Western City Campus

• Alpine Balsam is actually 2 separate projects: 1) the Western City Campus (WCC) that will house city operations and our customer service center and 2) the Alpine Balsam housing project which will be primarily be managed by Bouder Housing Partners.
• The total site, including both areas, is about 8.8 acres. 29% of the site is dedicated to the WCC, 40% is dedicated to housing and 31% is dedicated to infrastructure (flood mitigation, greenways, paths and roads).
• Individual costs for the two separate projects are complex as some costs include both the WCC and the housing project. We have used the figure of $140 million in the past as that was the amount appropriated in 2025 to complete the entirety of the site (both projects), but estimate the total cost of the WCC at closer to $128million inclusive of:
  • $117million for WCC building construction.
  • $3.9 million in site infrastructure (utilities, roads etc.). The entire infrastructure cost was around $16 million but that’s inclusive of both projects and specifically flood infrastructure that supports the housing parcels.
  • $7.2 million for the adjacent parking structure.
  • It does NOT include initial purchase price of the land (all 8.8 acres) which was about $40 million when purchased in 2015. It also does not include deconstruction costs of $16 million. This was the preferred approach out of three options presented to council in 2019.
  • Staff is working to provide additional information on costs on this very complex set of projects.
  • It is similar to other municipal construction even with our building code/environmentally sustainability features. Our projected total cost per square foot is $980. The Fort Lupton City Hall ($750/sf) and Golden Police & Municipal Facility ($1,017/sf), both completed in 2026, are in a similar range of cost per square foot when adjusted for inflation.
• When council decided on the purchase of this property in 2015, the vision for use was established by community engagement that pointed towards this site being multi-purpose and inclusive of housing needs, flood control, public gathering options and governmental use. That’s exactly what’s being built here.
• Costs recouped in part by offsets gained by:
  • Consolidation of 10 other city buildings that are in need of costly maintenance repairs and are not energy efficient. Offsets estimated at $4-5 million annually by not needing to invest in major repairs at these failing buildings.
  • Sale of 6 other buildings, estimated at between $20-40million depending on when and how they are brought to market.
  • New building will also yield operational savings over time by being built to higher energy standards than currently exist in our existing portfolio.

Continuing to defer maintenance on our buildings will only result in higher costs and in many cases, we are throwing good money into buildings that simply are at risk of failure and/or would cost more to renovate than to construct new.

• Recent examples of what we hope to address include:
  • Leaking roofs in several buildings have resulted in water pooling inside occupied spaces which can lead to mold. The Iris Center, Atrium building, and the Municipal Service Center are of the most concern for roof repair.
  • Leaking pipes from plumbing and heating and cooling systems have resulted in extensive, invasive repairs through building ceilings. The Police Department recently experienced this in their building, which not only causes concerns for staff and visitors alike, but also poses a risk to expensive equipment.
  • West Age Well Center was constructed with all water lines that serve the heating and cooling system under a concrete foundation slab. These pipes have been leaking for many years, and routinely (every 12-18 months) require costly work to locate, cut and jackhammer the concrete out to fix the pipes that keep the heat on.
  • Several buildings need structural repair.
    • Fire Station 5 needed floor beams repaired after leaking pipes deteriorated them.
    • In 2021, South Boulder Recreation Center was tagged as dangerous and closed after staff discovered that groundwater damage along a foundation wall had corroded a load-bearing steel column.
    • The concrete walls in the pool area of North Boulder Recreation Center have been experiencing water damage from the humid environment and poorly ventilated space and will eventually need a full replacement.
    • Across several buildings, fire alarm systems need full replacement as the age of the systems makes replacement difficult, if not impossible, to find.
    • Cast iron pipes for the sewer system have had major breaks and required emergency repair. Park Central recently experienced this and staff had to be relocated while the emergency repair was being made. Similarly, at the Police Department, the main cast iron sewer line, original to the building, is showing signs of corrosion, and the fire suppression system and internal water lines have been leaking.
    • Several buildings have electrical distribution systems that are original and more than 50 years old. They do not meet modern wiring standards and cannot support many newer pieces of equipment that need to be installed to support our community’s carbon reduction goals.

The Western City Campus is intended to hold around 600 employees and a customer service center. It is designed to consolidate staff in one singular location for efficiency and to have what we hope to be a singular place for community to receive services. That is not accomplished by spreading staff out throughout downtown in buildings that would need to be leased or purchased and likely retrofitted for municipal purposes.

