Petition to Elect Additional Boulder County Commissioners for 2020 Ballot

This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

If a citizen sponsored petition garners the required 13,926 signatures by November 18, 2019, it will seek to amend how the Boulder County Commissioners are elected. Boulder County voters could vote to increase the Commissioner’s membership by two, and then vote how those five members would be elected.

Spearheaded by Gary Cooper, resident of Lafayette, and Bruff LeVan, resident of Boulder, and supported by the League of Women Voters of Boulder County, if the petition finds enough signatures, then the initiative will find its way onto the 2020 November ballot.

"As it stands now, the City of Boulder ultimately determines who gets elected as County Commissioner," said Cooper. "Smaller cities or areas, such as Lafayette or Niwot, have little say in who becomes commissioner and who gets to represent that area's ideals or interests."

If placed onto the November 2020 ballot, the initiative would ask voters if the membership of the Boulder County Board of Commissioners should increase from three to five. If the voter selects "yes," then they would choose how they would like the five-member board to be elected.

The initiative asks voters to decide between electing all five members from districts and voted on only by residents in the districts or electing three of the five members from districts and then electing the remaining two members via a countywide vote. By state statute, there could be four choices, but there needs to be at least two different choices on the ballot.

"We looked at some other counties. We're the eighth biggest county in the state, population-wise. Everybody higher than us, and some lower than us has either five commissioners, or a county manager, or both," said Peggy Leech, President of LWV of Boulder County.

Thus far, there has been a healthy back-and-forth at two public conversations hosted by the LWV of Boulder County, but the interest hasn't gone past a general curiosity of how Boulder County government is structured. A rough estimate of several thousand signatures has currently been collected.

"The League did a study on this in 1999, so 20 years ago, and at the time, the population of the county was about 200-some-thousand. Now it's 300-some-thousand, so in 20 years it's gone up by 100,000. It's a budget of 433 million a year, they have over 2,000 employees," said Leech. "It does seem like a matter of good governance to have more skills on the board."

They figured the cost would be less than $500,000 a year and with our current population that would be less than $2 a year for each person to pay for two more Commissioners and more office space.

After the 2020 census, Boulder County will have to redraw the District's lines for three districts slightly, and if voters voted for five districts, there would have to be a significant redraw. County Commissioners are elected on even years, so if the county voted "yes" in 2020 to make this change, then five County Commissioners will be voted for in 2022.

This petition poses the question: Is it time to change Boulder County's governmental structure? More information can be found here.