Tuesday, November 3
Niwot deserves
to be a town.
Vote YES on incorporation.
The problems exist either way.
The county isn’t coming to fix our roads. So Niwot will. Vote Yes to incorporate, and Niwot finally gets a say over its own streets, its own land, and its own future — for about $63 a month on a typical home. You decide. Not the county. You.
Look for the Town of Niwot incorporation question near the end of your ballot — then keep going. The funding questions below it are what pay for the roads. Return it by 7 PM on Tuesday, November 3. Drop boxes and deadlines →
The campaign so far
The whole case, in posters.
Swipe it — every argument on this page, in the order the page makes them.
4,300 of 330,000
Outnumbered 76 to 1.
Three county commissioners set Niwot’s roads, building rules and minimum wage. Every one of them can win without a single vote from Niwot.
Roads
Niwot’s residential streets have no funding mechanism to repair them. The county stopped repaving them in 1995, and the average pavement condition is 44 — below 50 is poor. Nobody plows them in winter, either.
The same repairs, priced by how long Niwot waits. - Act now$15 million
- Wait to 2034$22 million
- Wait to 2040$33 million
Doing nothing isn’t the safe choice — it is the expensive one.
As a town Niwot fixes its own roads, on its own schedule — funded by a 4-mill levy and a 2.5% sales tax that visitors pay into too
Source Committee executive summary · pavement condition survey · Read the case →
Minimum wage
A Niwot shop pays $16.82 an hour where Longmont, three miles away, pays $15.16 — a $1.66 gap, set by a rule no Niwot business voted for. Downtown revenue is down 23% from its 2022 peak, adjusted for inflation.
As a town Niwot’s elected board sets local policy
Source Boulder County ordinance · Colorado statewide minimum · Niwot LID revenue (Committee analysis) · Read the case →
Land use
Every lot in Niwot answers to the county’s code — what you can build, what you can add on, what a remodel has to satisfy. It capped a new home at 100% of your neighbors’ size, down from 125%. Somebody decides all of that. Today it isn’t us.
As a town Niwot’s own code, Niwot’s own planning
Source Boulder County land use code, Sept 2024 / April 2025 · Read the case →
Utilities
You have sat in the dark. So has every shop on Second Avenue — and when the power or the internet goes down, nobody at Xcel or Comcast owes Niwot a phone call.
As a town A town that can negotiate a franchise agreement
Source Downtown Boulder Partnership · Boulder Chamber survey · Read the case →
Regional infrastructure
At Niwot Road and CO 119, three people have been killed. The safety project built there gave Niwot no connection — and moved the bus stop into the median. Niwot sits with the county’s Consortium of Cities and cannot vote in it.
As a town A seat and a vote
Source CDOT crash data · Left Hand Valley Courier · Niwot LID · Read the case →
Who does the work
Every alternative to incorporation asks for more volunteers — organize a district, petition the county, chase Xcel, show up to regional planning — permanently, from the same pool of people.
As a town Funded staff, accountable to voters
Source The campaign’s own record, and the arithmetic of it · Read the case →
A “no” vote doesn’t make these challenges disappear. A “yes” vote doesn’t magically solve them. Someone still has to do the work.
What it costs
About $63 a month.
For a typical Niwot home, incorporation runs roughly $63 a month — most homes land between $28 and $108 — about a tank of gas. Don’t take our word for it: put in your own numbers.
That figure is two different things added together, and it’s worth separating them. On the median home the town’s property levy is $279 a year. Your own sales tax is about $473 a year, on roughly $20,664 a year of taxable household purchases — what you buy in town, plus everything delivered to a Niwot address, which Colorado taxes where it lands. Together that is $752 a year — the $63 a month above. Every shopper and visitor who spends a dollar here pays theirs on top of that, which is exactly why a town costs a household less than a roads-only district would.
- Niwot households48.3% · $2.22MUs — the 1,736 homes inside the boundary
- Niwot businesses29.6% · $1.36MTelecom and data, leased equipment, wholesale supply, contractor materials — bought by every commercial business inside the boundary, including Monarch Park and the Boulder Tech Center
- People from outside Niwot11% · $0.51MVisitors and neighbors buying lunch, fuel and goods here
- State and formula money11.1% · $0.51MRoad funds and lottery proceeds only incorporated towns receive
52% of it — more than half — is paid by somebody who is not a Niwot household. A roads-only district collects none of that. It has no sales tax at all.
