam can provide at least part of an answer. “The first phase next year will focus
For Jennifer, housing is inseparable from health. Living with PTSD, ADHD and executive-function challenges, she said everyday environments can either provide stability or amplify stress. Noise, confusion and overstimulation can quickly become overwhelming, while financial pressures only add to the burden. Finding housing that accommodates those needs has proven difficult. After leaving an emotionally abusive
living situation, Jennifer spent years navigating waitlists, rising rents and housing options that failed to support the lifestyle she needed. Many affordable rentals required roommates or could not accommodate the animals she relies on for emotional support and routine. Even now, her housing situation remains uncertain. “I’m in a catch-22,” Jennifer said. “I’m using all my savings for rent, not being able to find work. If I move sooner or later, will I be able to find work?” What Jennifer hopes to find is not simply a cheaper apartment. She wants a neighborhood where daily necessities are easy to reach, where she can move through public spaces safely and independently and where the stress of navigating everyday life does not become another obstacle to her well-being. Isolation, she said, is one of the most difficult parts of living with her disabilities. Her animals help ease the isolation. “Being able to wake up and hug a warm animal that is happy to see me first thing in the morning keeps me from debilitating depression,” she said. For Jennifer, accessibility means more than ramps or building codes. It means being able to afford housing without constant financial pressure. It means clear signage and intuitive design that reduce confusion. It means safe walking and biking routes that allow people to move through a neighborhood comfortably. Most of all, it means remaining part of a community rather than being pushed to its edges. “Every neighborhood should be dispersed throughout the entire city,” she said. “It should be diverse enough now that we don’t have to section people off.” Jennifer’s concerns point to a broader challenge facing affordable housing: BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDERLAND ensuring residents remain connected to the services, jobs and community resources that help them thrive rather than being separated from them. Alpine-Balsam attempts to address that challenge by integrating affordable housing into an existing neighborhood near parks, grocery stores, transit routes and city services. “Often in communities, affordable housing ends up being in the place no one else wants to live in,” said Michele Crane, chief architect and project manager for Alpine-Balsam. “It’s exciting to provide these units in such a great location.”
DESIGNING A MORE CONNECTED COMMUNITY
Crane sees the project as an opportunity to address several challenges simultaneously. From the beginning, transportation planners helped shape the site. Wider sidewalks, safer crossings and improved connections to North Boulder Park are intended to encourage walking and cycling. Bike facilities, scooter stations, covered bus shelters and ride-share access points support multiple forms of transportation. “The car is more of the visitor,” Crane said. The floodway running through the center of the property reflects the project’s broader philosophy. Before redevelopment, the entire site sat within the 100-year floodplain. The new greenway will protect homes from flooding while serving as wildlife habitat, open space and a connection between surrounding neighborhoods. “We added additional design features, really just trying to understand that this needs to be more than just a functional channel,” Crane said. “It’s actually a community amenity day-to-day.” During a recent site visit, Crane noticed hummingbirds already moving through the newly planted landscape, a sign that the habitat goals may already be taking hold.
BRINGING GOVERNMENT WITHIN REACH
Alpine-Balsam’s focus on accessibility extends beyond housing and transportation. Today, many municipal functions are spread across leased and city-owned buildings throughout Boulder. Residents often need to travel between offices to complete routine tasks. The new Western City Campus will consolidate roughly 500 employees currently working across nine locations. Residents will be able to access services ranging from utility payments and business licensing to housing assistance, permit applications and transit passes in one place. For Crane, solving that long-standBOULDER WEEKLY
ing problem is one of the most important aspects of the redevelopment. “For more than 10 years, 15 years, 20, we’ve had decentralized customer service,” she said. “People have found it challenging to go to one building only to find they have to go across town to get to another.”
THE REAL MEASURE OF SUCCESS
Construction continues to move forward. According to Leana Evenson, the floodway is expected to open this fall, while the broader project remains on schedule for completion next year. Extensive underground infrastructure work, including moving a gas line that once served the hospital, contributed to some delays but is largely complete. For now, Alpine-Balsam exists somewhere between memory and possibility. The hospital that once stood on the site cared for people one patient at a time. The neighborhood replacing it is attempting something broader, addressing housing instability, transportation barriers, flood protection and access to city services through a single redevelopment effort. “The hospital was a legacy,” Crane said. “I think this is a legacy project.” Whether Alpine-Balsam ultimately earns that distinction will not be determined by renderings, construction milestones or planning documents. It will be measured years from now by the residents who live there, the seniors able to remain in Boulder, the workers who can afford to stay and the families who find stability in a city where housing security has become increasingly difficult to achieve. If the project succeeds, the site will continue its long history as a place of healing. The patients will simply be different. Instead of treating individual illnesses, Alpine-Balsam may help address challenges that have shaped Boulder for decades, from housing instability to social isolation and access to public services.
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BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CANDIDATES
VYING FOR MAYOR
AARON BROCKETT The ‘forever project’ By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly
I
n a political culture that often rewards confrontation, incumbent Mayor Aaron Brockett has built his career around collaboration. “One of the campaign issues has been that I’m too nice to be mayor,” Brockett says. “And I’ll disagree with that. But politely. Because I am actually a nice person.” Critics see caution where supporters see steadiness. Brockett sees neither
AQUILES LA GRAVE
Humble upbringing fuels mayoral campaign By Matt Weiner Boulder Weekly
A
s a young boy, Aquiles La Grave immigrated to Boulder from Venezuela in 1995. He slept on the floor of the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his mom and sister. But La Grave’s reflections on his childhood revolve around how various members of the Boulder community provided resources, Thanksgiving dinners, friendship and BOULDER WEEKLY
contradiction nor weakness in the approach. “A city is a forever project,” he says. “We serve in elected office for some number of years, and then we pass the baton to the next people who come after us.” Against the backdrop of the Flatirons, almost every conversation about growth in Boulder eventually arrives at the same question: How can the city welcome more people without losing the character residents value? “We have a backbone of policies in the city that have been around for decades that I think we’re very proud of,” Brockett says. “The urban growth boundary and the height limit and our open space program.” During his tenure, Boulder has loosened restrictions on accessory dwelling units, expanded opportunities for duplexes and triplexes, repealed occupancy limits and eliminated many parking requirements. One statistic Brockett frequently cites is that 35% of housing built in Boulder during the past decade has been permanently affordable. He says that percentage is higher than any city in the country, though that comparison could not be independently verified. He also
guidance, which helped him become a successful businessman and embody the American Dream. But the Boulder that shaped La Grave is no more, he said. Homes are being sold for over $10 million. Families with six-figure median incomes are forced to move. Penny Lane, a coffee shop he loved, filled with a vibrant Bohemian energy, has been replaced by a luxury lighting fixture store. “If you want to spend $15,000 on a chandelier, they got you covered, right?” La Grave said. “And you walk up and down Pearl Street, and you feel the drain. I’ve been working on Pearl Street for over a decade. It’s empty.” Now, as election season ramps
points to Boulder’s inclusionary housing requirements, which require affordable housing contributions from larger developments. Perhaps the most visible divide between Brockett’s supporters and critics is Alpine-Balsam. The redevelopment of the former Boulder Community Health hospital site has become one of the defining controversies of the election. Over the course of a decade, the project evolved from a relatively straightforward redevelopment proposal into a sprawling effort that includes municipal offices, affordable housing, transportation improvements and flood-mitigation infrastructure. As costs climbed, so did scrutiny. For critics, Alpine-Balsam has become more than a construction project. It has become a referendum on City Hall’s financial stewardship. Opponents argue the project’s final price bears little resemblance to what residents originally associated with the redevelopment and see it as evidence that city leaders lost sight of the total cost over time. Brockett points first to the flood-mitigation infrastructure, including a floodway designed to protect a neighborhood long vulnerable to flooding. He also points to transportation improvements
and approximately 150 permanently affordable housing units planned for the site, an amount that would make it one of the largest affordable-housing investments undertaken by the city. Brockett also frames the project as an investment meant to serve Boulder for generations. The city plans to consolidate operations from multiple aging facilities into a single campus; a move supporters argue will reduce long-term maintenance burdens while creating a more efficient public workspace. If housing has been the longest-running issue of Brockett’s political career, homelessness is the one he says changed most dramatically during his time in office. According to city data, daytime unsheltered homelessness has declined significantly since 2023, even as homelessness has increased in other parts of the region. Boulder has also added more than 200 units of permanent supportive housing with wraparound services. “A successful Boulder is a Boulder that is still fundamentally the place that has our core values as a city,” he says. “We’re open, welcoming and inclusive. We care about our neighbors. We value our environment and our open spaces.”
