Progress
Updated August 23, 2025
Key:
✓ Completed (18)
☐ In the works (45)
* 2026 workplan targets (3)
Better transportation choices combined with more resource-efficient land use
✓ Completed: Approve two-way protected bikeway plus a road diet (four-to-three lane conversion) on Iris Avenue
✓ Completed: Approve two-way protected bikeways plus a road diet on North 30th Avenue (from Arapaho to Diagonal Plaza)
✓ Completed: Approve two-way protected bikeways plus a road diet and other enhancements on Folsom Street
✓ Completed: Approve installation of traffic enforcement cameras on twenty four intersections, including many state-owned roads (resolution 1342)
✓ Completed: Streamline community engagement processes for safety-enhancing transportation projects (resolution 1358)
✓ Completed: Establish a goal of “access to opportunity” to guide transportation and land use planning in city code (ordinance 8702)
✓ Completed: Establish public reporting dashboard for serious injury and fatality traffic crashes (established 2024, available here)
☐ Eliminate minimum parking requirements for developers to enable more housing to be built and reduce the cost of housing that is built
☐ Reform on-street parking pricing and programs to better internalize the cost of driving to drivers and better maintain the use and usability of public right-of-ways
☐ Meaningfully improve the usefulness and user experience of public transit, most importantly by increasing access to frequent transit¹
☐ Create a whole-of-government approach to bike parking to effect meaningfully sustained fewer bike thefts and higher bike use²
☐ Facilitate the increased beneficial use of e-bikes and other battery-electric micromobility devices by planning for travel networks that are appropriate for higher continuous speeds and greater variability within the range of travel speeds while keeping riders of all ages safe and minimizing conflicts with pedestrians on multiuse paths and sidewalks
☐ Develop a visionary commitment to making golf-cart-sized battery electric vehicles work safely and effectively throughout Boulder, and take meaningful steps to make it happen
☐ Establish a maintenance fee to assess at least $6,000,000 of costs of driving directly to drivers, incorporating higher costs for higher impacts
☐Strengthen citywide transportation demand management (TDM) strategies
☐ Incorporate space-efficient land use and transportation choices into the climate action plan, and use that to drive greater investment towards compact-, walkable development
☐ Improve the experience of pedestrians and others outside cars in and around downtown and the civic area
☐ Update design and construction standards (“DCS”) to require wider sidewalks while improving safeguards to ensure full compliance with city code on sidewalks for new private construction and reconstruction of city streets
☐ Change TDM requirements to allow for a cash-in-lieu program that would let the city do projects that create far beyond site boundaries to address the citywide system which could be much more cost-effective
☐ Achieve full implementation of the 24 traffic enforcement cameras approved by resolution 1342 while ensuring maximum safeguards to protect civil liberties
☐ Partner with CU to strengthen efforts to meaningfully increase the number of students who move to Boulder without a car and then thrive once here
☐ Develop a program of education, wayfinding, and support to help visitors and newcomers to Boulder access and have a great experience with non-car travel options, and if driving, to anticipate Boulder’s culture of pedestrians and bicyclists sharing the streets, and keep them safe
☐ Improve safeguards to minimize disruptions to access during periods of construction, especially for bicyclists and pedestrians
Better housing choices
✓ Completed: End discriminatory limits on the number of people who can live together outside of traditional family relationships (ordinance 8651)
✓ Completed: Change zoning to legalize the conversion of many single-family homes near downtown and transit into duplexes, triplexes, and other infill middle housing, enabling the eventual creation of more than 15,000 additional units (ordinance 8666)
✓ Completed: Adopt a form-based code to enable the eventual construction of around 5,000 new additional in East Boulder (ordinance 8669)
✓ Completed: Eliminate parking and owner-occupancy requirements for accessory dwelling units (ordinance 8651)
✓ Completed: End Boulder’s cap on population growth (ordinance 8600)
✓ Completed: Meaningfully cut red tape in the way of making housing and other development more accessible and affordable (ordinance 8622)
✓ Completed: Establish a package of measure to improve affordability, rights, and quality standards for residents living in mobile homes and manufactured housing (developed throughout 2024 and 2025, presented to council July 24, 2025)
☐ Improve utilization of Boulder’s existing building stock for housing, including the use of the 1,000-4,000 homes that are empty most of the year
☐ Eliminate lot size minimums so people can build small houses on small lots if they wish
☐ Eliminate side setbacks by mutual agreement of adjoining property owners to allow rowhouse development on fee-simple lots
☐ Change development rules from requiring private open space to requiring public open space to rebuild community and use our land efficiently
☐ Allow building to 55' in most zone districts by-right with a community benefit requirement rather than require site review which adds risks, costs, and delays
☐ Eliminate or reduce front setbacks to reduce landscaping water usage and create more usable space
☐ Update the building demolition ordinance to encourage and streamline projects that are relatively low-impact and/or lead to relatively resource-efficient new buildings
☐ Improve incentives to enable and encourage housing through adaptive reuse of office space and other commercial buildings
☐ Identify and pursue a next generation of measures to significantly increase the diversify of type and holistic resource-efficiency of Boulder’s housing stock*
☐ Develop a program to encourage homeowner associations (HOA) to adopt practices that improve neighborhood climate resilience³
☐ Make the process of landmarking for historic preservation more explicitly supportive of city goals and considerate of opportunity costs
Additional energy stewardship
✓ Completed: Adopt a new energy code requiring all-electric equipment in new buildings (ordinance 8629)
☐ Develop standards to ensure potential new data centers meet the highest standards for sustainability and community benefit
☐ Continue to push to accelerate the electrification of all energy systems while advancing structural efficiency through legislation, utility regulation, and local standards and investments.
