CU-South and proposed zones within the property. South Boulder Creek is along the right side of this image, and US 36 is the white diagonal line near the top.

City of Boulder Ballot Question 2F seeks the repeal of the 2021 annexation agreement between the City of Boulder and University of Colorado for the CU-South property, which will be described in greater detail below. By law, citizens can gather petition signatures to place a “referendum” on the ballot to attempt repealing adopted ordinances or certain state laws. Proponents of what is now 2F gathered more than 5,700 petition signatures (needing about 3,300 for sufficiency) to put 2F on the ballot.

To be clear: voters will see “For The Measure” and “Against The Measure” as the two choices on the ballot. Voting “For The Measure” on 2F means wanting to repeal the annexation agreement. Voting “Against The Measure” on 2F means wanting to keep the annexation agreement in place.

In very short with more information below, annexation would put the 308-acre CU-South property within City of Boulder city limits, making it eligible for City water and sewer service. Current general plans for the property include a significant amount of residential and non-residential development, with some of the development made possible by using large amounts of landfill to lift the area out of the floodplain, plus a flood mitigation project to manage potential flooding from the South Boulder Creek that could include a concrete structure near U.S. 36 to divert floodwaters onto part of the CU-South property.

Repealing the annexation agreement could mean other solutions or agreements regarding the property might need to be considered. The referendum does not define next steps for the parties involved or future plans for the property.

The ballot measure itself is fairly simple, but considerations around the issue are complex and controversial. There was also an unsuccessful ballot measure in 2021 asking for a citizen vote on CU-South annexation, and I wrote a detailed post largely about general CU-South issues, available here. I don’t want to repeat too much of what I wrote last year in this year’s post, but a few aspects are worth including for those who won’t read my post from last year.

Editor’s note: I fully understand that I didn’t cover everything related to CU-South here, but I also understand many readers will find this post plenty long as is. I’ve included links to hundreds of pages of reports, and encourage curious readers to seek as much information as they can handle.

The History

Some newer Boulder residents might never have deeply considered the history of the CU-South property. I’ll suggest that readers without deeper context could benefit from at least skimming an outline, like this one: https://www.repealcusouth.org/information/history-of-cu-south

CU-South – “before”

Notably, readers might wish to consider that the City of Boulder established its formal Open Space program in 1967, and in 1972 the City Greenbelt Committee unanimously resolved “since this general area provides an entry way to the City…its general character should be that of open space.” Those who travel from Boulder toward Denver on US 36 can (safely, please) look to the right after Table Mesa and notice the entry way that the Greenbelt Committee was talking about.

Also in 1972, the Greenbelt Committee accepted Flatirons Company mining of the entire site provided the “land remains open space at virtually no cost to the public” after the mining was completed. In 1981, 220 acres of the property were identified as “future open space” in the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan (BVCP). Meanwhile, the current annexation agreement calls for up to 129 acres of development over time, but only 119 acres of City of Boulder Open Space.

While the City of Boulder had interest in acquiring the property, it failed to do so, and City voters defeated a ballot measure in 1996 to seek funding for a purchase. CU acquired the property in 1996, with no publicly stated plans for immediate development at that time, although CU entered conversations with engineering firm Love & Associates including mentions of maximizing development potential. After the 1996 purchase, CU and the Boulder County government were at odds with each other over CU’s action of raising the height of a berm on the property. CU also used landfill to fill in existing lakes and wetlands on the property.

For those who are saying “that was then, this is now” about our more distant history, the 2013 flood accelerated discussions over the years leading up to today. The issue could be reduced to two general components making up the basis of a deal – the most recent flood mitigation plans would require the use of part of CU’s property to temporarily store floodwaters that might otherwise impact nearby neighborhoods, but CU could not do residential or most non-residential development without water and sewer utility service. The current annexation agreement would enable a flood mitigation project (after regulatory approvals) and allow the City of Boulder to provide water and sewer service for new development.

And while earlier versions of the BVCP called for 220 out of 308 acres to be future open space (88 acres remaining), the current BVCP designates 129 acres as a development zone.

The Current Annexation Plan

Boulder City Council and the University of Colorado Board of Regents both approved the current annexation agreement in 2021. This is literally the issue that Boulder voters are considering this year with the ballot measure, even though some voters will certainly use 2F to support or oppose development on CU-South. I strongly recommend reading the plan in full at this link, or at least giving it reasonable time so readers have a strong sense about what we’re voting on, but if not here are some bullet point highlights paraphrased from the annexation agreement:

Utilities

  • The City of Boulder would be required to provide water and sewer utility service for the property.