up, La Grave’s 2026 mayoral campaign hinges on convincing voters he can return Boulder to the idealized one of his childhood. “If I arrive in Boulder today under the same circumstances, I am really challenged to believe that we would we would thrive in Boulder or even be very long for Boulder,” La Grave said. “And that’s a huge issue, right?” La Grave is critical of a slew of decisions by city council - like a proposed budget that, he said, cut services to the popular Spruce Pool and free rec center access to families in need. And a request for the largest bailout in city history, which comes with a $650 million price tag. “We’ve added 1000s of housing units, and we’ve lost population. Our revenues have flattened, and we’ve increased staff by almost 30%, and no one feels like they’re getting 30% more services. And when it comes to balancing the budget, we balance the budget through service cuts,” La Grave said. La Grave also mentioned a “safety crisis” occurring in Boulder. A graduate of the police academy, La Grave said it’s the result of “a turnover crisis at Boulder Police Department. Every year for the past five years, we’ve lost between 10 to 20% of our officers.” La Grave, who has offices on Pearl
Street, said vacancies are surging because policies make it hard for businesses to thrive. “Downtown businesses are 70% locally owned businesses – 70%, right? Every time we raise taxes on them, make it harder to get a permit, add fees, and maintain downtown infrastructure that isn’t welcoming to folks from our outlying communities, those businesses close,” La Grave said. “If they get replaced at all, they get replaced by those who can afford to do business, and so you see more national brands replacing what used to be local spaces.” But if elected, La Grave said he’d focus on fiscal responsibility and taking more steps before committing millions to projects. He would also focus on ongoing projects rather than taking on new ones, an approach he said the city council has taken that has hindered the community. And turned it into something he struggles to recognize. “It took me over 20 years to earn the right to vote. I voted in my first election in 2024, and here I am, two years later, running for office, right?” La Grave said. “No one takes the right to vote and the meaning behind every vote more seriously than I do, and so a key message of this campaign is, we can expect more.” OCTOBER 27, 2026 17
BOULDER CANDIDATES
JAMESON GOLDSTIEN Youth movement By Emma Houckes Boulder Weekly
J
ameson Goldstein is a Colorado native and currently in his third year studying finance at the University of Colorado Boulder. Goldstein said the biggest challenge facing Boulder right now is a disconnect between what people want and what the city council is doing. He described his conversations with citizens and said the primary thing he has heard is that when people come to city council with feedback or a suggestion, it typically falls on deaf ears. Goldstein believes the city needs a system where “the ball stops at the mayor.” He said the mayor should make the final call, and the city council should be considered the mayor’s employees, rather than leading the meetings and deciding which issues to discuss. One prominent issue that Goldstein takes exception to is the Better Boulder Bond, a proposed $400 million Recreation and Safety Bond on the November ballot. “We need to start with hearing what the people think instead of going instead of implementing top-down measures,” he said. This people-first idea is clear throughout his campaign, which centers transparency and citizen participation. He also said he would support bringing back camera coverage during public comment for city council meetings. “It’s important that we make Boulder about people again,” he said. He also said it is important to reform city spending, including implementing a dashboard where projects are clearly listed, and how funds are being allocated towards those projects. Accountability is a big issue for Goldstein. He said the city should bring in an independent auditor who goes through costs to figure out if
18 OCTOBER 27, 2026
spending is justified based on residents’ needs. Goldstein also wants to remove all Flock cameras from Boulder because they are an unconstitutional invasion of residents’ privacy and a waste of money at $93,000 a year out of the city’s budget. In terms of housing affordability, Goldstein said the city should not be allocating new land to building new houses. Instead, he said he would like to focus on incentivizing people to install accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, into their existing properties. He explained that a public information campaign to explain the longterm incentives of owning an ADU would be beneficial, in addition to allocating funds for those wanting to build ADUs in a bottom-up bond. He also said the city council should be doing more to incentivize homeowners to replace their lawns with natural foliage. He explained that out of 6.1 billion gallons of water filtered for drinking and other uses, 2.1 billion gallons go to watering lawns. He said switching to natural foliage, also known as waterwise plants, would save that water and homeowners’ money. He said the current wildfire resiliency direction is great, especially with incentives for homeowners, but the city should apply more pressure to Xcel. He explained that after the Marshall fires, instead of improving their infrastructure and focusing more on clean energy, Xcel reverted to turning the power off when there are fire risks. He believes Boulder City Council can apply more pressure for them to modernize their technology and keep the lights on at all times. As the youngest candidate on the ballot, Goldstien points to history, where he says many significant accomplishments can be seen from people his age or even younger. He cited Alexander Hamilton, who was 21 years old when he fought for U.S. independence. “Young people have proved countless times that they’re able to accomplish great things. And I don’t think I’m an exception to that rule.”
TAISHYA ADAMS
Resolving Boulder’s polycrisis By Hannah Carley Boulder Weekly
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aishya Adams has served on the Boulder City Council for two and a half years. She is a former commissioner for Colorado Parks and Wildlife and has worked as an Educational Equity Specialist with the American Institutes for Research. Adams claims Boulder is currently in a polycrisis, dealing with more than one critical issue at the same time. If elected mayor, she plans to focus resources and attention toward three key areas: water, electricity and food systems. “We are not doing meaningful scenario planning, recognizing the level of uncertainty of one third of our water supply is the Colorado River,” Adams said. “We know that there are significant challenges not only in the management of that river, but the fact that demand far exceeds supply, and that’s just a reality” Energy issues continue to impact Boulder residents as emissions and prices rise. Adams confirmed that representatives for Xcel Energy indicated the organization would not be able to hit carbon emission reduction targets in 2027 and 2028, falling almost 40% below projections. “We’re moving in the wrong direction,” Adams said. “A critical step toward another municipalization conversation and decision is actually owning energy infrastructure as a city, as a renewable energy enterprise.” She sees the airport as a potential place to cite solar energy. She plans for the city to use additional locations to site and store renewable energy. Adams will also push the city council to further discuss Boulder food systems. Existing local food programs, like the Farmer’s Market, are beneficial, as they provide a platform for the local exchange of goods. Adams believes more should be done to strengthen food access, food security, food sovereignty and food infrastructure. “The city of Boulder owns 16,000
acres of agricultural land, and they’re growing food, and so how do we strengthen production,” Adams said. “How do we continue to work with our community gardens? The majority of food that people eat in the city of Boulder comes from somewhere else.” Adams will also change how projects are planned. City plans do not follow annual targets, milestones or metrics that must be met. She emphasized how establishing a multi-year budgeting cycle and mapping annual goals and outcomes is crucial to establishing trust, as it would allow the community to hold city representatives accountable. “They don’t feel like our council, like the city staff, are listening to what is most urgent, important to them,” Adams said. “They’re not feeling like their voices are being heard.” Adams will be cautious and concerned about any new construction or developments for Boulder. She said the city should stay as big as it is, focusing efforts on correcting water, food and energy strains it needs to address first. “As somebody who has been in the field of climate, water and food right now for some time, I can say the worst thing you can do is urban sprawl when it’s not necessary,” Adams said. She claims protecting and reinforcing homes against wildfires is a larger concern than beginning any new projects. “Our population is not growing at a scale that would necessitate us growing and sprawling into area three,” Adams said. “So I believe we need to continue to grow within our current service area.” Adams said she will focus on providing a consistent, climate-safe environment for Boulderites. “We know extreme heat is going to escalate,” Adams said. “It was already 102 degrees here. That’s unprecedented, so we’re going to need places for people to cool down.” She also wants the city to develop a renewable energy enterprise. This would allow the city to gain revenue from Xcel Energy. The city must reconsider how it uses reserve funds, Adams said, as many residents would benefit from emergency funding. “Reserve funds are primarily used for emergencies, which is appropriate, and I would say we are in a climate emergency right now, and we need to think proactively,” Adams said. She also believes that some new diversity initiatives could be low-cost, high-reward programs worth pursuing. “Our city’s boards and commissions oftentimes do not reflect the diversity, whether it be raised ethnicity, social, economic, geographic representation,” Adams said. “And so these community connectors, particularly the outreach ones, are the ones who are going out into the community” BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CANDIDATES
LISA ANN JACOBS The ‘bright medical doctor’
By Emma Houckes Boulder Weekly
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isa Ann Jacobs has centered her campaign on her experience and making the city more money. She spoke highly of her education, which includes Bowdoin College, the Boston University School of Medicine, the University of Liege School of Medicine, the Columbia University School of Public Health, the University of Northern Colorado School program in Public Health, MBA classes at Brandeis Uni-
versity, the American Academy of Real Estate and the Southern University Law School. “I’m coming very much from a background of medicine, real estate, public health, and the lineage is very impressive,” she said. “My talent is so high that I was able to be a professional musician, to get a PhD, to get an M.D., to get a law degree,” Jacobs said. Jacobs also frequently references her I.Q., and wrote in a forwarded answer, “I have the highest IQ on the Wexler IQ score where I am also a leader.” Later in the written answer, Jacobs said “But I do not believe an I.Q. score qualifies someone to be mayor or governor. Intelligence is valuable only when it is put to work for other people.”
Jacobs said that the ultra-wealthy are struggling in Boulder, and that property taxes are getting so high they won’t be able to stay in Boulder. “I know my wealthy constituents are suffering,” she said. “I want to take away their anxiety.” Jacobs said, “the wealthy are committed to taking care of the homeless.” She also described personal kinship with homeless people. “The homeless want my help. I’m very dedicated to them,” she said. The Sundance Film Festival was one event Jacobs referenced that could generate money for the city via sales tax. She said that Boulder was not prepared for Sundance, and that she’d support building a new art theatre by fundraising and grants. She also raised concerns about the film festival, saying people will buy land in Boulder, drive up property taxes and force long-standing homeowners out. “I don’t want that to take place,” she said. Jacobs said voters have asked her to replace the current police force. She said that it is very important to weed out bad-natured police and gave an example of an officer who was arrested on misdemeanor charges of domestic violence. She said, “given the ineptness of the police,” that she had been selected to investigate crimes herself. She referenced other settlements
where she said police misconduct cost the city. She said voters are frustrated with standoffs, and the city should use established techniques of giving pizza and cigarettes to suspects. Jacobs alleges that according to some voters, some entity is trying to prevent her from being elected. She explained that her vehicle has been entered, her laptop has been stolen and her phone and email accounts have been hacked. She also alleged that she has previously been unethically represented by the press with regards to her background. She said the press hadn’t “stated the obvious to the voters that I’m a very bright medical doctor who’s brilliant. Boulder will have a brighter future with me.”
FRED SMITH Did not respond to our request for an interview.
