Terri Brncic: Boulder can’t say what Alpine-Balsam will cost. Why trust it with $400 million more?
This commentary is by Terri Brncic, an Open Boulder board member, co-organizer of the Boulder County commissioner expansion initiative and former Boulder City Council candidate.
Read more Help shape Boulder Reporting Lab’s 2026 election coverage
Over the past two years, I have watched with increasing frustration as the Taj Mahal of office buildings has been painstakingly constructed at the old hospital site on North Broadway, commonly referred to as Alpine-Balsam. Before we get started, a quick recap for those who don’t make a habit of perusing Boulder City Council records with their morning coffee.
In 2015, the City of Boulder purchased the 8.8-acre Alpine-Balsam site for $40 million, which included the shuttered hospital building, the Pavilion and Brenton medical office buildings and a parking structure. The value proposition sold to the city council at the time rested on three promises: the site would provide land for critical flood mitigation work; the Pavilion Building would be renovated to consolidate city staff currently scattered in leased space across the city, saving on leasing and deferred-maintenance costs; and the remaining land would be used for housing, with proceeds from market-rate parcels helping offset affordable housing elsewhere on the site.
Eleven years later, the numbers tell a very different story from the one the community was sold.
The Pavilion: A case study in cost escalation
In February 2019, the city estimated the Pavilion Building renovation alone would cost $48 million to $58 million. Two months later, that estimate had grown to $90 million to $120 million, prompting several councilmembers to publicly question whether the project should continue at all.
By the December 2024 groundbreaking for the renovation, officials cited $140 million in capital investment and debt issuance for the entire “Western City Campus,” including the Pavilion, the Brenton Building and the parking structure, plus site infrastructure and flood mitigation work.
The city has not, to date, published a breakdown showing what portion of that $140 million is attributable specifically to the Pavilion. But we do know that, in addition to the $140 million, the city spent $16 million to demolish the adjacent hospital buildings and is expected to pay another $108 million in interest on money borrowed to purchase and redevelop the site.
So, based on my calculation using the information that is publicly available, drumroll please, we are talking about a minimum of $304 million for the Alpine-Balsam project ($40 million for the land + $16 million for the hospital demolition + $140 million for the Western City Campus + $108 million in interest on the debt). And this is before the city spends $1 on the Phase II affordable housing component that was promised for the land.
Turns out, the city can’t readily provide any answers
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a public report showing budgeted versus actual spending on Alpine-Balsam, all in one place? How about a breakdown of where the city is getting the money to pay for it? How about just confirmation that $300 million is, in fact, the real total?
Read more Boulder considers opening South Boulder trails to bikes, reviving a 15-year fight
Since June, I have been asking these exact questions of the City Manager’s Office and the city council. I have been repeatedly rebuffed. After months of getting nowhere, I filed a formal request under the Colorado Open Records Act, or CORA, seeking records that would answer two simple questions: How much are we going to spend on Alpine-Balsam? And where is the money coming from?
The city missed CORA’s three-working-day deadline to respond. When I followed up, a representative from the City Manager’s Office told me that “since the Alpine Balsam project has been ongoing for 12 years now, there is not a compiled simple table” showing this information and asked for a seven-day extension to produce one.
Sit with that for a minute. This is one of the largest capital projects in Boulder city history, and the city could not produce, on demand, a basic accounting of what it has spent or how it is being financed. City staff have cited their focus on the 2027 budget as a reason for the delay. But how can anyone build a credible budget without first understanding the cash flow obligations of the city’s largest capital commitment?
This isn’t happening in a vacuum
If Alpine-Balsam were an isolated case, you might chalk it up to a costly, one-time mistake or a bad process, but not necessarily bad faith. But it isn’t isolated. At the very moment the city appears to be spending, at minimum, $300 million on Alpine-Balsam, money it apparently cannot fully account for, the city council has referred a $400 million bond measure to the November ballot, which the city’s own memos estimate will cost taxpayers roughly $650 million once interest is included. That will be paid for by you and me through a 20-year property tax increase.
Here’s the problem: If the city genuinely does not have Alpine-Balsam’s cash flow picture in hand, how can voters be confident that it fully considered the city’s existing financial commitments before recommending another $400 million in borrowing? And the city council, which, based on the response I received, doesn’t appear to have this information in hand either, voted to send that measure to voters anyway.
Where is the oversight? Where is the transparency? Where is the leadership willing to ask hard questions and hold people accountable, instead of leaving it to individual residents to file records requests to bring basic financial facts to light?
Boulder voters are being asked to approve $400 million more in borrowing from a city that cannot yet produce a simple accounting of the more than $300 million it’s already spending on the costliest capital project in city history. These aren’t two separate asks. They draw on the same city budget, the same debt capacity and the same taxpayers. A council that can’t tell you what its current largest capital project costs has not demonstrated that it can responsibly scope the next one. That’s not a technicality. That’s the whole question on this November’s ballot. I know how I’ll be voting.
Read more 🍝 Meet the family behind 25 years of Il Pastaio in Boulder