Housing

  • The property could eventually hold 1,100 residential units.
  • At least five acres must be set aside for deed-restricted affordable housing, with expectations of about 100-110 affordable units on this acreage.
  • At least 150 residential units must be built before non-residential facilities could be built, with exceptions for public safety facilities.
  • Freshman housing and fraternity/sorority housing won’t be allowed.

Non-Residential Development

  • The agreement allows up to 750,000 square feet of non-residential development. (NOTE: This is not meant to be apples-to-apples, but for illustration McGuckin Hardware is about 58,000 square feet of retail space)
  • Allowable non-residential use could include items like art studios, restaurants or taverns, daycare, and/or retail
  • CU “intends” to maximize energy efficiency in all CU-South buildings, and will strive to accelerate its goal of a 100% carbon emission reductions by 2050.

CU Could Sell Some of the Property

  • CU would not be allowed to sell any of its property for at least 10 years.
  • If CU wants to sell CU-South property, the City of Boulder would have a “right of first offer” option, giving the city the ability to make an offer to purchase available land.
  • If land is sold to another party, at least 45% of new residential units must be permanently affordable.

Flood Mitigation

  • The city would obtain 80 acres for flood mitigation at no cost. (NOTE: The City of Boulder has agreed to waive $3 million in capital facility impact fees as an offset for this acreage.)
  • Flood mitigation strategies would need the approval of a number of regulatory agencies, including U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, CDOT, FEMA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and more.
  • If the city can’t obtain the necessary approvals and permits for the flood mitigation project, the agreement authorizes a “de-annexation.”
  • I will discuss flood mitigation in greater detail below.

Open Space

  • The plan has an “expectation” that 119 acres would become City of Boulder open space, with the actual amount dependent on issues including what’s needed for flood mitigation and floodplain surveying.
  • The city would have the option to purchase up to 75 acres for Open Space, at $37,500 per acre.
  • The city and CU would collaborate on trail planning for the Open Space areas.

Transportation

  • Transportation planning would need to be in collaboration with Transportation Master Plans for the City and CU, plus with CDOT where necessary.
  • Transportation planning would include a “trip cap” for South Loop Drive (intersects with Table Mesa just west of the RTD Park-n-Ride) of no more than 5,550 daily trips each day.
  • Trip cap exceptions could be granted for up to 12 “special events” per year.
  • The plan outlines Transportation Demand Management strategies to limit single-occupancy vehicle use, and CU would build a multi-modal mobility hub.
  • There could eventually be transportation access to the property at a point on Highway 93, but not until the southern part of the property has development.

Sporting and Special Events

  • The plan definitions include a sports facility with the potential for fixed seating of 3,000 seats.
  • There could be various types of events on the property, and the agreement defines noise and lighting standards for the property.
  • There would be no more than 20 lighted events allowed per year, unless the City and CU reach agreement for a different number.

Flooding and Landfill

Very simply, the South Boulder Creek (SBC) originates thousands of feet in elevation above Boulder near the Continental Divide, flows into Gross Reservoir which is also roughly 1,800’ in elevation above Boulder, and eventually reaches the City of Boulder. It’s had a long history of periodic high water flow volumes during major storms, plus there can be heavy hydraulic force because the water could be coming down from higher elevations, and the SBC contributed to major flooding in southeastern Boulder during the September 2013 storm.

A rendering of what might happen under a flood mitigation plan. Image courtesy of Gordon McCurry.

The image (at right) might provide readers with a decent concept of what’s currently envisioned. In extremely brief, a concrete floodwall upstream of US 36 would divert floodwaters onto a detention portion of the CU-South property, capturing large quantities of water that might otherwise threaten the people and property located in the largely developed West Valley area. A major flood could also overtop US 36 itself, potentially cutting off a major transportation corridor for people who might not have time or advance notice to evacuate.

The general mitigation plan would also have systems in place to allow groundwater to flow underneath the concrete floodwall. To enable some types of residential and non-residential development on the property, an estimated 150,000 cubic yards of landfill would be used to lift some of the property out of the 500-year floodplain. An earthen embankment on the north side of the property would help keep water in the detention area.

The plan currently envisioned would be built to protect against “100-year floods.” This does not mean these floods would occur once every 100 years, but it means they have a one percent chance of happening at any given time. The City and CU held lengthy discussions regarding plans for both 100-year and 500-year mitigation plans, and Boulder City Council in 2018 approved a 500-year variant but CU informed the City in mid-2019 that it opposed this option.

There is still controversy in the community about whether officials should consider protecting for up to 500-year floods, partially because it’s generally considered possible that storms could get more severe into the future because of climate change. Opponents to a 500-year plan generally question whether such a plan would be economically or logistically feasible, or if it could gain regulatory approval.