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VYING FOR CITY COUNCIL
DAVID MARTUS
A financial approach By Evan Borman Boulder Weekly
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avid Martus has lived in Boulder for 41 years and earned his B.S. and M.B.A. at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is currently a Senior Advisor at Upwelling Capital and has had a 25-year career in institutional finance “I look at the current city council, which is a great set of backgrounds. There’s one skill set that’s not in abundance and that’s financial acumen,” Martus said. “I know how to be a good steward with people’s money. I’d like to do that and work to rebuild trust through transparency from the community which I think is lacking today.” After Mark Wallach resigned from the Boulder City Council, Martus decided to run and fill the role he left behind. “Mark Wallach brought a lot of pragmatic common sense, and he asked the right questions. A couple of his were, ‘is this program good for Boulder and can we afford it?’” Martus said. Martus’ campaign is centered around providing a non-ideological and pragmatic approach to improving the city. He believes in unbiased methods for the allocation of funding. “You have to come into any issue listening first, learning and having a fact-based approach. If you come in with a certain viewpoint, that’s going to skew your ability to look at information and evaluate it on its principles as opposed to saying, ‘it needs to fit my viewpoint.’ City council is nonpartisan, it’s for a reason.” Martus said. Martus wants to reimplement a Priority Based Budgeting system in Boulder to expand the pre-existing Budgeting for Re20 OCTOBER 27, 2026
silience and Equity. “Once [a program] has been implemented and we look and say, has this program been successful? When it gets put into the budget, it also should be included, how do we measure success? What’s the metric? And so, we can look back two, three, or five years and say, ‘ok this program has been successful, keep funding it or it hasn’t been successful in the way we want it to be, and our cost per unit of service delivery is too high.’ If you keep doing that over time, you create more common good,” Martus said. Martus wants a financial advisory board, where citizens can provide advice to counsel on allocated funding. “That’s worth exploring whether I’m elected or not. For the first time in the 40 years I’ve been here, it appears that Boulder now faces more of a systemic physical deficit. Boulder grew, it was easy to add programs when revenue was exceeding inflation, now it’s the opposite,” Martus said. Martus believes that wildfire resilience is the most urgent environmental plight facing Boulder. “When it gets windy here, there’s a collective anxiety across this entire community. That’s a result of climate change that is beyond the direct control of the city, but what is in our direct control is how we respond to that and become more resilient,” Martus said. Martus does not support the proposed $400 million infrastructure bond as it currently stands. He believes that before residents assume long-term debt, council and staff should provide a transparent list of projects, specific costs and whether lower-cost alternatives were considered. He also doesn’t want any significant changes to current policies surrounding homelessness due to current metrics of steady improvement. “We just want to observe the trends and modify it as needed. It’s how do you find that right mix of enforcement and compassion,” Martis said. Martus calls for a clearer and more predictable land-use code that is easier for residents to navigate. He wants to increase housing affordability for middle-income households through a cost-effective approach without high density being the only solution. He also supports modernizing Title 9 and will commit to a targeted update that defines what issues need to be solved. “I picked up playing hockey goalie 10 years ago. In the morning before a lot of people are even up, I have a frozen piece of vulcanized rubber shot at me at 40 miles an hour. When you make tough decisions on council, you’re going to hear from people,” Martus said. “I got the thick skin to look at stuff in a pragmatic, non-ideological way and help build consensus to make good decisions for the city.”
LYNN SEGAL
Not done ruffling it up By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly
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ynn Segal is running for Boulder City Council because, she says, “nobody else would run.” After an unsuccessful campaign in 2003, in her telling, Boulder has endured “20 years of a completely lame city council.” At 73, the retired ultrasound technologist sees her medical career as preparation for public office, citing “a deep understanding of the complexity of the human body.” Her answer to nearly every policy question circles back to one subject: development. “Stop the developer subsidies. There’s way too much building,” she said. To Segal, housing affordability, neighborhood change, homelessness and university expansion all trace back to the same problem: growth. In her eyes, no institution embodies that concern more than the University of Colorado. “CU is the destruction of this town the way that it’s going,” she says. The criticism comes moments after she insists she loves the university. Three generations of her family attended CU, yet moments later she describes the university as “a virus.” She argues that CU’s status as a state institution allows it to expand beyond the city’s control, citing redevelopment projects and housing growth as evidence. Asked what a healthier relationship between Boulder and CU would look like, she returns to a familiar conclusion: less growth. On fiscal issues, Segal calls for greater transparency, including faster release of public records. She accuses city government of withholding critical information from residents. Conversations about budgets, planning and infrastructure often arrive at the same conclusion: a city she believes lacks accountability and transparency. “So much corruption, so little time,” she said A longtime advocate of municipal energy, Segal supports geothermal heating
and cooling, neighborhood microgrids, battery storage and distributed solar generation. That support exists alongside frustration with some of the city’s climate initiatives. She points to a $55,000 city-funded energy retrofit at her home through Colorado’s Affordable Residential Energy program that she says left her colder and disillusioned with the project’s execution. On homelessness, she favors prevention over intervention. “Why are you filling up the bathtub and then draining it out?” she asks. “Why not just turn off the tap?” Rising housing costs, speculative investment and continued growth, she argues, are helping create the very problems policymakers later spend money trying to solve. A familiar figure in Boulder civic politics, she regularly speaks during public comment and has often clashed with elected officials. She has been suspended from attending council meetings in person and faces misdemeanor charges she describes as fabricated. She also said she has been barred from the Jewish Community Center, another dispute she views as evidence of institutional exclusion. City officials, meanwhile, say restrictions on her participation stem from what they characterize as disruptive behavior. In 10 years, Segal hopes to see the city rely on its own “intellectual capital” by bringing together residents, university expertise and, especially, “the people who don’t speak, because sometimes they have the most to say.” She references the Yiddish concept of deuchheit, or “hereness,” which she believes encapsulates the idea of communities solving problems where they are rather than looking elsewhere. Segal is running because she believes something has gone fundamentally wrong in Boulder and because, after years of feeling ignored, suspended and dismissed, she has decided silence is no longer an option. Whether voters see that as conviction or volatility is the question her campaign ultimately poses. “I’m nobody special. I just like to ruffle it up.” BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CANDIDATES
RACHEL ROSE ISAACSON Advancing together By Riggs Robertson Boulder Weekly
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or Rachel Rose Isaacson, becoming a Boulder City Council member would mean advancing practical win-win solutions to address several resident issues and concerns. Isaacson, who describes herself as a 29-year-old working-class renter, public
servant and political economist, has a master’s degree in public administration and leadership. Due to her work experiences and educational background, she feels she understands “both the policy decisions underlying these challenges and the kitchen-table realities that rarely reach Council chambers.” She has worked in the public politics sector for over a decade, playing a role in banning conversion therapy for minors and preventing LGBTQ+ employment discrimination in Ohio. Isaacson considers herself “a direct bridge between people and government.” “I’m an environmental educator, a certified soil advocate with Kiss the Ground, a pollinator ambassador with Cool Boulder, and I serve on the executive committee of our local Sierra Club chapter working at the intersection of climate and social justice,” she said. According to Isaacson, the biggest challenge that Boulder currently faces is the dwindling options for affordable housing, which is forcing people out of the community. “No single policy will solve Boulder’s affordability crisis, but modernizing our land use code is a foundational step towards cultivating solutions that would help more people remain rooted here while strengthening our neighborhoods, local economy and community resilience,” Isaacson said.
Her plan is to develop more housing that aligns with the city’s pre-existing regulations for open spaces and height limits. “We can accommodate more homes through allowing for lot splitting, accessory dwellings, adaptive reuse and thoughtfully designed mixed-use redevelopment. Clear standards governing building form, setbacks, transitions, tree preservation and usable open space can help new development fit its surroundings.” She also wants to direct development toward areas with existing infrastructure, while also protecting against future wildfires and floods. When it comes to budgeting, the candidate wants to prioritize things that will help grow the community. “Budgeting is ultimately about public trust,” she said. “Residents should be able to see in detail what each major investment is accomplishing to serve our community.” Additionally, Isaacson wants to ensure effective use of taxpayer dollars, balancing current city climate change goals with maximizing community safety. “I would champion a citywide neighborhood resilience program focused on wildfire preparation, extreme heat and emergency readiness. It would expand equitable home-hardening assistance, create shared defensible spaces, strengthen evacuation planning, plant and maintain climate-appropriate shade
trees and establish resilience hubs with backup power and clean-air capacity.” Sustainability and building a robust future for the city of Boulder are driving points for Isaacson as well. “Boulder must also explore addressing its longterm structural challenges rather than relying on temporary reductions or continually adding obligations without identifying sustainable funding.” If elected, Isaacson wants to implement strategies to prevent homelessness, including creating more safeguards for current renters and worker wages. She wants to see an increase in notice requirements for no-fault evictions, especially during the winter months, and more services for those currently experiencing homelessness, such as 24-hour services and behavioral health and substance use treatments. “A successful Boulder remains recognizable as the community people love, while becoming more affordable, resilient and inclusive,” she said. “Although Boulder is a city, it retains the close-knit sense of ‘village’ where families can remain rooted across generations, and the locally owned businesses, cultural institutions, and gathering places that give Boulder its unique character stay and thrive.”
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SAM FUQUA
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irst-time Boulder City Council candidate Sam Fuqua has a diverse background in leadership and communication roles. He worked for many years in broadcast news before serving on both the Boulder Valley Board of Education and the Boulder Library District Board of Trustees. Fuqua said his previous newscaster roles granted him strong listening and communication skills, helping him understand his future co-workers and constituents. “You’re getting thorough information from multiple perspectives,” Fuqua said. “Not just from my fellow council members and the mayor, but from the impacted community members and the community as a whole.” Fuqua is passionate about affordable housing and has firsthand experience living in Boulder mobile homes and affordable housing for over seven years. He described his overall experience as positive, though he said mobile homeowners struggle with annual rent increases. Fuqua said these increases often coincide with rising inflation rates. Fuqua believes the housing situation in the city is not currently improving. He plans to support local organizations that already support unhoused individuals and lower barriers for those struggling to obtain housing, such as Boulder Housing Partners and Habitat for Humanity. Fuqua aims to protect and strengthen low-cost, public areas around Boulder. He emphasized the importance of affordable
third spaces for families and individuals. Community events take place at recognizable third spaces, like parks or recreation centers. He plans to keep costs down for these free-to-low-cost spaces. “I want to see that Boulder is able to fund our critical priorities, and the things that make, you know, life fun and enjoyable here,” Fuqua said. “Parks and recreation facilities, our free public spaces, and people can go down to the Pearl Street Mall and have fun without having to spend a lot of money, but hopefully spending it at a diverse group of local businesses.” Fuqua supports ways to lower gas emissions for a cleaner city and overall cleaner environment. He recommended the city electrify residential and commercial buildings and abandon gas resources. He stated he encourages businesses to shift from gas to electricity as a cleaner energy source. “Electrification in our homes and commercial buildings replaces gas often,” Fuqua said. “And that is, if the electricity is being produced by renewables, or is helping us decarbonize, then electricity is going to be preferable to natural gas for the climate.” Another way he plans to decrease carbon emissions is to create a more walkable, bikeable and bus-friendly Boulder. Fuqua plans to advocate for investments in active transportation infrastructure and support “last-mile” services, which help residents get from one transport station to another, like a shuttle service or e-bikes. “Those little scooters that you see around town are part of a last-mile strategy so that someone could hop on them to get to the bus stop, for example,” Fuqua said. “So encouraging and investing in any of those last mile strategies is another piece of that decarbonizing puzzle.” Fuqua aims to address issues within the council through respectful, open communication on contentious topics. He remained optimistic regarding a handful of future issues the council could come together on over the next two years. “We can’t approach it as a in a in a dogmatic or inflexible way,” Fuqua said. “It really has to be a team approach. We are going to disagree at times, but we need to understand that we’re open-minded, and that we’re colleagues, all working together for the betterment of the city”
BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CANDIDATES
SCOTT RENDLEMAN Running on trust and good government By Emma Houckes Boulder Weekly
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cott Rendleman is a former civil trial attorney running for Boulder’s City Council. As a lawyer, Rendleman said he had to learn to tell people’s stories in an advocating way during trials. In cases that didn’t go to trial, he learned to build consensus for settlement, with a process of empathy, patience and understanding.