One more, because it isn’t in that $63: buying a vehicle carries the same 2.5% once — about $875 on a $35,000 car — and so do materials if you remodel. Neither is a monthly bill, which is why they sit outside the monthly number rather than inside it. What it costs shows the all-in figure.
Your ballot
Niwot appears on your ballot eight times.
Incorporation
Vote YESThe yes/no that creates the town.
Home rule — forming the charter commission
Vote YESThe yes/no that lets a charter be written at all.
The charter commission — and nine people to elect
Vote for nineA candidate election, not a question. Vote for nine.
- Scott Firle
- Orin Hargraves
- Kathy Koehler
- Nick Little
- Jim Parys
- Tony Santelli
- Jack Trope
- Bruce (Biff) Warren
- Carrie Wise
Niwot Together’s recommendations.
Sales & use tax
Vote YES2.5% — the lowest on the Front Range, groceries exempt.
Property tax
Vote YES4 mills — about $23 a month on the median home.
Retail marijuana tax
Vote YES3%, if it is ever sold here.
Revenue retention
Vote YESLets the town keep what these taxes raise.
Debt authorization for the roads
Vote YES$15M for the roads, repaid from sales tax.
Vote it all the way down
We’re asking for a yes on all of it. Incorporation creates the town; the funding questions pay for the roads. If those fail Niwot could still make it work, with a great deal less — but that is a smaller answer to the problem we started with.
Nothing appears on your bill until 2028.
What we are
You’re a Niwotian.
That’s what a Niwotian is. Not an address, and not how long you’ve been here. Someone who clears the walk that isn’t theirs, who fixes the thing because it’s ours to fix and no one else is coming.
Look at what that just built. Neighbors got incorporation onto the ballot — the petition drive, the public meetings, the analysis, a wall of posters — volunteered, by people with jobs and families, against a deadline. Nobody who watched it can argue Niwot lacks capacity. But a season is not a decade, and the job has outgrown the model, not the willingness.
This is not a criticism of anyone. The people doing this work are doing it well, and they’re doing it for free, on top of their own lives. The question is whether it’s fair to keep asking — and whether it holds when they stop.
You cannot inherit a sign-up sheet.You can inherit a town.
An institution is the opposite. It isn’t better than the neighbors who have carried Niwot this far — it is the version of them that survives them.
And we were handed this place: the downtown, the cottonwoods along the ditch, a century and a half of people deciding this was somewhere worth being from. They planted trees they would never sit under.
That is what a town is. This is our turn to plant.
Since 1875.Our turn to plant.
What we’re asking
The largest thing Niwot has ever been asked to do.
Form a government, and keep the character of the place while doing it. That is a real thing to ask, and it deserves a better answer than “trust us.”
So here is the answer, and it isn’t a promise. You elect the people who write the rules. Then you vote on the rules. Two more elections, both of them ours — and in the meantime, a board we elect adopting a code we write. See how that works on the ballot →
On November 3, we don’t become Niwotians. We already are. We just finally give it a seat. Rise to it.
Already in?
A pledge is a vote. Three more things win it.
Nobody here is on a payroll and there is no mail house. What there is: neighbors with an afternoon, and a printing bill. Either one moves this.
Knock some doors →Help print the posters →
Or send a poster to one neighbor — that is the entire distribution plan. See all the posters →
November 3
Make a plan to vote.
This time, every vote counted is a Niwot vote. Don’t hand the next one back to the other 76.
Niwot is on the whole ballot. Don’t stop at the top.
Ballots arrive by mail. You can post it, or drop it at a box — and the questions about Niwot run further down the page than most people expect, so read all the way to the end before you seal it.
- — Ballots mailed to every registered Boulder County voter
- — Recommended last day to mail your ballot back — after this, use a drop box
- — Online and mail voter-registration deadline to receive a ballot in the mail
- — Election Day — ballots must be received by 7:00 PM (drop boxes close). Same-day registration available at vote centers