Also, there is controversy in the community over the extent to which the SBC was responsible for damage in southeastern Boulder. A report linked here, based on a city “Flood Impact Survey,” suggested that significant amounts of the 2013 property damage in south Boulder could have been attributable to other sources, including tributaries or localized drainage systems. However, the storm certainly dumped extremely high volumes of water into the South Boulder Creek. The report also provides information about damage suffered along numerous other drainageways in Boulder, not just the SBC, that impacted property owners.

According to a City “briefing book” on CU-South, the estimated cost of the flood mitigation project includes $10M for soil fill and $15M for property impacts, including demolishing existing tennis courts and a warehouse (see below). Anecdotally, it is possible that costs for this project could go higher than estimates due to materials costs and other factors, but this is not yet certain. The placement of fill material would raise 34 acres at CU-South out of the 500-year floodplain to allow for future development.

Even if the annexation agreement is upheld in 2022, the City of Boulder would still need to obtain approvals for the flood mitigation project from numerous agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Colorado Department of Transportation, and Colorado State Engineer’s Office.

For Those Who’d Rather Watch

Some readers might be more into video than reading. I get it. So, here are links to three videos. The first two are both about four minutes long, but with very different viewpoints on the annexation agreement. The third is about 19 minutes long.

From Save Boulder’s Wild Spaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSELLciYhe0&t=5s

From No Means No More Delay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDUyx89XPBw&t=91s

From Ben Binder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sutXapfUoU

For More Information

It would be possible to read hundreds of additional pages on this issue without trying very hard through these four sources alone:

Pro (meaning pro-repeal):

  • The amount of development planned for this property would pave over much land that is currently undeveloped, threaten endangered species, and impact local neighborhoods with increased traffic and noise.
  • The flood mitigation project currently envisioned would probably be built to handle up to 100-year floods, while many people expect more extreme storms into the future, so supporters of repealing the annexation agreement say the protection might not be sufficient to protect people and property in case of an extreme storm.
  • The non-residential development would probably need a significant number of employees, and if the employees don’t already live in Boulder, there might be much more demand for housing in Boulder or neighboring communities than the CU-South project is likely to include.
  • The roads near CU-South, including Table Mesa, US 36 turning into 28th St. heading into Boulder, US 36 heading toward Denver, and Broadway, would ultimately bear significantly increased auto traffic on top of existing congestion.
  • City water ratepayers would need to pay a significant amount of money for this project.
  • It’s not certain that the current plans envisioned are the only way to move forward. Opening the project up again might generate detailed discussion and lead to different plans.

Con (meaning anti-repeal):

  • CU has owned the property since 1996, and has legitimate expectations of being able to do something with the land it owns at some point. CU and the City have already been in discussions for a number of years.
  • There’s no guarantee that other plans for the property would be better than what’s envisioned now, or that CU would agree to other plans having agreed to the current annexation agreement.
  • Going back to the table could delay the flood mitigation project, which could be risky to peoples’ health or safety in case of an extreme flood event.
  • Residential development would provide local housing, plus people being able to live in Boulder instead of nearby communities might reduce some amounts of in-commuting and in turn greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Non-residential development could help provide CU with facilities, and provide residents of the CU-South area with amenities so they’re less likely to need to drive for those needs.
  • Development on the property would provide a lot of jobs and economic activity, along with tax revenues for local governments.

Richard’s Take

I’m going to vote YES on the referendum, but neither the pros nor cons of this issue are trivial and I believe readers should make up their own minds.

Fundamentally, I feel like the top-level question this referendum asks is if the annexation agreement is really the best we can do, and the more I read – in combination with a pretty long history pondering this issue – the more I question if revisions might not be in a lot of peoples’ best interests. For a few major side questions: Does the projected amount of development really need to be that extensive? Is the flood mitigation plan sufficient? How will an undeniably large amount of development impact people who have lived in the general area for decades?

I’ll also ask voters who haven’t spent a lot of time at CU-South to take one more visit on a beautiful fall day, and honestly consider what is in danger of just being bulldozed and paved over. If a visit doesn’t change your mind, you’ll at least get a nice hike or ride.

I thought last year and still think CU-South is a lousy place for the kind of development envisioned. The project will be destructive in my opinion – destroying much of a pretty nice parcel of undeveloped land for buildings and asphalt and concrete, damaging the views of a relatively unspoiled area along US 36, threatening endangered species, and requiring gigantic amounts of construction plus landfill to make the whole thing work. There would be benefits, including the new housing (I want to talk about flood mitigation separately), though the benefits would be fundamentally similar if the housing was located elsewhere in Boulder.