Rendleman said he was inspired to run for City Council by his late brother, a county board commissioner with a legacy of good government. He said his brother’s belief in him was the confidence he needed to take on such a big job. The residents in Boulder are facing a loss of confidence in the city government, Rendleman said. His goal is to play a part in strengthening that confidence. He believes residents need to trust the city is looking out for them and spending its money wisely. He thinks one aspect of this degrading trust is exemplified by the $400 million recreation and safety bond on the November ballot. He said this bond, as well as other
cost overruns, have created a disconnect between the residents and their city government. Rendleman does not point blame at the current City Council for this issue but instead believes that the distrust has been brewing for decades. He said the city needs to seriously consider what programs are serving residents well, and consider which programs should be cut. “Boulder has a limited number of resources, and we cannot continue to just inflate our budgets,” he said. Rendleman described an independent performance monitoring system as a solution to this wasteful spending and growing distrust. The goal would be to monitor how programs are performing. This should be a pilot program, he said, left to future city councils to determine whether to continue with it. Spending and budget concerns are on many voters’ minds this election, and Rendleman understands that to be a top priority if elected. “We need to reconsider how we do things. I don’t think there’s fraud. I don’t think there’s abuse. But we should be responsible with how we spend money,” he said. Rendleman said he firmly believes in the 55-foot height limit in Boulder. He believes this height limit is responsible for
preserving the view of the flatirons, which is part of what makes Boulder so unique. He said the city has room for responsible growth, not rapid growth. He said he would like some growth in the Area III planning reserve and along transit corridors. He said given the cost of housing and the city’s struggle to provide sufficient permanently affordable housing units suggests the need to expand into Area III. “I don’t believe that Boulder should be a lifestyle just for those who got here early or who can afford it today,” he said. Rendleman believes in shifting a large portion of the climate and sustainability funding to wildfire resiliency. He said he wants to continue the $2000 refund program for property owners. “If we have a wildfire that’s the size of the Marshall Fire, the years of reduced emissions that Boulder has been able to achieve will be eliminated in just a few minutes.” Rendleman takes what he calls an effective and compassionate approach for addressing homelessness in Boulder. He supports findings from the 2025 Clutch report, which proposes rapid exit and rapid rehousing. He said he will eventually enforce the camping ban and prohibit rough sleeping, but he hesitates to disrupt people in active addiction or struggling with mental illness.
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LEE GILBERT
All in on transportation By Matt Weiner Boulder Weekly
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hile some politicians shy away from dedicating a campaign to one issue, Lee Gilbert is leaning into it by focusing primarily on transportation – specifically the Baseline Safety Transportation Project. As the election heats up, the question is whether Boulder residents are rankled enough to tab Gilbert over more well-rounded candidates. And even that hinges on whether voters agree with the changes Gilbert’s proposing in the first place. It’s a bet so lofty that Gilbert quipped to Boulder Weekly, “If I get elected to city council, I probably will ask for a recount.”
Gilbert said he’s taken zero donations, planted his own signs and marketed mainly through media inquiries. He’s also criticized multiple city staff members in charge of biking projects – the same people he’d work with if elected. He said city staff members either didn’t meet with him or take his concerns seriously. So he turned to the campaign trail and hopes his run for office can communicate that something needs to change. “If I win or get enough votes, it’s a direct message to city council and to the Transportation Department that, in a direct popular vote, the people are saying we don’t like what you’re doing,” Gilbert said, later adding, “I’m not taking away votes from other people, really.” An electrical engineer and avid cyclist, Gilbert’s foray into politics was largely spurred by the Baseline Road Transportation Safety Project. The City of Boulder described the project as “a
multi-year project focused on improving safety along Baseline Road, one of the city’s most-traveled corridors.” According to Boulder’s 2022 Safe Streets Report, “this is one of the top 10 crash locations for people walking and bicycling in the city.” But Gilbert said the accident rate is far lower than what’s been reported. He also said the project could increase accidents and reduce efficiency. “My goal is to get the transportation department to stop doing things that people don’t like that don’t improve safety, and so that’s the reason why I’m running. I’m trying to illuminate the issue,” he said. Not one to hold back, Gilbert’s 28page plan is laced with barbs. “The city council and city manager provide no oversight, simply deferring to the transportation department ‘expertise.’ These projects need to be critically reviewed, something that is currently lacking. I will push for these reviews,” Gilbert writes on page one. “While the transportation department may well have competent people, it also has a culture of hubris and an absence of humility. That culture prevents it from truly listening and learning from the local community and being able to acknowledge mistakes and make course corrections,” he writes on page 27. Such is the result of a man entering a campaign with nothing to lose and everything to gain. “If the message that I’m saying has some resonance, then maybe it’ll catch on. And of course, there’s a chance that no one’s interested,” Gilbert said.
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BOULDER CANDIDATES
RYAN JAMIESON
Striving to build a stronger community By Riggs Robertson Boulder Weekly
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oulder City Council candidate Ryan Jamieson grew up outside of Atlanta, where he later served in the U.S. Army. He worked as an internal auditor at American Express, before moving to cybersecurity. “The Army taught me to work with the team I have to get things done. I didn’t get to be picky. I just needed to accomplish the mission, and I’ve brought that forward throughout my life, working with anybody I can to get the work done. It’s also a very results-oriented organization, as was American Express, and both taught me how to really measure how the work we were doing was effective.” From Jamieson’s perspective, the “byantine Title 9 requirements underlying permitting processes, which vary widely depending on the person doing the reviewing,” is the biggest challenge that Boulder is currently facing. He places a lot of emphasis on reevaluating Title 9, to make development in Boulder easier and more consistent. The process in which many of city affairs are handled is a major concern for Jamieson. “Busted city processes are why we can’t seem to build affordable housing, why it takes forever to open a restaurant and why folks couldn’t even replace a community playground in North Boulder,” Jamieson added. “If Boulder is honest about creating more affordable living spaces in the city, we need to densify and allow more diverse housing types than we currently allow, and we need to have a set of processes that actually facilitate their creation.” Another major concern for Jamieson is wildfire mitigation. He wants to balance the budget to provide more resources to wildfire services and ensure that Boulder stays safe for years to come. “Of cities in Colorado, we are at the top of the list as BOULDER WEEKLY
far as wildfire risk goes, and we’re spending on wildfire mitigation like it’s an afterthought, while we simultaneously spend more money in an attempt to have an impact on a planetary system.” Regarding the budget, Jamieson views it as a “bit of a black hole,” but would like to dedicate time to working with staff to make it more concise, transparent and accessible. Jamieson believes that Boulder has the budget to accomplish what residents want, but it is not being utilized effectively. The candidate said there doesn’t need to be new taxes, but rather a reallocation what the city collects from the climate tax, as well as partnering with the county and applying for federal funding. Overall, Jamieson wants to see the city expand, to have a thriving population and to create a strong sense of community. He wants to guarantee the longevity of Boulder and help the city flourish. “It’s a city that’s opening new schools, not closing them down,” Jamieson said. “It’s a city that has both more Michelin stars and more dollar slices, more mom& pops than corporate flagships, more Dark Horses and Tom’s Taverns. It’s a city where [people with] PhDs from CU (University of Colorado Boulder) or grads from Boulder High can easily start and grow a business and hire a team that lives here, too. It’s a city that our firefighters and teachers and civil servants all call home, not commute into. That’s a successful Boulder – one that’s a place for everyone to live and grow their families and their dreams.”
valuable place to own property. It should be a place where people can belong, raise families, build businesses, and grow old.” Grano brings a long history of civic duty to her campaign, working in housing, advocacy, business and public service. She’s a longtime volunteer for Meals on Wheels and the Boulder Shelter for the homeless and worked at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Leadership. She also spent three years working in community affairs at the district office of Congressman Joe Neguse, helping residents cope during the federal shutdown, COVID19 pandemic and King Soopers shooting. To Grano, the biggest challenge facing Boulder is its lack of sustainability for local businesses and lack of affordability and flexibility for homes. Residential and commercial vacancies have risen in recent years and that’s mainly due to rising costs. Grano wants to improve local commerce by making pop-up shops easier to open, creating a category for creative and hybrid businesses and helping legacy businesses secure long-term leases. Her plans for housing include pre-approved ADU plans and allowing homeowners to sell them separately. And she wants to help protect homes from immediate investor capture.
Many of the buildings in Boulder also need major repairs. The city’s budget only covered 20% of the estimated $500 million needed. Grano suggests a bond measure to help cover the outstanding cost of corrective measures. Grano has long been a supporter of Boulder’s efforts to protect wildlife habitats and open spaces and secure clean water. She looks to champion policies and actions to help wildfire mitigation, emergency planning and investing in infrastructure that can withstand extreme conditions. Grano also wants to lower Boulder’s emissions, make sure buildings have proper electricity, create safer alternatives to driving, and build homes closer to workplaces and daily needs. Grano has a strong but compassionate stance on the homeless problem in Boulder. Saying that it shouldn’t have to be a choice between compassion for others and use of public areas. She supports implementing systems and resources for people in need of shelter, mental and behavioral health services and case management. In ten years, Grano’s idea of a successful Boulder is a city full of opportunity for everyone who lives there, thriving business, safe and usable public spaces and diverse and active communities.
