On Aug. 21, Boulder City Council voted 6-3 on a flood mitigation plan that will continue to put the Frasier Meadows neighborhood of 3,500 people in extreme danger for years to come, potentially indefinitely. Council was well aware of the choice they made. As a community we have presented dozens of videos showing the 5 feet of water that came flowing through our streets without warning when U.S. 36 overtops, blocking any option of escape or evacuation. They have heard the stories of people having to swim out the windows of first floor apartments, barely escaping with their lives. They were told the stories from Frasier Meadows retirement community and how miraculous it was that no one was killed as they evacuated residents to higher floors in waist deep water. They were even more aware of the flooding blocking access to emergency services and evacuations of the broader community outside of those of us directly impacted. Despite all of this, council has decided to pursue an option that has no clear path to completion without University of Colorado support.

Council had another perfectly viable option, called Variant 2. This option was seen as an acceptable option by the community, Water Resources Advisory Board, Open Space Board of Trustees, the planning board and even CU. I watched them try to poke holes in Variant 2 and its flow restrictor at the U.S. 36 bridge. They brought up a number of city staff, career engineers and experts who presented evidence and referenced scientific studies explaining why it wasn’t an issue. Ultimately council decided to ignore their professional advice, deciding they knew better. Variant 2 was also the most adaptable to climate change, which was identified as one of the guiding principles by council. The council ignored their own recommendation from the guiding principles and picked an option with little to no adaptability to climate change. They spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to get professional opinions they chose to ignore.

When they did choose an option, they decided to go with one that WRAB specifically advised against, ignored the expertise of career engineers and scientists, and did it fully knowing that CU opposed the option as well. On top of this, they decided to combine it with an “upstream option” that was created by an exclusive working group formed by council members Carlisle and Weaver, among others, without the knowledge or consent of other members of council.

A lot of money was spent by the city for this small group of people who met several times with staff, consultants and facilitators, mostly to present their ideas about an upstream option that had been evaluated in the past numerous times, only to be found to include potential impacts to critical habitat would make it extremely difficult to permit. This preferential treatment of a select few has cost even more taxpayer money (the exact amount still, as yet, unknown) and now we are going down that same road, likely to find out that, once again, environmental permitting issues will likely preclude its viability. As a result of this choice, along with the clear message from CU that they do not support it, council has ensured that we will have additional months, or even years, of delay to an already overdue, life-saving project.

Their real agenda seems to be trying to stop or limit CU from building on the CU South parcel, while disingenuously claiming to support flood mitigation. Meanwhile the health and safety of over 3,500 Boulder residents is being held hostage in the process. With council ignoring the advice of city staff, career engineers and scientific studies, this is the only conclusion we can come to. We demand swift action and will hold our elected officials on city council accountable to do their jobs. It is unconscionable that our safety is being used as a pawn in a political fight, and we won’t sit idly by while it happens.

Jon Carroll lives in Boulder.