The questions Niwot is actually asking.

You’ve heard the worries around town. Here are the straight answers — in the order people tend to raise them.

This is about the opposite of development. Right now the decisions about what gets built in and around Niwot are made twenty miles away, by people who don’t live here. Incorporation is how Niwot stops development being done to it and gets a say over its own land, its own roads, and its own future.

We’re neighbors who want to keep Niwot the place we chose. The whole point is to keep it what it is — to keep Niwot, Niwot.

The boundary on this ballot is fixed — the exact lines are written into the incorporation petition, and they exclude Gunbarrel. Nothing about a Yes vote moves them.

What a town may do later — whether it can annex land at all, on what terms, and who has to agree — is one of the things the home rule charter defines. And the charter isn’t written by the people asking for your vote today: it’s written by the nine charter commissioners you elect, and then it comes back to you for a second vote before it takes effect.

So the honest answer is not “never.” It’s that the rules for it don’t exist yet, and you get a vote on them before they do. What a Yes vote does and doesn’t decide →

Because Colorado makes us. A statutory municipality with more than 2,000 people is classified as a city under state law, and Niwot has 4,306 — so the ballot has to use the word the statute uses. It is a size label. It says nothing about what Niwot is, or how it gets run.

It also isn’t the last word. If the home rule charter is adopted, that classification stops applying and the name becomes whatever the charter says. The petition records the community’s preference already: Town of Niwot. That is one of the things the nine commissioners you elect will settle.

Niwot has been a town for 151 years without the paperwork. The ballot is catching up to it, in the language the statute requires.

It’s the reverse. The new government answers to you. A town charter is written by nine charter commissioners you elect — neighbors whose job is to put limits on the government, not expand it. You elect the town council, and if they don’t serve Niwot, you vote them out.

This is a non-partisan coalition — the enemy here isn’t a party, it’s distance and drift. A small town of neighbors is about as far from a distant power grab as you can get.

There’s no power being seized here — there’s a seat being filled. The chair meant for Niwot has sat empty this whole time, which is exactly why every decision keeps getting made without us. Incorporation doesn’t take power from anyone. It just puts someone in the chair — and that someone is you.

Yes — and we’ll be straight about how much. For the median Niwot home — about $1.1 million, using the county assessor’s own values — it’s about $63 a month (roughly $752 a year), with most households between $28 and $108: a 2.5% town sales tax and a 4-mill property levy. That’s about a tank of gas. Two things move your number across that spread: what your home is worth, which sets the levy, and whether it is a house or a condo — condo and townhome households are smaller, so the sales half is smaller too. The bottom of that range is a condominium.

The property piece scales with your home — figured on its value after Colorado’s statutory reduction (the lesser of 10% or $70,000) — and the tier table on what it costs shows every step, from a $340,000 home to a $3,000,000 one. Either way the money stays in Niwot, spent on the streets you drive every day, not sent somewhere else.

Two purchases sit outside that monthly figure, because neither is monthly: buying a vehicle carries the same 2.5% once — about $875 on a $35,000 car, sourced to where you live rather than where you buy — and so do materials if you remodel. Counting those the way a budget would, spread across the years between them, a typical home is about $77 a month all-in. Most households, in most years, pay the $63.

No. Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights requires a public vote before any government here raises a tax rate — a town council cannot do it on its own. That is exactly why the rates are on this ballot in the first place: 2.5% and 4 mills are not something a new council chose, they are something you are being asked to approve. Changing either one means coming back to you.

One thing on the ballot deserves the straight version, because it looks like the exception. Revenue retention asks whether the town may keep what the approved taxes actually bring in, instead of refunding the surplus in a good year. It waives a revenue cap. It does not touch your vote on the rates — raising a rate still requires an election either way. Almost every Colorado municipality has passed a version of it, because without it a town can be forced to refund money in a good year while the work it was collected for goes unfunded.

We would rather tell you both halves of that than only the comfortable one. Every question on your ballot, in plain language →

No. Nothing you rely on disappears the day Niwot becomes a town. Your fire district, your water, your schools, your mail — they keep working. Incorporation adds a say over what happens here; it doesn’t switch off the services already serving you.

The Local Improvement District doesn’t vanish when Niwot becomes a town. It becomes part of an intergovernmental agreement — a formal agreement negotiated between the new town and Boulder County setting out who does what.

And it won’t be negotiated on its own. The arterial roads and open space are on the same table, as one package. That is the honest shape of it: a single negotiation with the county, not a list of separate wins.

The expectation is that LID revenue collected in Niwot stays in Niwot — which is the whole argument for a town in one sentence. We’d rather call that an expectation than a promise, because it is the outcome of a negotiation that hasn’t happened yet.

No. A roads-only special district (a PID) loads the whole bill onto homeowners. A town pays for roads out of its sales tax — so every shopper and visitor who spends a dollar in Niwot helps pay for Niwot’s roads. Same roads, lower cost to you, plus a real say.

And a PID only gets more expensive the longer we wait, because the roads keep degrading and the county stopped chipping in. A roads-only district for one neighborhood now runs about ~33 mills, every one of them on homeowners — against the town’s 4-mill levy and a sales tax that shoppers and visitors share. See how the two compare.

That’s the heart of it: read why roads come first and what it costs — or hear the neighbor who ran the 2025 district effort explain why they stopped, in a minute and a half of video.

Election Day is November 3, 2026. Here’s how and when to vote — registration, mail ballots, and drop-off, all in one place.