JILL GRANO
More than a valuable place to own property By Brendan Bishop Boulder Weekly
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ike many residents, Jill Grano believes that Boulder has experienced an unmistakable “shift,” noting how the community feels hollow, and less full of life – with empty stores and businesses and declining enrollment numbers in schools. A quote from Grano on her website states, “I am running for City Council because Boulder should be more than a OCTOBER 27, 2026 25
BOULDER CANDIDATES
RYAN SCHUCHARD
Advocate for affordable living By Hannah Carley Boulder Weekly Boulder City Council member Ryan Schuchard is running for a second term. He previously served on the Boulder Transportation Advisory Board and served in the Peace Corps. After moving to Boulder seven years ago, he became interested in working
TARA WINER Activation of space By Riggs Robertson Boulder Weekly
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oulder City Council member Tara Winer has made an impact with her sharp communication skills and dedication to helping people. “I suppose I actually love the job,” Winer said. “Not everything is great about it. But the things that I love are. My strength [is] meeting with community members. Somebody says they have a problem. I actually meet with them. Everybody has my phone number. I take the job seriously and personally. If I can make one person’s life better, I’m going to try to do it.” 26 OCTOBER 27, 2026
for local government. He cited concerns over Boulder’s cost of living and climate issues as the main reasons he is running for re-election. “I found during my time on council that the lack of affordable living wage in Boulder, and affordability in general, is just so important and problematic for our town,” Schuchard said. His goal is to help create longer-term climate solutions and create a more affordable city. He believes these issues overlap, with personal transportation creating more emissions and costing more than utilizing public transport. Schuchard believes Boulder is also
under severe stress in dealing with the risks of fast-moving wildfires and power outages. Compared to his last campaign three years ago, these are even more prevalent issues today. Schuchard cited Xcel Energy as a large problem. The council meets with the company every year, when they provide the city with performance data. Xcel Energy has performed far below the standard required for the past several years. “They can’t even keep the lights on,” Schuchard said. “And we saw a graph that our city staff compiled that showed, since 2023, the duration in minutes of power outages has increased by 20fold.” He said the city needs to find an attractive alternative to Xcel Energy, either to make the switch or persuade the company to fix preexisting issues with the power grid. Schuchard established a new voter-ballot conference plan during his first three years on council, creating land use reforms to provide better housing options. The plan will establish more walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods with local shops and services. “There’s so much more to do, and we now need to update city code to align with that,” Schuchard said. “What this is really about is cutting the cost of living.”
Schuchard found inspiration to help cut living costs in other ways, such as becoming a labor advocate. He has been one of the leading voices supporting the increase of Boulder’s minimum wage. He has stood against reducing wages through the tip credit and walked with Boulderado Hotel workers attempting to unionize. Schuchard referenced how the federal government creates barriers for local government officials by removing funding or deploying ICE agents. He said these stressors placed on both state economies and residents can be damaging. “It creates a lot of economic stress, emotional stress, you know, just mental stress nationally,” Schuchard said. “We feel it in Boulder.” Schuchard said residents do not have faith in their government structures, so that trust must be won back over time through demonstrated integrity and loyalty. “Our job is to be a great service provider and protector of our community,” Schuchard said. “And to give you more reasons to believe we are doing that, we are going to do a good job, so they can believe us.”
The candidate noted that a lot of her most recent votes have been motivated by developing new ways to bring in tax revenue. If more money isn’t brought in, then the programs and projects residents want to keep will continually face declines in financial support, Winer said. “We need activation of space. That is the way that you make things more exciting.” She commends the addition of the Sundance Film Festival and Limelight Boulder as two fantastic additions for downtown businesses. According to Winer, sales at brickand-mortar stores and restaurants are being affected by more employees working from home and the prevalence of online shopping. While Winer doesn’t blame anyone for these changes, she feels it’s important to adapt to the times. “I’m a businessperson, and when you
see trends, it’s best not to ignore them,” she said. Another goal for the candidate is to ensure that building codes aren’t so stringent that they make it difficult for people to open independent businesses without any corporate backing. “Which building codes now are so much more expensive and pushing up the cost of building anything, that it’s not worth it for the amount of environmental impact that it has? I want to actually look at that as well because I’m trying to get the cost of our buildings down in this town. And a lot of different things cause it to be expensive,” she said. Winer believes extensive bike pathways bring joy to the residents of Boulder while providing an alternative to driving. “One of my goals…has always been to have this be like the biking capital of the country and have people come here just to enjoy our incredible biking infrastructure. And I just want to keep doing that. That’s important to me.” During her time in office, a large concern Winer has heard from residents is how funds are being utilized and managed. “The community has a lot of opinions, but transparency is important,” she said. “And then either way, we’ll get back community trust, even if people disagree with some of our decisions.” Additionally, Winer wants to focus on maintaining roads and go “back to the basics” by addressing potholes and snow and ice removal. She places a large em-
phasis on safety and wildfire mitigation as well. Another goal for the candidate is to ensure that building codes aren’t so stringent that they make it difficult for people to open independent businesses without any corporate backing. “Which building codes now are so much more expensive and pushing up the cost of building anything, that it’s not worth it for the amount of environmental impact that it has? I want to actually look at that as well because I’m trying to get the cost of our buildings down in this town. And a lot of different things cause it to be expensive.” Winer acknowledged that more can be done to tackle homelessness and cited All Roads and Mother House at Haven Ridge as two facilities that offer resources. She also noted that another facility, Bridge House, will be closing due to lack of funding. “I am not going to blame people with mental health challenges,” she said. “I’m blaming us as Colorado that we do not have a good enough infrastructure for them” Winer sees Boulder as being vibrant and alive, with an opportunity to improve even more. “We have so much great stuff going on here, and the city council keeps trying to make it better. And that’s what city council should be doing: protecting our citizens, doing the basics, making Boulder a great place to live for everybody.” BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CANDIDATES
TINA MARQUIS Making sure Boulder remains Boulder By Emma Houckes Boulder Weekly
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efore serving on Boulder City Council, Tina Marquis served on the accountability committee of her children’s neighborhood school and the district accountability committee afterwards. She then served on the school board for eight years, where she developed a strong understanding of the community and how housing development impacted enrollment. To Marquis, a vibrant local economy means backing small businesses by supporting a Downtown Development Authority. She wants to prioritize businesses that are unique to Boulder, not external chains that make the city feel corporate. “When we walk around Boulder, we know that we’re in Boulder and nowhere else,” she said. Housing became one of the reasons Marquis initially ran for city council, to be part of the conversation on how the city is developing housing and the developments the city council is encouraging. Marquis said the council has done an incredible job creating student housing and rentals, but the data shows that the city has been building housing that does not appeal to families in the Boulder Valley School District. In her time on City Council, she said there have been some changes in the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan that have allowed for more townhomes and duplexes, which are highly desired over apartments, especially for families. “We know Boulder is a great place to raise a family, if we just had more housing,” she said. She also referenced the vacant home tax, which she believes is beneficial. “I don’t think that vacant homes are a good use of land. In our city, we’re very constrained, and there has been this trend towards second home ownership that I think is a negative impact,” she said. Another focus point for Marquis is public safety. She has been interested in how to compassionately tackle the homeless encampment problem, which she said has decreased by 50% since she has been on council. BOULDER WEEKLY
She said she supported the Clutch report’s work, including centralizing services to create a “one-stop shop” for people looking for help. One step Marquis is working more aggressively on is dismantling encampments, which was requested by the community. While she understands this tactic may seem harsh, she clarified that the approach is to look to transition people to housing or shelters. For Marquis, Xcel upgrades like more wires underground, newer poles, and microgrids are important in the climate conversation. She said this advocacy work is important for wildfire mitigation and making sure businesses in Boulder have reliable power. She also supports work that connects the health of the city with the health of the ecosystem, including supporting pollinators. “We have short-term pressures that we are feeling, and this is long term work that feels so small,” she said. “The more communities that come together and do this kind of work, the bigger impact we’ll have together.” Marquis said she feels the city council is collaborative and respectful. She said this is an important quality for city council candidates, whether they will consider other perspectives. “When you have a council with diverse perspectives it tends to create better policy.” she said When asked about the controversial Recreation and Safety Bond, Marquis recognized that it is not expected to pass but said a similar financing option is needed for maintenance and infrastructure. “So some people feel that our bond ask came out of the blue. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. We have done studies and communicated with the community, with people living here, that we’re going to have some needs that we don’t know how to fund,” she said. Marquis supports hiring an external auditor, in addition to the city manager’s internal auditor, to help prioritize costs and provide oversight. She said the community will benefit from this because they’ll know the council has an objective way to evaluate the programs. She explained that she believes the city has already done a good job prioritizing what they cut, but it will be harder moving forward. She also proposed an infrastructure oversight committee. She said the committee is a way to include community members and maintain a focus on the entire portfolio of infrastructure. Marquis understood criticisms about Alpine Balsam, and said criticisms are fair, as there were many factors leading it to become so expensive. However, she said that for this one project that got out of hand in spending and created distrust, the city has so many other projects that are successfully completed on time.