At the same time, I have no illusions that repealing the annexation agreement would be a benign action. The City and CU have been in conversations and negotiations for years over this issue, and there’s no guarantee that going back into negotiations again would yield different results – if CU would even want to go back into negotiations with the City. It’s also quite uncertain if future City negotiators would really want solutions that would be more agreeable to referendum proponents. I can’t tell anybody with a straight face that our current Council would be likely to support what some opponents to CU-South development want, nor could I say that’s likely to change much in 2023 or 2025.

Furthermore, I believe there needs to be flood mitigation to protect neighborhoods that could be impacted by future flooding ASAP. I’m not a CU no-growther, and I understand it’s at or near the top of our list of the most important institutions in Boulder. I might not be crazy about a gigantic amount of new development, but can understand how CU needs or would benefit from additional housing and facilities.

Nonetheless, a repeal of the annexation agreement through 2F would send a powerful message that a majority of voters don’t believe our current situation is optimal. Plus, the option to run another referendum would be there if the City and CU decide to pass another agreement that doesn’t address peoples’ concerns.

I’m also going to be harsher on the CU side of the issue this year than I was last year. This is partially because I interviewed City Council member Mark Wallach last year. He told me he asked a CU official why they couldn’t decouple flood mitigation from the annexation agreement, and the reply he got was “leverage.” That’s the crux of my problem with the whole affair, since I can’t shake the impression that the business/development angle is in importance equal to the queen in this game of chess, with flood mitigation more like a rook or bishop. Rooks and bishops are valuable, in case you don’t play, but they’re both of far less value than the queen. In fairness, Wallach opposes the current referendum for a number of reasons, and he told me last year he felt the annexation agreement would provide benefits including flood protection, despite the agreement being imperfect in his opinion.

While researching other ballot measures in Boulder County, I couldn’t help noticing that Longmont is doing its own flood mitigation project along the St. Vrain, and it’s running a fairly simple 2022 bond measure to finance improvements without having the entire issue tied up with an unrelated land ownership and development situation. Longmont along with very much of Colorado’s Front Range suffered extensive flooding damage from the 2013 storm, and while I definitely will not minimize the very real flood danger in the South Boulder Creek floodplain, I’m really only trying to say different flood mitigation options than what we’ve been through over CU-South are easily within the realms of imagination, though imagination is different from negotiation.

I’d like to close with a few additional points:

  • The purchase price of the CU-South property was about $16 million, and for illustration, CU has spent more than that in real dollars on buying out the contracts of football coaches since the time of the purchase. And CU just fired Coach Dorrell while I was writing this piece, so the cost of buying out coaches will continue to increase. But seriously, if this project reaches buildout, you can only imagine the property value of 1,100 housing units and 750,000 square feet of non-residential development. The value will dwarf the purchase price, and CU will at some point be able to sell some of the developable property to the City or other parties, plus they could sell some of the land to the City for Open Space.
  • The property CU would grant to the City for flood mitigation under the annexation agreement would for the most part not be ideal for development anyway, or at least it wouldn’t without serious mitigation. This had to be one reason for the relatively cheap cost of land, and it’s not that generous to give land not ideal for development away.
  • CU has already done flood mitigation at CU-South by adding height to an existing berm, but this was to protect its own mostly undeveloped property from flooding impacts. Yet, the flood mitigation at US 36 that could protect actual people and built property is considered leverage for a development project.
  • There would probably be some environmental value to having the new housing in Boulder, but I can’t help thinking the impact will actually be a fairly serious net environmental negative at least until many years or a few decades have passed. Ponder the impacts of a mile-long concrete dam, unknown impacts on the floodplain or nearby properties, certainly heavy use of heavy machinery, ripping out more than 100 acres of vegetation that can absorb carbon, replacing it with concrete and asphalt and structures that can’t absorb water or carbon, transportation impacts from residential and non-residential development, impacts of trucking in enormous amounts of landfill, and I know I’m missing a lot. I’ll gladly look at an environmental analysis that goes beyond “housing density is good” and honestly considers all of the other potential factors, though.

I’m a fan of CU in so many ways, but it’s fallible – and let’s face it, it hired John Eastman and fired Patty Limerick. The CU-South issue has been over the course of more than 25 years an extended dark saga, rooted in CU buying a bunch of land of which a large percentage wasn’t well-suited for development without serious mitigation. CU was smart to buy property when it was available, but it had to understand the floodplain issues in advance of the purchase. From the 30,000 foot view, I still don’t think an open-minded person could look down and conclude that the only possible way to do flood mitigation is to truck in massive amounts of landfill to another part of the floodplain and build a project twice the size in acreage of Boulder’s Twenty Ninth Street retail district.

For all the reasons above, I’ll be voting yes on 2F, but in fairness also telling anyone who asks or reads to seriously think it over – no matter what side you’re on.