Copyright Boulder Daily Camera
Nicole Speer has surpassed Jenny Robins and is now in position to be re-elected to the Boulder City Council after the latest ballot drop on Wednesday night. Speer was in fifth place after the first ballot drop on Tuesday evening, but she gained ground on Robins in each of the subsequent ballot drops Tuesday night and into early Wednesday morning. Speer has 13.9% of the vote and Robins is at 13.2%, a difference of fewer than 700 votes out of almost 106,000 cast . Incumbents Matt Benjamin and Mark Wallach appear to be safely re-elected at 17.9% and 15.7%, respectively. Ex-Boulder Fire Rescue Chief Rob Kaplan is in third at 14.2% of the vote. Mayor Pro Tem Lauren Folkerts is in sixth place with 12.2% of the vote. She and Speer getting re-elected would mark a major win for Boulder’s progressives, but Folkerts is about 2,000 votes behind Kaplan. The first drop of results tends to lean moderate/conservative, Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, City Council members and people active in the city’s politics have said. Speer and Folkerts are two of the more progressive candidates in the field. Folkerts trailed early in 2021 when she was first elected but steadily made ground with each subsequent drop to capture a seat on the council. There are two more ballot drops scheduled by the county clerk’s office, one for Wednesday night after the Daily Camera’s print deadline and another by the end of day Thursday. Based on data from the county clerk’s office, there are approximately 10,000 ballots left to be counted after the Wednesday evening drop. Filling out the field, social justice activist Rachel Rose Isaacson was at 4.3%, auction house manager Montserrat Palacios was at 2.6%, building developer and small-business owner Max Lord was at 2.5%, pro-Palestinian activist Aaron Stone was at 2.3%, and longtime Boulder activist Rob Smoke was at 1.3%. For short-term goals, Benjamin said he wants to readdress Boulder’s inclusionary housing ordinance, which allows developers to pay cash in lieu of building affordable housing. While well-intended, Benjamin said it has fewer affordable units and has contributed to the city’s absence of middle housing, which is essentially housing smaller than single-family homes but larger than apartments. Benjamin also wants to institute more protections from wildfires and ensure a tipped-wage credit for restaurants, which essentially allows restaurants to pay employees below the minimum wage with the expectation that their tips will make up the difference. He also wants to support tenants and proposed requiring notice for rent hikes. Long-term, Benjamin wants to continue working on an economic development strategy for the city and rewrite Title 9 of the city code, also known as the land-use code. Wallach, likely to enter his third term, is setting his sights on prioritizing public safety, wildfire resilience and implementing policies to combat homelessness in Boulder. He said he’s worried about public safety from some members of the homeless community in north Boulder, where many of the community’s resources are located. Wallach said he wanted to talk with Stephen Redfearn, chief of the Boulder Police Department, about putting a police headquarters in the neighborhood to have a closer presence in the area.