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OUR TOURS Private & Authentic; we don’t read from a script Tour the places students spend their time Customizable; families only see what they care about
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READY TO SEE BOULDER LIKE A LOCAL? OCTOBER 27, 2026 27
BOULDER CANDIDATES
JAMILLAH RICHMOND Community driven governance
By Brendan Bishop Boulder Weekly
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amillah Richmond has been active in the Boulder community since 2019, advocating for civil rights, mental health resources, unhoused populations, and local environmental efforts. She co-founded the Parents of Color Council, a non-profit dedicated to addressing racial disparities in schools and encouraging fair student treatment. Richmond has stated her commitment to developing small in-home businesses next door to commercial spaces by improving local zoning policy. She also supports rental housing solutions for local workers and providing affordable home buying programs that make sense for current and future residents. Richmond says a concern she hears from Boulder residents is the lack of public trust in Boulder’s governance. She wants to improve public engagement, starting with transparency and account-
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ability from local officials. Making sure residents know what is being done to fix issues, and that they’re being addressed quickly, efficiently and without unnecessary barriers. Richmond wants to make progress in improving unity within the community and council. She is staunchly in favor of more community driven governance and affirms this point by saying she believes local government staff have too much power in decision making. She believes residents feel unrepresented or unrecognized in the decisions that are being made. Her solution to this problem is to host community discussions on the issues facing residents and how to best go about resolving them. She also wants to make police oversight and accountability an open-door policy. Richmond’s goals in terms of climate related issues start with reviewing and improving zoning policy that would allow the city to build better and safer in responses to future flooding and wildfires. Richmond is also in favor of helping to grow an “urban canopy” to help support native plants and wildlife. Richmond plans to use her past work with unhoused individuals and groups to help make sure Boulder has adequate resources and facilities to assist anyone in need. Richmond also put some focus on the dangers of Flock Cameras, citing issues with citizen privacy and safety, as well as rapid implementation in the community. Richmond hopes her goals of community driven governance, housing solutions, zoning improvements and public safety make her an appealing and trustworthy candidate for Boulder residents to vote for.
BENITA DURAN Intent on bringing
experience to the city council By Brendan Bishop Boulder Weekly
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enita Duran graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a master’s degree in public administration. She also holds a B.A in economics and public affairs from the University of Denver. Duran was previously an intern for former Denver Mayor Federico Pena, an assistant city manager in Boulder, and currently serves as vice chair for the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Finance Authority. When asked what inspired her to run for Boulder City Council, Duran said, “I ran 7 years ago in 2019. But after seeing such events like the COVID19 pandemic. The King Soopers shooting. The Pearl Street bombing. The damage from wildfires. I saw how much damage the community has seen. The change and hardships that have fallen on it in recent years. And I really wanted to run again to help not just make a difference. But to bring experience
into the role of city council” Duran’s primary goal is to help Boulder’s middle-class families find affordable housing and pave the way for workers, local businesses, artists and entrepreneurs to succeed here. She also points to wildfires driving up the price of homeowners insurance and the lack of proper procedures and planning in the case of emergency evacuation for wildfires “I don’t believe there is a current procedure for evacuation. I would look to change that by having signs posted and QR codes with information spread around to inform residents of where to go and what to do,” she said. Regarding Boulder’s budget, Duran said her aim was to make sure projects get finished on time and stressed the need to use funds wisely to help the community in all aspects. When asked how she would approach homelessness and public safety in Boulder, Duran approved of how the city has addressed the issue with help from a third-party consultant. She believes the plan that is currently in place is on the right trajectory. Duran said there is too much individual work or separate agendas among current city council members. She wants to improve communication and unity, be a team builder and have everyone working towards the same goals. When asked what she thinks a successful Boulder looks like in ten years, Duran said, “That we have addressed all affordable issues of housing and where housing is located. Fifty percent of the work force is living within the city. Working families are thriving, kids are kept in the schools and districts. And our community is the strongest it has ever been”
BOULDER WEEKLY
ARTS & CULTURE HOW THE BEAT GENERATION SHAPED BOULDER’S CREATIVE WRITING COMMUNITY Oct. 21, 2026 marked the 57th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s death and his writing lives on in the voices of Boulder poets. By Evan Borman Boulder Weekly “I don’t think you could really picture the writing that goes on in Boulder separate from the Kerouac School. It was always the most visible and most lively,” — -Andrew Schelling, poet, translator and 36-year Naropa professor.
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onday, Oct. 19 was the 2,026th consecutive week of Tom Peters’ “So You’re a Poet” poetry reading series. “It’s the longest running weekly poetry series in the world,” Peters, a Naropa graduate and owner of Beat Book Shop said. Monday’s reading was a memorial of Kerouac’s death, held at Wesley Foundation church, where poets read his work and remembered him in ancient entertainment. As poets interchangeably shared the vulnerabilities of being, Peters got on stage and introduced everyone with distinct sincerity. When it was Peters’ turn to read, he grabbed Kerouac’s poetry and thrusted passion into the aged language, cursing, howling and shaping sonic sound into the shared space of soul. “The inner monologue, or whatever that is in a lot of his books, where he’s following what they call a stream of consciousness. I just could relate to how thoughtful he was, in the sense where he was thinking about everything all the time and not wanting to really harm other living things,” Peters said. “I really related to the voice and his work. After I read all his books and all the books about him. I talked to every person he ever knew about him.” Peters’ reading series is a reminder of the music in poetry that’s only instrument in the voice of the living. Kerouac wrote in what he called spontaneous bop prosody, which carried an uninhibited melody that paid homage to jazz music. “I don’t think you could really picture
BOULDER WEEKLY
the writing that goes on in Boulder separate from the Kerouac School. It was always the most visible and most lively,” Andrew Schelling, poet, translator and 36-year Naropa professor said. Kerouac is ingrained in the creative writing community of Boulder without ever visiting. When Naropa University’s founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche arrived in the U.S. he said, “Where are the poets? Take me to your poets!” He brought Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman to Naropa to create the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1974. “[Ginsberg and Waldman] stayed up all night, trying out different names and they ended up settling on Kerouac,” Schelling said. “He was only recently dead. His writing felt very vivid, alive and full of possibilities.” Naropa’s creative writing program embraced Kerouac’s spontaneous approach to prose to let a story assume its own organic shape and applied it to education. “My favorite thing is that we got to make up our curriculum all the time,” Schelling said. “We could teach the classes
we wanted to, we would design the classes.” The innovative curriculum included collaborative poetry and experimentation such as setting an alarm at 3 a.m. or going into a laundry closet to push the boundaries of how writing could be shaped. “Some of the spontaneity had to do with innovative practices,” Schelling said. “There was a real focus on novel ways of writing that were also novel ways of approaching consciousness.” Every program at Naropa integrates contemplative studies and students are required to take a contemplative course such as yoga, tai chi or aikido. These programs unify students and bring curriculums into conversation though the Kerouac school often sits off the beaten path. “The writing program often was a little distant or more remote from the rest of the school. The poets kept the language a little bit grimier or saltier or more playful or a little bit more open,” Schelling said. While attending Naropa, Peters was taught by a variety of Kerouac’s close friends like Ginsberg and William Burroughs that informed alternative approaches to writing. “William Burroughs, whenever I was around, I always was aware of how Kerouac would say he was the most intelligent man in America,” Peters said. “[Burroughs] would start every class at Naropa by saying that you couldn’t teach somebody to be a writer and that teaching writing was something that he thought wasn’t even a thing that could be taught. He thought you could teach people about what to read and how to think more critically,” Peters said. “He felt you could teach people about how to notice things and how important it is to notice and be aware of your surroundings.” Naropa distinguished itself from other
creative writing programs with greater focus on poetics, theory and research. “Though they’ve got reputations as being beat, I think there’s a popular view that means sort of unwashed and unlearned. But these people were extremely learned. Deeply learned in languages, in spiritual traditions, in political activism and sciences,” Schelling said. “The one thing that was really impressive about Ginsberg was he was such a great scholar. Really well prepared for teaching. I think that being a beat and being thought of as a beatnik. I think he worked extra hard to be an erudite scholar and good teacher,” Peters said. The beatniks culminated at Naropa and brought some of the greatest living authors together to shape learning that extends beyond the classroom. The descriptive, ‘beatnik’ was never embraced by the writers most known for the title. “Beatnicks. I’m putting that in quotation marks. None of the people that were members of the beat generation in Boulder or at Naropa considered themselves to be beatniks,” Peters said. Beatniks was a term assigned by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Caen said Bob Kaufman was a pied neck. “He said, ‘he’s far out there, far out, they’re so far out there, like the Sputnik, they’re beatniks,’” Peters said. Since 1990 the Beat Book Shop, which is tucked into a basement space on the Pearl Street Mall, has held the history that shaped Boulder’s creative writing community in art that defined an American generation. “[Peters] probably knows more than just about anybody in the country about specifically the books of the beat generation,” Schelling said.
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FILM THE HARVEST OF FEAR: HOW A BOULDER COUNTY HORROR FILM GREW FROM COLORADO SOIL Longmont filmmaker Sean Mannion’s debut feature reached the Telluride Horror Show through borrowed cameras, donated meals and local support By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly
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ELLURIDE — The fog comes down the mountain before most people notice it. By dusk, it drifts through Telluride’s narrow streets in pale ribbons, softening neon signs and swallowing the peaks above town. Theater marquees glow against the gray. Horror fans gather beneath them, comparing screenings before disappearing into the dark between shows. Inside one of those theaters, Sean Mannion was living through his own small horror story. The Longmont filmmaker had just screened his debut feature, “The Threshing,” at the Telluride Horror Show while keeping track of a 3-month-old and a 2-year-old backstage. By the following morning, he looked equal parts exhausted and relieved. “It went very well,” Mannion said. “It was really cool to play such a full room of straight-up horror fans.” For Mannion, the screening marked the culmination of a yearslong effort to make a Colorado horror film with a budget that rarely seemed large enough for the movie he envisioned. Shot on Boulder County farms and sustained by local support, “The Threshing” reached Telluride through the same community that inspired it. Its journey also points to a larger question facing Colorado’s creative economy: As Sundance prepares to move to Boulder and the state’s film profile rises, can local filmmakers still afford to build careers in the places that inspire their work? “I never thought about making it any-
where else but Colorado,” Mannion said. “It was so personal and so tied to Colorado.”
