Lynn Segal, from her Channel 8 TV Council spot

If you’ve been to a Boulder-area political or civic meeting over the past few decades, you’ve probably seen Lynn Segal at one or more of them, and chances are good she spoke for a couple minutes if there was public comment allowed. During a mid-September interview, she said she “follows” the City of Boulder’s Planning Board, Landmarks Board, Transportation Advisory Board, Water Resources Advisory Board, Open Space Board of Trustees, Housing Advisory Board, Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, and Environmental Advisory Board.

In 2026, Segal is running for Boulder City Council, for the first time since 2003. Her answer to a typical first candidate interview question – “Why are you running?” – was to the point.

“No one else would run that I would vote for. I tried a lot of people,” she said.

Mini-Bio

Segal was born in the Hollywood, California area, but didn’t live there long before her family moved to Seattle. They moved to Fair Oaks near Sacramento, where her father worked for Aerojet. Her family moved to a relatively new neighborhood in Boulder called “Martin Acres,” where Segal said they bought a house for $16,000, and she believes her father worked for Martin Marietta. Next, a move to the Salt Lake area, where he worked for Sperry Rand, and back to Seattle where her father worked for Boeing.

Segal ran in 2003, and she’s at lower left in this picture. Folks who have been here a while will recognize a few other 2003 candidates

She started college at Western Washington State College in Bellingham, then finished her undergrad in ultrasound at Seattle University. She took a job briefly in Palo Alto, California, then worked for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara. Segal came back to Boulder in the 1980s and took a job with Denver Health, then for Salud in Commerce City. She said in mid-September that she’s not retired.

In 2003, she ran for City Council but did not earn a seat.

On The Issues

Q – Has Directly Elected Mayor Been a Good Experience?

When asked the question above, Segal said “Absolutely not.” She said she doesn’t mind having a vote for Mayor, but isn’t happy with what she called the “disproportionate power” of the position, saying Boulder isn’t like New York City with Zohran Mamdani, who runs a bigger city but makes less money in salary than Boulder’s City Manager. She also noted that under the 2020 ballot measure creating the directly elected Mayor system, it’s possible for one person to serve for more than 12 years between Council and Mayor terms despite an earlier term limit ballot measure that limited Council members to no more than 3 four-year terms. “If the term limit is 12 years, it’s 12 years for everybody, not anything special for the Mayor,” she said.

Q – Contentious Council Meetings?

In 2025, some Council meetings got heated as attendees protested the situation in Gaza. Segal was among the people protesting, and she actually got suspended for a time. She said meetings were “absolutely not” handled properly, saying it was “mayhem.” Segal said she “begged” City Council to adopt a resolution against the situation in Gaza, and noted that she was on Pearl Street when a firebomber attacked Run For Their Lives members who were marching to support Israeli hostages in June 2025. She said several times during this interview that the attacker might have stopped firing after seeing her, mentioning that she was carrying a Palestinian flag (Editor’s note: I can’t verify this), but Segal was quoted and mentioned frequently in this June 2025 story about the attack from the Denver Post: https://www.denverpost.com/2025/06/02/boulder-colorado-fire-attack-mohamed-soliman/

Q – Boulder’s Economic Status and Ideas?

When asked about ideas for Boulder’s economic future, Segal quickly answered “Let the developer pay. It’s very simple.” During this mid-September interview, Segal had a campaign sign in her yard for the 2015 Boulder ballot measures 300 and 301, which in part would have called for increased impact fees to be charged on new development projects. Impact fees do go toward paying for public needs, including facilities, and the city does currently have an impact fee that goes toward affordable housing. However, the ballot measures, 300 and 301, were both defeated.

Q – Thoughts or Ideas About Housing in Boulder?

Segal once again answered “let the developer pay.” As an example of what she doesn’t support, she called out the “Weathervane” development near East Arapahoe, which she briefly called “a city with no services on a floodplain.”

Q – Rec Centers and Deferred Maintenance?

According to Segal, the city needs to do a better job taking care of deferred facilities maintenance and build new recreation centers. However, she said the city should not build anything until it can produce “a full life cycle analysis of the whole thing; the maintenance and operations over the lifetime of the thing, the replacement costs, and values, including projected inflation.”

Q – Thoughts on Sundance?

Segal said she’d “love to welcome Sundance,” and knows people involved with archaeology at CU who are working on a film that she’d “love to promote through Sundance.” But she added that she believes Sundance will be “destructive” to the community if the process of accommodating the festival involves scraping structures and large quantities of redevelopment.

Q – How is Boulder Handling Homelessness?

When asked the basic question above, Segal said “Dismal.” She said unhoused people keep coming to Boulder for certain services, but added that then the community engages in what she called an “unconscionable argument” between helping people obtain food or medicine. Services cost money, and Segal once again said letting the developers pay higher impact fees could provide revenues.

Q – Downtown Development Authority?

Segal said she would have voted against sending a DDA ballot measure to DDA voters if she was on Council when the vote took place. She called DDA “another smoke and mirrors illusion,” and said revenue from the DDA would not have been redistributed to local venues in the business districts, in part because of the lack of local venues in the Downtown area. “If we had the things that people actually need in our community – not the tourist attractions, not the high end recreation gear, not the high end everything, boutiques and stuff – we could make some real money from real people in our real community,” she said.

Q – Climate Action?

This mid-September interview took place at Segal’s home, and she noted that she had received funding for energy-related retrofits, but the entire project had not been completed. She was disappointed about delays in getting her project done, plus was disappointed that the proposed city municipal electric utility was defeated by voters in 2020 after more than a decade of efforts and other successful ballot measures to pursue municipalization. Part of the rationale behind municipalization was climate-related, to attempt obtaining higher percentages of renewable energy than what Xcel Energy supplied.

2026 Ballot Measures

  • City of Boulder $400 Million Bond: Segal opposes it
  • City of Boulder Residential Vacancy Tax: She supports it, “in spite of the fact that it’s probably going to affect me,” and said she believes the tax should be large to pay for more services.
  • Boulder County Childcare Tax: She said “absolutely not.” This measure is a property tax, and Segal said she’s already being “taxed to death.”
  • City of Boulder Firefighter Collective Bargaining: Yes, she said “support the firefighters.”
  • City of Boulder Debt Limit Increase: No
  • Boulder County Increase 3 Commissioners to 5: She said she’s “OK” with going to five commissioners, but wasn’t sure in mid-September which of the two district set-ups she’d prefer.