A look back at budgeting in Boulder
The city's Long-Term Financial Strategy Project is a current City Council priority designed to guide the city’s financial future in a sustainable, equitable and resilient way. With this project, we hope to achieve more flexibility with the dollars we have and to identify new sources of revenue to better address dynamic needs and provide the levels of service our community desires.
Prioritizing our financial future is in line with policy recommendations from the last two decades. As we pave our way forward, let’s take a look back at budgeting in Boulder.
Setting the Stage: Blue Ribbon Commission
Our current City Council isn’t the first to make our financial future a priority. About 20 years ago, the council at that time also identified financial stabilization as a key area of focus. As a first part of this work, they appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to analyze the city’s current financial landscape and recommend ways to best fund our community’s needs over the next few decades.
The commission, made up of local leaders and financial experts, focused on how to establish balanced and stable revenue for Boulder with flexibility to meet both ongoing and emerging programs and services. A key recommendation from the commission was not to rely too heavily on sales tax revenue, as this can ebb and flow based on economic factors and population size. Another was to minimize dedicated funding, or dollars that must be spent in a specific area, as this limits the ability to address shifting priorities.
Instead, the commission recommended that the city diversify its revenue sources and lean into flexible dollars. This approach would allow the city to put money where it is needed most at any given time and leverage multiple sources of income.
The commissions also recommended increasing the city’s emergency reserves to ensure adequate funding for unanticipated needs and disasters.
Other key recommendations focused on better prioritization, highlighting the importance of considering city services and programs holistically, instead of by department, being clear about tradeoffs and centering services around the city’s values.
These recommendations set the stage for the city’s current financial strategy. Read the full reports:
From Recommendations to Reality
So, what steps has the city taken to implement these recommendations?
In the years since this important work, the city has achieved many of the recommendations, with a particular focus on boosting emergency reserves, pursuing taxes that meet community needs more broadly through measures like the Community, Culture, Safety and Resilience Tax, and taking steps to improve its budgeting processes.
Budgeting for Sustainability, Equity and Resilience
Most recently, the city made an intentional move toward outcomes-based budgeting, called Budgeting for Resilience and Equity. Under this structure, the city’s sustainability, equity and resilience framework has been layered into annual budget conversations, helping guide where money is spent to make the most impact toward the city’s goals and values. This approach enables the City of Boulder to perform data-driven decision-making to understand how funding choices and resource allocation support community and citywide goals.
Fund our Future
Right now, we are reworking our long-term financial strategy to guide future budget decision-making and establish a sustainable, equitable and resilient way to meet our community’s needs. This is the second in a series of blogposts about the city’s Long-Term Financial Strategy Project.
Stay Informed
The City of Boulder E-newsletter is a bimonthly roundup of city news, including information on city’s long-term financial strategy initiative.