Additionally, the assertion that the city has over 1,400 employees who don’t come downtown for work is simply not true.

There are already many staff in the field who come in to work every day and/or are in field-based positions across the city.

• Police and Fire have over 400 individuals who do not work remotely.
• There are around 641 Parks & Recreation and Open Space and Mountain Parks staff who work across recreation centers, the golf course, Chautauqua, and trails and parks all across the city; the majority of these jobs cannot be done remotely.
• Over 200 Utilities, Transportation & Mobility and Facilities & Fleet staff are based in the Municipal Services Center or in other specialized facilities like the Waste Water Recovery Facility.
• Not all our office-based staff work downtown currently. The building across the street from the Western City Campus houses our Human Resources and Finance staff as well as some folks in Planning & Development Services. Municipal Court employees work at the county’s Justice Center.

Only about 350 staff work in the downtown area now. Many of these individuals are eligible to participate in the city’s hybrid telework policy. The requirement is two days a week, but we are increasingly seeing more staff coming in 3-4 days a week. Hybrid work remains something we monitor, but we hear from staff that our policy is a recruitment and retention tool, particularly as many of our neighboring jurisdictions offer similar flexible working options.

It’s easy to try to look back at the past and try to place blame, but the reality is these are not new problems, and we are not alone. Cities all across the nation are facing deferred maintenance issues. The “why’s” vary from city to city but likely share similar traits that speak to the difficulty of balancing several demands, including:

• A desire to keep up with other emerging priorities over time
• The need to support existing and/or new levels of service to meet community expectations or demand
• New programs or policy initiatives brought in - some of which were likely not fully funded
• Financial pressures from critical incidents like floods, fires or the pandemic
• Slowing or declining revenues and/or continued strain on the General Fund.
• Boulder was also struggling to build its own municipal reserves for almost two decades. In 2008, municipal reserves were around 8-10%. It took us to 2022 to reach the full 20% that is considered best practice.
• The city was also largely decentralized, and departments were responsible for their own building’s maintenance. The reality of that practice is that you can’t expect individual departments to have the full expertise that our current Facilities and Fleet department has as the cost of hiring department-specific architects, engineers and technicians of all kinds would be exorbitant.
• Over the past five years, the city has changed its philosophy and staff have been intentional about assessing the full scope of the problem and looking for solutions not just for the moment, but for the future.
• The Facilities Master Plan, which we now call the Facilities Strategic Plan, was brought forward in 2021 – the first full and holistic assessment of the city’s building portfolio. That also introduced the concept of including total cost of ownership principles in our buildings so that operations and maintenance would be included as new buildings are brought into the city’s portfolio.
  • Since then, the city has slowly been building its maintenance reserves – just as it did with the municipal reserves. Alpine-Balsam was the first building to start including ongoing maintenance costs as a percentage of its project budget in 2022. We have implemented and will continue this practice of building and maintaining such reserves for all our buildings over time. But we can’t get there overnight – particularly as we continue to face necessary sunken costs of maintenance to repair the buildings we currently have.
  • We’ve centralized facilities staff so that the burden of facility maintenance does not fall on the people best suited to run parks or patrol our community or address wildfires.
  • We published the budget on Opengov and have been steadily increasing its ease of use to provide for transparency and heightened data-informed decision making at all levels. We’ve also continued to work with council on the city’s Long-Term Financial Strategy, which addresses issues from the city’s overreliance on sales tax to flexibility of funding.
  • We’re also working to add a community advisory component to this work for the future, similar to practices we have seen in other cities.

• We knew we could not address budget shortfalls without fully addressing service level/demand.
  • 2021 began a journey that has sharpened our financial analysis. We have strengthened our ability to speak to outcomes and services, including this year adding a service level inventory that has allowed us to categorize services by criticality.
  • We have also made some hard decisions regarding how to equitably perform cost allocation across all our funds so that every department is pitching in for internal service needs like human resources, legal counsel and technology – something that was not done in previous decades.
  • We also looked to our 68% of dedicated resources to best leverage them – being sure to maintain the integrity of what those dedicated dollars can be used for.
  • And we made some hard choices about budget and programming reductions that included personnel, as well as some service level reductions like early pool closures.
  • None of these choices are easy, but we have been in a better financial place than many of our counterparts and have positioned the city for better financial success well into the future.
  • What our work to date does not do, however, is fully address the enormous backlog of maintenance facing us today. That is why City Council has agreed to place the Building Boulder Together: Recreation and Safety Bond measure on the Nov. 3, 2026 ballot for voter consideration.