☐ Advance legislative and regulatory reforms to improve alignment between profits and affordability, reliability, and other ratepayer/resident benefits
Protection from fires and floods
✓ Completed: Approve flood mitigation to put 2,300 Boulderites and 1,100 homes out of harm’s way in a 100-year flood, the final step of approval by City Council after a ten-plus year process that began in the aftermath of the 2013 flood
☐ Harden new and existing structures against wildfire while maintaining the use of soils for vegetables and other vegetation providing important ecosystem services
☐ Systematically reduce Boulder’s exposure to wildfire risk by undertaking a set of ambitious new commitments that invest in evidence-based strategies targeting the highest expected impact*
Food security and sustainable natural lands
☐ Improve food security and access to plant-rich nutritious food in part by seeding the development of a year-round farmer’s market and public food hub
☐ Eliminate the use of pesticides and herbicides on school grounds in partnership with Boulder Valley School District
Water security
☐ Enact new standards for water conservation in landscaping
☐ Establish new collaborative approaches to reduce water demand regionally and statewide
Other inclusion to make our community stronger
✓ Completed: Triple council pay to 40% of the area’s median income for future election winners (city ballot initiative in 2024)
☐ Create a new program of support for the development of worker cooperatives
☐ Meaningfully increase Boulder’s minimum wage
☐ Comprehensively update Boulder’s approach to homelessness, with new data-driven commitments that meaningfully contribute to resolving homelessness and the surrounding dysfunctions
Good governance centered in climate-compatibility and wellbeing
✓ Completed: Integrate a standard assessment of climate, resilience, and sustainability into a note accompanying all staff proposals and other memo materials going to city council (established July 24, 2025)
☐ Defend Boulder against harms from federal cuts to science, jobs, investments, protections, and other assets for our community’s wellbeing⁴
☐ Continue to implement the visionary plans Boulder has built and is in the process of building, including commitments to safer streets and more resource-efficient, inclusive housing, in light of economic storm clouds moving in
☐ Integrate strong climate reasoning into city finance
☐ Make the city’s financial strategy more robust and resilient
☐ Update the city’s financial investments policy, last revised in 2016*
☐ Develop a protocol to guide redevelopment purposefully in the unfortunate event that significant parts of Boulder are effected by a natural disaster
***
1 Transit improvements include: (1) Increase access to frequent transit service near where people live (i.e., 15-minute frequency from early morning until night within a 15-minute walk), (2) Increase the number of shelters and other amenities at transit stops, (3) Introduce convenient service to the statewide intercity bus network, Rocky Mountain National Park, and trailheads throughout Boulder’s nearby mountains, and (5) Undertake a meaningful evaluation of options to establish new transit service delivery models in the Boulder Valley that includes scenarios for creating a new local transit agency
2 For bike parking, first recognize the following: Bicycles can be a real workhorse of the city’s transportation, accounting for 50%+ of year-round trips in towns that plan for it, while saving money and creating stronger communities. Also, e-bikes are enabling that even more, but they are expensive and people are afraid for them to be stolen, And finally, ubiquitously convenient, secure parking is crucial to induce bicycles in a similar way that safe networks to travel on bicycles is. Then, based on that: (1) Facilitate the installation of high-quality bike parking within the landscape of existing buildings, with consideration of education, services facilitation, incentives, and targeted retroactive requirements, (2) Conduct a citywide assessment of needs to make bike parking accessible for all users and their uses, and (3) Initiate an infrastructure development program to fully and equitably meet those needs identified
3 HOA program aims include: (1) Ensure HOA boards and members understand the state’s recent preemptions of many common prohibitions which give homeowners the by-right authority to develop multifamily units and grow vegetables in the front of their homes despite previous HOA rules, (2) Work together to harden buildings and landscapes against wildfires, and (3) Develop cooperative systems for emergency preparedness and response.
4 Defending Boulder includes: (1) Document and speak out about harms threatening Boulder (such as these), (2) Resist through the courts illegal and inappropriate attempts to roll back protections and civil liberties, (3) Reform state law to allow Colorado to fill the hundreds of millions of dollars being eliminated from the state budget which is currently prevented by TABOR, and (4) Build a more cohesive, self-reliant community at home