BUILT BY A COMMUNITY
“The Threshing” took shape after Mannion and his wife moved from Chicago to Boulder County in 2020. His wife left a corporate food-marketing career to work on a regenerative farm, introducing him to a community that would eventually inspire the film. “The seed of the idea came from this really unique community of small regenerative farms, which I so deeply admire and still do to this day,” he said. The question that eventually became the movie was simple: “What if that mentality turned up to 12?” In “The Threshing,” a young couple arrives at a regenerative farm looking for a fresh start, only to discover something unsettling beneath the community’s idyllic surface. Bringing that world to the screen took roughly 20 days of filming at Esoterra Culinary Gardens and Bluebird Sky Farm, often stretching late into the night as crews worked around harvest schedules and weather. Rain arrived often. Mud arrived daily. “We pulled up cars into a muddy field with a three-ton grip truck every day that got stuck in the mud,” Mannion said. “Overnight, me and our gaffer had to put wood slats under the tires and pull it out.” Rather than fight the conditions, the production absorbed them. Fog curled through the trees. Clouds flattened the sky. Fields turned dark and slick beneath steady rain. The movie itself survived because
people kept finding ways to sustain it. When equipment costs threatened to derail production, a producer’s relative helped secure access to a Sony Venice camera. A Fort Collins van company supplied transportation. Longmont Public Media stepped in with equipment and meeting space. Restaurants donated food and coffee. Filming locations came through relationships built within the local farming community. None of it came from a studio. “It was almost impossible to make it work,” Mannion said. “The hard truth is that we couldn’t pay people standard rates.” “I don’t think I could have done that if we weren’t local,” Mannion said. “I was so grateful that people really stepped up and were willing to help.” Early drafts of the script were far larger than the production could support. Characters, locations and plot lines fell away as budget realities set in. “The script that I wrote was probably a script for a $2 million movie and it was a $100,000 movie,” Mannion said. “We were trying to put 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.” The result doubles as a case study in how independent filmmaking often works in Colorado: through borrowed resources, local partnerships and people willing to support a project because they believe it should exist.
THE COST OF STAYING LOCAL
By the time post-production wrapped, The Threshing had cost about $120,000. For Mannion, the harder challenge isn’t making a movie. It’s staying close enough to the community that makes one possible. “There’s a reason I live in Longmont, not Boulder,” he said. “I don’t think I could ever afford to live in Boulder, honestly.” Like many independent filmmakers, 30 OCTOBER 27, 2026
he keeps a day job. “You don’t have to do it full time to be a true filmmaker,” he said. “The only people who can do it full time are either already rich, incredibly successful or living in poverty.” His situation is hardly unique. The relationships that helped “The Threshing” get made were built over years through local businesses, artists, landowners and community organizations. The borrowed camera, donated meals and filming locations all came from people invested in the place where they lived. As housing costs continue to rise, Mannion worries about what happens when fewer creative workers can afford to stay close enough to build those same connections.
A HOME FOR HORROR
The Telluride Horror Show has become one place where those efforts can find an audience. Now in its 17th year, the festival draws filmmakers and horror fans from around the world. Festival founder and director Ted Wilson said Colorado films are not given special consideration, but local success still resonates. “To be honest, we don’t have a conscious effort to spotlight horror movies made in Colorado,” Wilson said. “We have such an international lineup each year.” “It certainly is an added bonus when a Colorado film like “The Threshing” comes our way,” Wilson said. “Hell yeah, a Colorado local just made something that should be seen by horror fans worldwide.” Unlike the film’s international premiere at South by Southwest Sydney, Telluride brought together a theater packed with dedicated horror fans, creating the kind of close-knit audience Mannion said is unique to the genre. “This is like a very, very strictly horror audience, which is so cool,” he said. “Independent film and film-going commuBOULDER WEEKLY
FILM nity is most alive within the world of horror. This is where film is alive.”
SUNDANCE AND THE NEXT WAVE
Success stories like “The Threshing” arrive at a moment of transition for Colorado filmmaking. Sundance will relocate to Boulder in 2027, bringing new attention to the state and renewed questions about who stands to benefit from it. Wilson hopes the festival’s arrival encourages more productions to view Colorado as a place to make films, not simply a place to set them. “My hope is that Sundance’s much broader spotlight on the state might help bring more productions here,” he said. “I’m always pushing visiting horror filmmakers to try and do a future production in Colorado.” Mannion has already encountered some of the pressures that growth can bring. While exploring events and screenings around Sundance, he has struggled to find affordable venues as larger organizations move quickly to secure available space. “I’ve been really struggling to find a location,” he said. Colorado has spent years building infrastructure for filmmakers through organizations such as the Boulder County Film Commission. But infrastructure only works if the artists it serves can afford to remain part of the community. “Building filmmaking communities in places outside those cities is only good for the ecosystem of film and horror film in general,” Mannion said. The concern is not that Colorado will fail to attract bigger players. It is that the grassroots ecosystem that produced films like “The Threshing” could become harder to sustain if rising costs continue pushing local artists to the margins.
WHAT’S NEXT
Mannion is already developing two new scripts, including a supernatural story about a recovering addict competing in a 250-mile ultramarathon through Colorado’s mountains. He hopes to shoot it in the San Luis Valley. “It’s such a kooky, crazy place,” he said. “I’m looking for some of the more intense environments in Colorado.” “The Threshing” is expected to receive a North American release through Yellow Veil Pictures in early 2027. Mannion hopes to accompany it with screenings on working farms featuring food, music and community gatherings, bringing the film back to the communities that helped make it possible.
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EXPLORE A GLACIER NAMED FOR A PEOPLE The Arapaho Glacier connects Indigenous homelands, Boulder’s early water system and a century of climate change. By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly
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he wind at 13,000 feet doesn’t howl so much as saw. It cuts through fleece and skin alike as it sweeps across the ridge above Arapaho Glacier. Tucked into a cirque, or bowllike valley, beneath North Arapaho Peak, sits a shrinking patch of ice and snow that is easy to miss at first glance. Yet the story of Colorado is written in places like this. Long before highways crossed the mountains and towns spread across the plains, glaciers carved the cirques, valleys and ridgelines that still define the state. For generations, that ice concealed the rock beneath it. Now the ice is retreating, the stone is emerging and the histories carried within these landscapes are becoming easier to see. Arapaho Glacier carries more than ice. Its name preserves the memory of the Arapaho people, whose ancestral homeland included much of present-day Colorado. Its meltwater helped build Boulder. And its retreat has become one of the clearest symbols of a warming climate in the state.
A LANDMARK OF HOMELAND AND HISTORY The story begins with movement.
Arapaho families traveled throughout the Front Range and the high country west of the plains, returning to familiar watersheds, mountain corridors, hunting grounds and seasonal camps. The glacier sits beneath North Arapaho Peak in what is now the Indian Peaks Wilderness, its name emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as surveyors mapped mountains Indigenous people had known for generations. The historical record grows thin at this elevation. Colonial records, early surveys and anthropological accounts have little to say about the glacier’s place 32 OCTOBER 27, 2026
Today, the ice contributes only a in Arapaho tradition. That absence may reveal the limits of the written record small fraction of the basin’s runoff. “I more than it does the limits of Indige- don’t think the city honestly was realnous knowledge. Some histories remain ly relying heavily on like the melt water from the glacier to where they belong, “Arapaho Glacier gives us a supply water,” with the Northern chance to see that changing world Boulder Water ReArapaho people sources Manager who continue to not on a graph, but on a mountainKim Hutton said. “I steward them. Yet side in our own backyard.” think it was just a the larger relation— Ulyana Peña, glaciologist component. There ship is still visible was water coming in the landscape from the glacier, itself. These mountains and watersheds were part of a but there was also all the snow fields at homeland threaded together by travel, the basin.” Few people documented Arapaho tradition, story and return. The Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Glacier more thoroughly than Junius Preservation Office could not be reached Henderson, the first curator of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural for comment. History. His photographs from 1902, 1904, 1912 and 1919 created one of Colorado’s earliest visual records of glacier change. Henderson thought he was documenting a natural wonder. Instead, For Boulder, the glacier eventually he created a baseline from which future became something that could be mea- generations would measure its decline. More than a century later, researchsured in gallons. ers can stand where Henderson stood and When the hotel Boulderado opened compare the same ridges, the same cirque in 1909, its lobby fountain served water piped down from the Arapaho watershed. and the same camera angles. The landVisitors could stand beneath chandeliers scape remains recognizable. The glacier in a downtown lobby and drink snowmelt does not. For more than two decades, Univerthat began its journey thousands of feet above the city. The fountain still stands, sity of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted a relic of an era when Boulder proudly Scambos has returned to the cirque to docadvertised “Pure Cold Water from the ument its retreat. Colorado State University glaciologist Dan McGrath has mapped the Boulder-Owned Arapahoe Glacier.” As the city grew, officials moved to remaining ice using aerial surveys, phosecure the source. Boulder began ac- togrammetry and radar. This September, quiring land in the Silver Lake watershed glaciologist Ulyana Peña and mountaineer in 1904 and completed its purchase of Ricardo Peña climbed to the same overthe glacier basin in 1929, transforming look on a return visit to document the disa mountain attraction into protected in- appearing glacier. The work has passed from curator to frastructure. The glacier became part of scientist to mountaineers. Each generation the city’s identity, a symbol of the alpine landscape that sustained life along the inherited the same view and found less ice than the last. Front Range.
THE GLACIER THAT HELPED BUILD BOULDER
A GLACIER IN DECLINE
The glacier Henderson photographed more than a century ago is becoming harder to define. Scambos describes it as an “ice field and former glacier,” a remnant slowly transitioning toward a debris-covered feature where ice may persist beneath rock. Whatever label scientists choose, the direction is clear. “This past year’s combination of very warm, very dry winter and a very hot summer is exactly how you destroy a glacier,” Scambos wrote in an email. Over more than two decades, he has watched the glacier’s profile transform. The broad bulge that once spread beneath the cirque wall has collapsed into a steep, concave slope, leaving behind “a tremendous amount of melted-out rock on the summer surface.” Looking down from a late-summer 2026 LightHawk flight — a nonprofit program that connects scientists and conservationists with pilots — glaciologist Dan McGrath documented Arapaho Glacier and neighboring Isabelle Glacier nearly stripped of seasonal snow. The measurements matched the view from the air. McGrath recorded an average of 11 feet of ice loss between summer 2025 and summer 2026, while radar surveys suggest the glacier’s maximum remaining thickness is only about 50 feet. From above, he said, the glacier looked “deflated or even defeated.” The changes are not confined to Arapaho Glacier. Mountaineer Ricardo Peña, who has climbed the Indian Peaks since moving here in 1996, noted that St. Mary’s Glacier “melted completely for the first time in recorded history” this summer. Glaciers can grow during cool, snowy years and shrink during warm, dry ones, but the long-term trend has become difficult to ignore. BOULDER WEEKLY
EXPLORE “The idea that [these glaciers] will be here in 50 years may not be valid,” McGrath said. McGrath said he still expects St. Mary’s, and possibly Arapaho, to regain some mass during snowy years, though not enough to rebuild.
