Investing in What Matters

Friends and neighbors,

This week's City Council study session includes a preliminary discussion on potential 2026 ballot measures, and it's got me thinking about how we prioritize as a city. I want to share some honest reflections with you.

South Boulder Rec Center: A Wake-Up Call

Let me be direct: the South Boulder Recreation Center is failing. And this isn't new information;  the city has known for over a decade that SBRC was on a path to failure and past its end of lifecycle. The 2021 Facilities Plan and the 2022 Parks & Recreation Plan reaffirmed what we already knew. The pool area, air handling units, and electrical infrastructure all need major work, and the city has said it will "keep it operating as long as is feasible", which is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the building's future.

In 2025, the city identified funding for some stopgap repairs to buy time. But there is no long-term plan and no dedicated funding for SBRC's future. Meanwhile, the East Boulder Community Center secured $53 million from the CCRS tax for a deep energy retrofit starting in 2027. East Boulder is funded. South Boulder is not.

I want to be honest with you: this is a prioritization failure, and it happened on my watch. I've been on council while we've directed resources toward projects like the Civic Area redesign, which, on its own merits, is a great project. But if you gave me the choice between investing in a shiny redesign of the Civic Area or saving a failing recreation center that serves families every single day, I'd choose the rec center. Every time.

That's a needs vs. wants decision. We haven't been making it clear enough, and we haven't done a good job in objectively discussing trade-offs as part of infrastructure improvements. 

But here's what gives me hope: at the March 5th Council meeting, our community showed up, and showed up strong. Both Council chambers and the overflow area in the lobby were packed with people of all ages voicing their support for the South Boulder Rec Center. It was powerful, and it's so refreshing to see our community rally around a local issue that directly impacts people's daily lives.

I want to give a special shout-out to 10-year-old Bennett, who absolutely crushed it with his testimony. If you need a closing argument for why we need to fund the South Boulder Rec Center, Bennett made it better than any of us on council ever could.



Learn more about the Future of Recreation Centers and visit the South Boulder Recreation Center page.

The 15-Minute Neighborhood Paradox

Here's what makes this even more frustrating. For over a year now, we’ve been working to update The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, the foundational document guiding our city's growth and land use. The current draft plan calls for 15-minute neighborhoods. The idea is simple and powerful: people should be able to meet most of their daily needs within a short walk or bike ride from home. Fitness, community gathering, youth programs, senior services, these are the building blocks of a 15-minute neighborhood.

Recreation centers are exactly the kind of neighborhood anchor that makes this vision work. So how can we, with a straight face, write a plan that enshrines 15-minute neighborhoods as a core value while simultaneously letting SBRC, a functioning neighborhood anchor, deteriorate toward closure?

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance built into our system that I'm committed to changing. Our investments need to match our stated values. If we say we believe in 15-minute neighborhoods, we need to invest in the infrastructure that makes them real.

Learn more about the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan Update and explore the community vision at A Boulder Future.

A Path Forward: Thursday's Ballot Measure Discussion

This Thursday, council will have a preliminary discussion on potential 2026 ballot measures as part of the city's Long-Term Financial Strategy. Staff has presented eight options across three categories, from transformational tax changes to targeted increases to structural reforms.

One option stands out to me as particularly important right now: General Fund debt authorization.

Here's the problem most people don't know about: Boulder does have a mechanism to fund major facility investments, the Community, Culture, Resilience, and Safety (CCRS) tax, which voters passed overwhelmingly last fall. That's the funding source behind East Boulder Community Center's $53 million retrofit. But CCRS revenues are already committed to projects well past 2030. If we want to prioritize the South Boulder Rec Center in the next couple of years, not a decade from now, we need bonding capacity beyond what the CCRS tax provides.

Right now, the city's General Fund cannot issue general obligation debt. That means we can't spread the cost of a major rebuild over time, the way you would with a mortgage on a house. We're stuck waiting in line behind projects already funded, or trying to cobble together money from annual operating budgets, which is why SBRC keeps getting deferred.

General Fund debt authorization would change that. It would unlock an estimated $75–100 million in new bonding capacity for critical infrastructure, recreation centers, public safety facilities, age well centers, independent of the CCRS pipeline. And here's the key: it does not raise taxes. Debt service would be funded through existing revenues by making smarter budget choices. At a time when our economy is facing serious headwinds and families are already feeling the squeeze, this matters. We can solve real infrastructure problems without asking taxpayers to dig deeper.

I'll be advocating for this approach on Thursday, and I'll be pushing council to think holistically about how we prioritize, not project by project in a vacuum, but across the full landscape of our community's needs.

Learn more about the city's Long-Term Financial Strategy.

Looking Ahead: The BVCP and Title 9

The Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update will be completed during this council term. It's our chance to set the vision for Boulder's next chapter, from 15-minute neighborhoods to Area 3 annexation to greater housing diversity.

But a vision document is only as good as the code that implements it. And our current land use code, Title 9, is buckling. Layer upon layer of amendments over decades have made it cumbersome, internally inconsistent, and often at odds with the very values the BVCP is meant to advance. I've compared it to shingles on a roof: we've added layer after layer, and the roof is now sagging under the weight.

I believe it's time for a full rewrite of Title 9, not another patch, but a new foundation built from the ground up to implement the updated BVCP. In my next newsletter, I'll do a deeper dive into the comp plan update and why a document this bold and important to our community's future demands a complete rewrite of Title 9. Stay tuned.

The Bottom Line

Boulder is at an inflection point. We have a comprehensive plan that calls for 15-minute neighborhoods. We have recreation centers that are falling apart. We have creative financing tools on the table that could solve real problems without raising taxes. And we have a land use code that needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

The question isn't whether we have the tools. It's whether we have the discipline to use them consistently, to prioritize needs over wants, to invest in neighborhoods before shiny objects, and to make sure our actions match our words.

That's the Boulder I'm working toward. And I'd love to hear what you think.

If you found this helpful, I'd appreciate you forwarding it to friends and neighbors. If you havnt already please feel free to sign up to my Newsletter HERE. The more people understand the full picture, the better decisions we'll all make together.

As always, thank you for being engaged, asking hard questions, and caring deeply about Boulder’s future.

Matt Benjamin

Boulder City Council

benjaminm@bouldercolorado.gov