The Commissioners’ Policy Team works to advance and support key public policy and intergovernmental relations goals for the County Commissioners, engaging with local, regional, and state governmental entities, including the Colorado General Assembly.
This page contains Boulder County’s 2025 Legislative Principles and last year’s summary report. (For additional information, visit the 2025 Legislative and State Budget Priorities webpage.)
- 2024 Boulder County State Legislative Session Summary (PDF)
- 2025 State Legislative and Budget Priorities (PDF)
Legislative Principles
Boulder County’s state legislative and budget priorities adhere to the following Legislative Principles, which guide the development of the positions the county takes on state legislation:
Racial Equity: Boulder County is committed to creating and adopting fully inclusive, anti-racist, and culturally responsive policies. We have a responsibility to interrupt institutional racism which manifests through racist policy, practices, and behaviors. We are dedicated to eliminating systemic discrimination against people in all protected classes. We address racism at its root and review all state legislation through a lens of racial equity and strive to solicit the voices and perspectives of those historically excluded from the legislative process.
Climate Action and Environmental Justice: Boulder County is dedicated to protecting and enhancing our environment for generations to come. We advance strategies that promote sustainability, address the climate crisis, protect our open lands, and improve air quality. We make decisions and promote policies that address the inequitable impacts of the climate crisis and pollution.
Financial and Organizational Stewardship: Boulder County is focused on the effective use of taxpayer funds through efficient service delivery and integration of public programs and services to achieve equitable outcomes. We engage in collaborative decision-making efforts with local, regional, and statewide partner agencies to advocate for county priorities in the state budget and concerning fiscal decisions that will impact our organization and our constituents.
In recent years, multiple circumstances have placed unprecedented stress on the budget of Colorado’s local governments, especially those funded primarily by property taxes, including counties. Multiple property tax bills that have reduced property tax revenues, the post-pandemic wind-down of American Rescue Plan Act funding, inflationary pressures on costs and wages, and a growing number of state mandates, many of which have not been funded, means local governments must do more with less even as we continue our efforts to steward our tax revenues as effectively and efficiently as possible.
The way forward will require collaboration between the state and its counties. In the spirit of partnership, Boulder County offers the following strategies that it asks the administration and General Assembly to consider as we move into a future of financial austerity:
- Include adequate funding for staffing and administrative costs associated with statutorily required programs, reforms, and services that will be implemented at the county level.
- Include adequate funding for any legislation that is expected to be implemented at the local level.
- Increase fees for fee-funded programs, as needed and where appropriate, to address local government and state government staffing and other program needs and require industries and polluters to pay for the costs of regulating those sectors.
- Expand the revenue-raising authorities of county governments to enable counties to provide adequate services to their communities.
Utilizing these strategies, Boulder County advocates for a flexible state revenue structure that can quickly respond to changing economic conditions, and which includes reforms to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights and any other constitutional and statutory barriers that implicate Colorado’s revenue structure.