MORE THAN A LANDMARK For generations, Coloradans have
sought out the state’s remaining glaciers simply to experience them. “All these glaciers have been part of activities along the Front Range for quite some time, places where folks go skiing in the summer, where picnics have been held...” McGrath said. Glaciers offer something increasingly rare: a pocket of winter lingering through July, a chance to stand beside ice older than memory. They have become part of Colorado’s outdoor identity. As McGrath put it, “Colorado has the highest mean elevation of any state in the US. We pride ourselves in the Rocky Mountains and the fourteeners that people come to hike.” He sees that attachment reflected even in the crowds. More than four million visitors pass through Rocky Mountain National Park each year to experience landscapes shaped by ice. “I know we all get frustrated when we can’t find the parking spot or there’s traffic at the entry,” he said, “but I think it just means that there’s a lot of people that want to see these landscapes, that appreciate these landscapes, and that makes me happy.” For many Coloradans, glaciers are woven into family histories and outdoor traditions. Ricardo Peña, who has climbed throughout the Indian Peaks since moving to Colorado in 1996, remembers Arapaho Glacier stretching farther up the cirque wall, its surface broken by crevasses that signaled active movement. The mountain is familiar. The glacier is not. The loss will be measured in acrefeet or scientific data. It will also be measured in experiences future Coloradans will never have: skiing summer snow, feeling cold air spill from glacier ice in August or standing before a crevasse and realizing the mountain is still moving.
WHAT REMAINS
Even now, the glacier leaves clues. Earlier this fall, Ulyana Peña and Ricardo Peña photographed a prominent bergschrund, the deep crevasse that forms where moving glacier ice pulls away from the snowfield above. In 2017, the feature was visible but subdued, partly obscured by snow. By September 2026, it had opened into “a substantial open gap with an exposed wall of ice.” Peña cautions that photographs alone cannot determine whether the remnant ice is still actively flowing. Even so, she believes the bergschrund “tells an extraordinary story about how much this feature has changed.” The bergschrund is still a fracture left by a body of ice that once pushed steadily through the cirque. But it has become less a sign of a living glacier than a record of one. “Arapaho Glacier gives us a chance to see that changing world not on a graph, but on a mountainside in our own backyard,” she wrote. The glacier has been photographed, measured, climbed, skied, studied and remembered. Generations of Coloradans have made the pilgrimage into this cirque and returned with stories, whether carried home in scientific notebooks, family photo albums or memories of summer snow.
Ricardo and Ulyana Pena at Arapaho Glacier.
Now the glacier is leaving the landscape that made it possible. The rock beneath it is emerging. The ice is thinning. Future generations may still stand beneath North Arapaho Peak and see the cirque, the basin and the ridgelines. Whether Arapaho Glacier will still survive with them remains uncertain.
Close up of the Arapaho bergsch rund.
BOULDER WEEKLY
OCTOBER 27, 2026 33
EVENTS
(720) 927-7061 2251 Ken Pratt Blvd, Unit A Longmont, CO 80501
Longmont's premier eatplay-win destination.
Thrilling games, elevated food & drink, and unforgettable nights, all under one roof.
WE’VE GOT YOUR WEEKEND COVERED Friday 11AM-2AM $4 drafts $5 house wines Saturday 10AM-2AM $30 buckets (beer or seltzers $99 Sunday Family Special 1-topping pizza & a pitcher of soda Four $20 arcade cards 1 hour of bowling or 4 rounds of mini golf
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7 p.m. | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, Boulder
6–9 p.m. | Junkyard Social Club, Boulder
3–5:15 p.m. | Dairy Arts Center, Boulder | $20.70
LANGUAGE EXCHANGE NIGHT
Practice a new language, meet interesting people and connect with Boulder’s diverse community during Language Exchange Night at Trident Booksellers & Cafe. This welcoming gathering brings together language learners, native speakers and curious conversationalists for an evening of cultural exchange. With more than 10 languages regularly represented, participants can practice their skills in a relaxed environment while learning about different cultures. Whether you’re fluent in multiple languages or just beginning your journey, everyone is encouraged to join the conversation.
FLOW JAM AT JUNKYARD SOCIAL CLUB
Get moving and explore your creative side during Flow Jam at Junkyard Social Club. This community-centered gathering brings together people interested in movement, music and creative expression for an evening of exploration and connection. Whether you’re looking to try something new, meet fellow creatives or simply enjoy a lively atmosphere, Flow Jam offers an inviting space to experience the energy of Boulder’s artistic community. All ages are welcome to participate in this unique combination of movement and social connection.
BOULDER JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: THE SEA Experience a moving story of childhood, identity and belonging during the Boulder Jewish Film Festival’s screening of The Sea. Directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, the film follows a young Palestinian boy who is left behind when his classmates depart for a trip to the Mediterranean Sea. Through his journey, the story explores themes of innocence, separation and the desire for freedom. This thought-provoking film invites audiences to consider the human experiences that connect people across cultural and political boundaries.
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3–6 p.m. | Pearl Street Mall, Boulder | Free
2–5 p.m. | Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder | Free
10 a.m.–6 p.m. Wednesday | Boulder County Fairgrounds, Longmont | Free
MUNCHKIN MASQUERADE
Get ready for a frightfully fun afternoon as Downtown Boulder transforms into a Halloween wonderland for its annual Munchkin Masquerade! Children ages 12 and under are invited to dress in their favorite costumes and trick-or-treat at participating businesses along Pearl Street. From superheroes and princesses to ghosts and goblins, this beloved community tradition brings families together for an afternoon of sweet treats and Halloween excitement.
DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS RECEPTION
Celebrate life, remembrance and cultural traditions during Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Día de los Muertos reception. This family-friendly gathering features music, dance and traditional holiday refreshments alongside a community installation of colorful ofrendas honoring loved ones who have passed. Created by local community groups and artist Anthony Maes, the exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to experience the beauty and significance of this meaningful Mexican tradition.
FIBER ART SHOW & SALE
Discover the creativity and craftsmanship of more than 100 local fiber artists at the Handweavers Guild of Boulder’s annual Fiber Art Show & Sale. Explore an impressive collection of handmade textiles, jewelry, clothing, accessories and decorative pieces featuring weaving, knitting, felting and embroidery. With artist demonstrations and a juried showcase celebrating vibrant colors, this five-day event offers a wonderful opportunity to support talented Colorado makers. BOULDER WEEKLY
EVENTS
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Doors 6:30 p.m. | Show 7 p.m. | Junkyard Social Club, Boulder | Ages 13+
7–8:30 p.m. | Dairy Arts Center, Boulder | $17.25–$48.30
Wednesday, October 28 | 11:30 a.m. or 12:30 p.m. | Boulder County Clerk & Recorder’s Office, Boulder
FIVE 5THS: BEETLEJUICE
Get ready for a delightfully strange evening as Five 5ths takes on the Halloween classic Beetlejuice. This creative performance brings a fresh perspective to the beloved supernatural story, known for its eccentric characters, outrageous humor and spooky charm. Hosted at Junkyard Social Club, the event offers a playful alternative to traditional Halloween entertainment. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the original film or simply looking for something unusual to do, this imaginative theatrical experience promises an entertaining night.
BOULDER ENSEMBLE THEATRE COMPANY: THE WEIR Step inside a remote Irish pub where an ordinary evening takes an unexpected turn in The Weir, presented by Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company. When a newcomer arrives, the local regulars begin sharing stories that gradually reveal unsettling secrets, supernatural encounters and deeply personal experiences. Written by acclaimed playwright Conor McPherson, this atmospheric production blends humor, mystery and emotional storytelling.
BOULDER COUNTY BALLOT PROCESSING CENTER TOUR
Ever wondered what happens to your ballot after you drop it in the mailbox? Get a behind-the-scenes look at the election process during this guided tour of Boulder County’s Ballot Processing Center. Participants will follow a ballot through the steps of signature verification, scanning and counting while learning how election officials work to maintain a secure and trustworthy election. Attendees will also have the opportunity to ask election staff questions about the process. Advance registration is required.
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6–9 p.m. | Thistle Community Gallery, Boulder | Free
November 6–7 | Boulder, various venues
4 p.m. | Macky Auditorium, Boulder | $28–$107
NOBO FIRST FRIDAY MARKET
Spend an evening celebrating local creativity at the NoBo First Friday Market in North Boulder. This lively community gathering brings together artists, musicians, farmers, makers and entrepreneurs for a unique shopping and cultural experience. Browse handmade goods, discover original artwork and connect with the people behind Boulder County’s creative businesses. With its welcoming atmosphere and diverse vendors, the market offers something for visitors of all ages. BOULDER WEEKLY
BOULDER CHILDREN’S BOOK FESTIVAL
Spark a love of reading and storytelling during the 2026 Children’s Book Festival in Boulder. This two-day celebration shines a spotlight on children’s literature and the imagination that brings stories to life. Families, young readers and book enthusiasts can explore the festival’s literary programming while celebrating the authors and illustrators who inspire the next generation of readers. A wonderful opportunity to encourage creativity and a lifelong appreciation for books.
RUBBERBAND: EVER SO SLIGHTLY REDUX
Experience an electrifying fusion of contemporary dance and athletic movement as RUBBERBAND brings Ever So Slightly Redux to Macky Auditorium. Choreographed by Victor Quijada, this powerful performance features ten dancers exploring the tension between chaos, resilience and the search for calm. Blending explosive energy with moments of delicate expression, the production challenges audiences to reflect on the pressures of everyday life through breathtaking movement and storytelling. OCTOBER 1, 2026 35