The Western City Campus (WCC) is a purpose-built, functional facility designed to consolidate city services that are currently spread across more than 20 locations in aging, inefficient buildings.

The city has been seeking solutions to aging facilities and office space needs since at least 2015. When the opportunity to purchase the Boulder Community Hospital site came up, the city began to explore a new way to address this issue.

After detailed analysis, including community engagement, City Council decided to consolidate city services to the Alpine-Balsam site. The 2021 Facilities Plan — also developed with community input — found that Boulder's current building portfolio averages 47 years in age, carries $55 million in deferred maintenance today, and is projected to require $307 million in maintenance investment by 2050 if we stay on the current path. The city plans to consolidate staff from 10 other city buildings into the footprint that includes the re-purposed Pavilion Building and the Brenton Building across the street. Two of the city facilities being consolidated to the WCC are within the high hazard zone of the floodplain, which limit our ability to reinvest in them and make necessary repairs. These two buildings will be demolished. Others are planned to be sold.

Yes, this project was revisited. The 2021 Facilities Plan was developed after the pandemic and directly incorporated analysis of hybrid work patterns. The conclusion was counterintuitive, but sound — hybrid work strengthens the case for consolidation, not against it. When employees are in a city office fewer days per week, it becomes more feasible, not less, to consolidate into a single, well-designed shared space rather than maintaining multiple buildings for a workforce that no longer requires them all simultaneously. The result is a building designed for a smaller daily footprint, which reduces cost.

On leasing commercial space: Boulder evaluated this alternative approach. The fundamental problem with long-term leasing is that it trades capital costs for permanent operating costs and provides no pathway out of the deferred maintenance crisis on the buildings we already own. The city government is a permanent function in our community, and remaining dependent on commercial lease markets for core government operations presents risk. The 30-year math consistently favors ownership of purpose-built space for large, stable organizations like city governments.

Following the COVID pandemic, like most other cities, we adopted a hybrid work schedule. All eligible office workers are required to work in a city facility at least two days per week, and current trends show that quite a few choose to come onsite more frequently to be most effective in their work. We are not in a position as a city government to reduce our onsite needs more, and we need to have an appropriately scaled office facility. As an additional point of clarity, only about 50% of the city’s employees are eligible for hybrid work based on their job function.

Remaining workers such as police officers, firefighters, transportation & utilities maintenance, recreation center staff, etc. all work in-person only.

The WCC program was explicitly changed to account for hybrid work — meaning the building interior was redesigned to account for a 2:1 occupancy of staff. Prior to the pandemic, we were planning on roughly 200-250 employees being assigned to the building. It is being constructed now to have more than 600 employees assigned to the building. Much of the space is designed for shared and flexible use rather than assigned individual offices, which reduces the total square footage required per person. The ground floor will provide enhanced and centralized customer service opportunities, as well as a large meeting room, which, combined with an additional meeting room on the lowest level, will increase publicly available gathering space in Boulder.

While the comparison to private sector office decisions is understandable, there are meaningful differences. Private companies can shed office space and ask employees to work from home indefinitely. City government cannot. Planning and permitting, licensing, code enforcement, and other municipal services require the opportunity for in-person public service windows, secure file access, legal document handling, and staff coordination that cannot be fully performed remotely. The city's obligation is to maintain accessible, functional space for public services — not just for internal staff convenience.

The broader point stands, though: The City of Boulder is not building more space than it needs. The Facilities Plan is explicit that consolidation reduces the city's total square footage — the goal is fewer and better buildings, not more of them.

Western City Campus is expected to be open to the community in 2027.

• General inquiry and assistance

• Business licensing

• Dog licensing

• Neighborhood grants

• Parking permits

• Rental assistance

• Food truck assistance

• Utility bill pay

• Pothole reporting

• Volunteer/event support

• Legal services

• Financial aid

• Housing programs

• Energy advising

• Transit passes

• Ticket payments

• Park shelter rentals

• Building permits

• Landmark review

The city plans to consolidate staff from 10 other city buildings into the footprint that includes the re-purposed Pavilion Building and the Brenton Building across the street. Two of the city facilities being consolidated to the WCC are within the high hazard zone of the floodplain, which limit our ability to reinvest in them and make necessary repairs. These two buildings will be demolished. Others are planned to be sold.