Vote Yes · November 3
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 $55 a month on a typical home. You decide. Not the county. You.
Doing nothing isn’t the safe choice. It’s slow decline you can feel in your steering wheel — another five years of the same potholes while the county’s list never moves. “Fine” has a cost, and you pay it every year you wait.
Fixing it now, while the bill is still ours to carry, is what we owe the neighbors who come after us. That’s what it has always meant to be a Niwotian — looking out for this town when no one else will. This is just the next step, and the hardest one yet. It’s time we took it.
The argument that wins
Our roads are falling apart, and there’s no plan to fix them.
Ask anyone in Niwot about the roads. You already know the answer.
Right now the county maintains our streets — or doesn’t — and Niwot has no plan of its own and no say in the matter. Incorporation changes that: a town can set its own priorities and finally keep up its own roads.
And it costs less than the alternative. A roads-only special district (a PID) loads the whole bill onto homeowners. A town spreads it across sales tax and property tax — so shoppers and visitors help pay — which means a lower burden on you, and you get everything else a town can do, not just the roads.
And roads are just where you feel it first. The same distance capped what you can build and left a new bikeway at our door with no safe way to reach it. Different decisions, one problem: they’re made about Niwot, without Niwot. See the whole case →
The honest question
“Aren’t you just trying to develop Niwot?”
The opposite. Renewal downtown is already happening — the town is already zoned and changing. The only question is who decides how. Today that’s Boulder County. Incorporation puts it in the hands of your neighbors, so the answer to development that doesn’t fit Niwot can finally be no.
And it reaches your own lot. The county already limits what you can build on the land you own and pay taxes on — it recently capped a new home at 100% of your neighbors’ size, down from 125%. Incorporation moves that call from an office twenty miles away to the neighbors who live next to you.
We’re not trying to make Niwot into something else. We’re trying to keep it what it is.
What it costs
About $55 a month.
For a typical Niwot home, incorporation runs roughly $55 a month — most homes land between $40 and $85 — about a tank of gas, to fix our own roads and stop asking Boulder for permission. Don’t take our word for it: put in your own numbers and see exactly what it would cost you.
What we are
You’re a Niwotian.
You didn’t end up here by accident. Nobody ends up in Niwot by accident. You chose this town — and choosing it made you responsible for it.
That’s what a Niwotian is. Not an address, not how long you’ve been here. A Niwotian is someone who takes care of this town — who clears the walk that isn’t theirs, who shows up when the town needs showing up for, who fixes the thing because it’s ours to fix and no one else is coming.
We’ve been that for a long time. Through the roads no one would repair, the wage rule written for somewhere else, the bikeway built around us — the answer was always the same neighbors, doing the work of a town with none of the standing of one.
There has been a chair at the table this whole time with Niwot’s name on it, and no one in it. It isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just empty — and it’s ours to fill.
To be a Niwotian is to take care of this town — now, for the neighbors beside you, and forward, for the ones who come after. The people before us planted the trees we sit under. This is our turn to plant.
On November 3, we don’t become Niwotians. We already are. We just finally give it a seat. Rise to it.
Make it count