Nicole Speer and Mark Wallach: Boulder’s facilities funding debate deserves facts, not misinformation

This commentary is by Nicole Speer, a current Boulder City Councilmember and longtime member of the council’s Financial Strategy Committee, writing in her individual capacity, and Mark Wallach, a former City Councilmember who served on the committee from 2021 to 2026.

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Across the U.S., mid-century public buildings are reaching the end of their lifespans at the same time. Colorado communities are dealing with it too; Longmont’s 2026 public safety bond measure will partly address $76 million in one-time capital and facility needs. Boulder is in that same wave, no matter how exceptional some former elected officials and council candidates imagine our city to be. 

Our recreation centers, fire stations and public safety facilities are outdated and failing, and they cost more and more every year to maintain. The bond measure on Boulder’s November ballot aims to address the same facilities reality that cities across the country are facing. It is not glamorous, ideological, frivolous or nefarious. It is key to a fiscally responsible, well-governed and safe community. 

It is a troubling and dangerous time when former elected officials or board members of political organizations who have chaired capital committees, approved municipal budgets and overseen public projects choose to misrepresent how municipal finance works. Too much is at risk in 2026 for us to accept this as normal behavior for people in positions of power and influence. 

Given how far the public conversation about this measure has drifted from the facts, let’s start with a quick reality check:

The city’s 2021 Facilities Master Plan assessed all 75 of the city’s buildings. The findings were stark:

• The average building is 47 years old.
• More than half were built before 1970.
• Seven are over 95 years old.
• The city carries $55 million in deferred maintenance.
• It will cost $372 million to keep failing buildings open through 2050, with no upgrades.

These failing buildings pose safety risks in an era of wildfires, floods and deadly public attacks. They threaten the future of beloved community amenities like the South Boulder Recreation Center. They also show up in the daily lives of the city’s workers:

• Firefighters sleep in rooms with windows that no longer seal, letting in water and cold air.
• Public safety personnel try to keep up with modern emergencies from a building with malfunctioning, decades-old equipment and leaks so frequent they risk mold.
• Recreation staff manage facilities with deteriorating walls, failing mechanical systems, frequent closures and inaccessible layouts.
• Utilities crews repair equipment that is decades past its lifespan, while the facilities department contracts out repairs because our old buildings can’t accommodate modern vehicles.

Two recent opinion pieces, one by former councilmember KC Becker and another by Open Boulder board member Terri Brncic, simply deny these realities and argue that Boulder cannot be trusted with capital investments because the city’s processes are flawed, its estimates are vague, or its accounting is suspect. These claims sound alarming. They are also inaccurate.

Becker incorrectly claims this measure gives council a “blank check” for spending, despite years of debate at council meetings, board and commission meetings, and a specific list of projects published on the city’s website: rebuilding the South Boulder Recreation Center, renovating North Boulder’s Recreation Center, constructing a modern public safety and emergency communications facility, upgrading fire stations, and addressing long-deferred needs at the Municipal Services Center and Penfield Tate II Municipal Building. This is a case study in the modern tendency to opine on an important topic without doing a modicum of basic research.

Read more 🏊 Boulder’s free recreation access for low-income residents could end

Likewise, the claim that the city “hasn’t produced real cost estimates” for the proposed projects ignores the detailed, publicly available building condition assessments, lifecycle cost projections, and preliminary cost ranges for each project. These early conceptual estimates can’t be final construction numbers — that is not how real-world construction works. Anyone who claims knowledge of municipal finance without understanding this basic fact has a gondola to sell you.

Construction costs change over time in any project, and this is especially true in large public infrastructure projects because the costs of materials like concrete and of skilled labor increase faster than inflation. Once individual projects are authorized, scoped, designed, and competitively bid, we will have final numbers. Estimates that enable flexibility are a safeguard for taxpayers, not a loophole.

Brncic also argues that because the city could not instantly satisfy her demand for a single compiled table summarizing 12 years of spending on the multi-phase Alpine-Balsam redevelopment, voters cannot trust the city with any capital project. This is not a reasonable standard. Alpine-Balsam includes land acquisition, demolition, flood mitigation, site infrastructure, multiple buildings and future housing phases. These components were approved in different years, funded through different local, state and federal sources, and tracked in different systems — exactly as they are in every city.

That the city asked for time to compile this information is not evidence of mismanagement. It shows a complex project being documented responsibly in a time when staff capacity is strained. Brncic appears to believe she is uniquely entitled to receive voluminous information on this project, even though staff’s current focus must be on preparing the 2027 budget. Perhaps council can move funding from wildfire mitigation to add staff dedicated solely to her future information requests.

More importantly, Alpine-Balsam is not a warning about capital investment. It is a warning about what happens when a city inherits aging buildings and tries to modernize them to current standards. The city purchased the site in 2015 after the hospital closed, in part because neighbors wanted the city to guide the area’s future, rather than a private developer. Renovating a 1960s medical office building to meet today’s accessibility, energy, safety and workplace requirements is expensive. Pretending otherwise does not make the costs go away.

Becker’s nostalgia for the 2011 bond process is equally misplaced. That relatively small 2011 bond focused on a narrow set of renovation projects. The 2026 bond addresses a $400 million maintenance backlog across 15 buildings, some of which need full replacement. The scale is different, and the process differs because the problem differs. Over the past five years, the city has held public meetings, published extensive materials, conducted polling to understand voter priorities and referred the measure in open session. Public engagement did not disappear; it was elongated to reflect the scope and complexity of our more-than-50 year facilities backlog.

Capital projects cost money, and none of us want to pay more in taxes. Those are both facts. But it is also a fact that there is a cost of failing to invest in the recreation centers, fire stations, emergency communications systems and public facilities we all rely on: Our city’s workers will leave for communities like Longmont that are willing to invest in their safety; more families and older adults will move to cities that provide modern amenities like pools and recreation centers; and our shrinking revenues will increasingly be consumed by repairs, leaving minimal funds to mitigate the increasing economic, climate and social risks we face. 

We will all pay for this bond one way or another.

This November’s question is simple: Will we face the facts, invest in the infrastructure we need, and work together to build a city that we and future generations can rely on? Or will we let misinformation lull us into believing that the cost of doing nothing is free?

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