Boulder City Council
On June 26, council voted on changes to open comment, the public forum held at the beginning of business meetings through which community members can speak on a topic of their choosing.
The following changes were approved by a majority of council members in informal polling and will be brought back for formal adoption at a later date:
- 5:30 p.m. start time for open comment. The regular meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m., with a small break in between as time allows.
- Fixed length of 45 minutes for open comment. Currently, open comment is scheduled for one hour, but the city’s code only requires 45 minutes, City Attorney Theresa Tate said during Thursday’s meeting. As per the code, the number of potential speakers will still be limited to 20 people randomly selected from the total list of who signed up to speak. If 45 minutes passes without all the selected speakers being able to participate, those left out will be prioritized in the following meeting’s process.
- Speakers will alternate between in-person and virtual
- Open comment will be broadcast as audio only. Currently, in-person speakers are included in the meeting’s video broadcast, while community members participating remotely use audio only.
- Council members will each be given 30 seconds to respond to the content of open comment, directly after it concludes. The presiding officer can respond immediately to “hateful or dehumanizing language.” Council members have been limited to two minutes each for responses at the end of meetings.
- Council rejected placing restrictions on what topics community members can address during open comment.
Council is on summer recess through July 18. There are two meetings scheduled this month: a July 24 special meeting with a review of the city’s manufactured housing strategy and a July 31 study session on the city’s water supply and wildfire hardening strategies
Special meetings do not include open comment. The next open comment session is scheduled for the Aug. 7 meeting. It will be the first since May 15.
Also on June 26, council:
- Decided to move forward with only one city ballot measure for November’s election: a permanent extension of the Community, Culture, Resilience and Safety (CCRS) tax, a 0.3% sales tax that funds transportation, facilities, infrastructure and nonprofit grants, among other things. The tax was introduced in 2014 and extended twice in 2017 and 2021. It is currently set to expire in 2036.
An increase in property tax to pay for infrastructure projects and maintenance was also discussed, but council abandoned it after only 37.5% of respondents to an official poll said they would support it.
- Gave a tacit OK to the North 30th Street Preliminary Design proposal. The design was unanimously approved by Boulder’s Transportation Advisory Board (TAB) on June 23.
Council had an opportunity to “call up” or review the approval, but declined to do so, meaning the project will proceed unchanged.
Staff will complete the recommended preliminary design this summer. Final design for the 30th Street and Arapahoe Avenue intersection will begin in the fall.
The project is one of more than a dozen on Boulder’s Core Arterial Network, a subset of roadways where the majority of injury-causing car crashes occur. Since 2022, the city has been pursuing safety improvements to bike paths and on-street bike lanes, bus stops and pedestrian infrastructure.