City of Boulder Seeking Community Input on Budget Goals

The City of Boulder is launching a questionnaire to gather community input on priority areas for the upcoming 2025 budget. The questionnaire is available online on the city website. Anyone who resides, visits or works in Boulder is invited to share their input. The questionnaire, available in all languages, should take less than five minutes to complete. The opportunity to provide feedback will remain open until May 12, 2024.

The city is in the final year of a three-year plan to implement an enhanced budgeting approach using outcomes and performance measures to guide budget development, called Budgeting for Resilience and Equity. The city is using the Sustainability, Equity and Resilience (SER) Framework as a key planning and budgeting tool to provide consistent, shared goals that help the city achieve Boulder’s vision of building a more resilient and equitable community. As part of this new budgeting approach, Budgeting for Resilience and Equity identifies and incorporates performance measures to program outcomes, heightens strategic and data-informed decision-making, and increases the transparency of the development of the annual budget and investments as they align with community goals.

“Understanding our community’s priorities and reflecting those in our budget development is an essential step towards equity and transparency,” said City Manager, Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde. “We look forward to collaborating with our community to define our key areas of focus for the coming year.”

The SER Framework has seven key goal areas: Safe, Livable, Accessible & Connected, Environmentally Sustainable, Responsibly Governed and Economically Vital. The questionnaire asks community members to rank these goal areas in order of highest priority based on current needs.

To view the City of Boulder’s budgeting and transparency portal, approved budgets by SER goal area and learn more about the city budget process, visit the city’s website.