Building a sustainable, equitable and resilient financial future

The city's Long-Term Financial Strategy Project is a current council priority to help guide the city’s financial future.

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Project Overview

Prioritizing our financial future is consistent with policy recommendations from the last two decades. With this project, we hope to achieve more flexibility with the dollars we have and identify new sources of revenue to better address dynamic needs. We also want to engage with our community to better align around service expectations and priorities.

Our Financial Landscape

The city strives to provide service excellence for an inspired future. We know our community has high expectations – and we want to meet these, both in delivering core services and taking on challenging issues. Unfortunately, our list of needs is outpacing our available funding.

This is, in part, because the city budget relies heavily on sales and use taxes, and in times of inflation and decreased spending, less money comes in. But our issue goes beyond this. Here’s a snapshot of some of our current conditions:

  • While Boulder taxpayers have been generous, they typically approve taxes for specific purposes. As a result, 68% of the city’s revenues are dedicated, reducing flexibility to address rising costs and emerging needs.
  • There is a significant number of underfunded core city services in areas our community counts on, like parks and recreation, transportation maintenance, public safety, facilities operations and more.
  • Recent practices have focused on short-term decisions without a strategy for expiring taxes and other potential sources of revenue.

Areas of Focus

City Council prioritized the creation of a Long-Term Financial Strategy at its April 2024 retreat. Guided by a Financial Strategy Committee with three council members, a cross-departmental staff team launched a two-year initiative to address this important issue. The workplan includes four key focus areas. Each one has a set of specific tasks detailed in the drop-down tabs below.

  • Establish a Long-Term Financial Plan that outlines guiding principles, performs a current state assessment, recommends updates to financial policies and commitments to best practices, and future strategic steps. The Long-Term Financial Plan will serve as a strategic planning document to guide the financial strategy forward and provide supporting direction on and priorities of future action steps.

Outcomes:

  • Established guiding principles for fiscal philosophy for organization
  • Performing a current-state assessment against Blue Ribbon Commission recommendations
  • Revising and updating financial policies and committing to financial best practices
  • Identifying future strategic steps including performing research and identification of alternative funding methods, identifying services levels, and developing a multi-year ballot approach.

Timeline:

  • Staff to complete in 2025

  • The city is performing a research analysis and comprehensive inventory on revenues across the city. The intent of this work is to inform potential funding opportunities and understand our true cost of service levels to support community needs and citywide goals.

Outcomes:

  • Conducting a comprehensive inventory of fees, taxes, and other revenues
  • Conducting a comprehensive inventory of fee methodologies
  • Research and analysis, including benchmarking and cost recovery levels
  • Identifying potential revenue updates

Timeline:

  • Staff anticipates completing this work in 2025.

  • Why: Alignment of department strategic plans (previously called master plans) is necessary to better guide the city and identify implications related to financing and maintaining programs and projects. The city is also using this effort to understand resource allocation and associated revenues. The previous planning approach has been inconsistent and piecemeal. The goal is to look at needs holistically across organization.
  • What: The city is performing research on core service levels to understand service level requirements across the organization.

Outcomes:

  • Performing current state inventory of service levels
  • Identifying the criticality of core service areas
  • Synthesize community input on service area prioritization
  • Updating unfunded and underfunded needs list

Timeline:

  • Staff anticipates completing this work in 2025

Develop a Ballot Measure Approach for 2025 and 2026. This multi-year approach will help focus more holistically and comprehensively on the longer horizon to help support core service levels and community needs. Recent practice has focused on short-term decisions without a longer-term strategy for revenue approaches and tax renewals. This effort will include Financial Strategy Committee and Council review in the 2025 ballot measures planning and 2026 annual budget discussions.

Outcomes:

  • Identified potential ballot measure opportunities in 2025 and 2026 to support core service levels and community needs
  • Increased stability, predictability, and diversity of revenues
  • Longer-term funding approach to focus more holistically and comprehensively

Timeline:

  • This work will come forward in 2025 and 2026

Guiding Principles

These goals and action steps outlined in the Long-Term Financial Strategy will guide future decision making, both within the budget and as we approach major policy issues that implicate the city’s long-term financial health. This comprehensive strategy will help guide us forward as we seek to establish an equitable, resilient and stable fiscal strategy to meet our greatest needs as a community.

  • Fiscal Sustainability and Sufficiency – The levels of service the city provides are stable and predictable, based on broad community engagement and needs assessments. Revenue is diverse, flexible and consistent. The city uses specific criteria when considering proposals to increase taxes.
  • Equity – Financial policies and implementation advance racial equity and reduce burdens on historically disadvantaged groups.
  • Resilience– The city maintains an ability to anticipate, adapt and recover quickly to adversity and change, supported by a range of funding sources and sufficient savings, or reserves, to meet emerging community needs, emergencies, and changing economic conditions.

The following photos represent some of the current operations areas that are underfunded. The goal is to consider these during the creation of a long-term financial strategy.

  • Smiling children pile onto a camp counselor outdoors at one of Boulder’s Kidz Kamp opportunities.

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  • A paramedic prepares a gurney in a hospital room.

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  • City truck with a plow blade on front clearing snow from a multi-use path.

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  • A male and female police officers bending over to talk with a woman and a child wearing a bicycle helmet on one of Boulder’s creek paths.

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  • Six city staff members pulling a cover over the Spruce Street swimming pool.

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  • Two city staff members working on a piece of radio equipment to support communications across first responders in Boulder.

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  • An instructor guiding two participants on mats through a pilates class at East Boulder Community Center.

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  • A City of Boulder fire engine undergoing maintenance or repairs in the fleet garage.

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  • A facilities technician repairing a heating/cooling unit on the rooftop of the Penfield Tate II Municipal Building with the Flatirons in the backdrop.

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  • A City of Boulder dump truck unloading materials to repair a pothole.

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  • Four Boulder firefighters dressed in full gear approaching the Boulder Bookstore at dusk lit up by the blue and red lights from nearby vehicles.

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  • A City of Boulder mechanic working beneath the open hood of a pickup truck in the fleet garage.

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    • Stay Informed, Get Involved

    Over the next year, we’ll be seeking community input on what you consider to be core, essential services and what acceptable performance looks like in these areas. The city will host a series of community Inform & Input sessions to share more about this topic as well as to hear perspectives and insights from community members. Opportunities for sharing feedback online will also be available.

    In the meantime:

    • Share Your Thoughts on One Underfunded Core Service – Recreation Centers
      The Parks and Recreation Department is engaging with community now to inform exciting renovations at the existing East Boulder Community Center and to better understand the community’s interests and needs related to other recreation facilities. The feedback will shape a recreation center vision that would need to be funded through the Long-Term Financial Strategy.
    • Observe Financial Strategy Committee meetings
      This committee meets monthly. The sessions are virtual, and community members are welcome to watch in real-time. The meetings are not recorded, and there is no public comment. Any decisions requiring a vote by council must occur at a council meeting, and typically include a public hearing. To see upcoming schedule for committee meetings, please visit the city’s online calendar and search for Financial Strategy as the title.

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