NIWOT
Incorporation equals Team Niwot.
Residents win. Businesses win.
Same team.
We gave back everything we gained.
Last 12 months, through May 2026: $26.8M — back to 2019, still $5.5M below 2022.
Taxable sales district-wide — LID collections ÷ the 1% rate, in 2025 dollars. The district’s own revenue history, not a projection; the final point is the twelve months ended May 2026, actual collections. Source: Boulder County / CDOR LID records, business-vitality-v1.md App. C.
Similar towns kept their gains.
Indexed to each town’s own 2019 = 100, because five jurisdictions tax at five different rates and their raw dollars aren’t comparable. Source: business-vitality-v1.md App. C.
What happened?
“The rising costs of doing business have made it impossible to continue in a sustainable way.”
“The economics of the business have reached a point where it is unfortunately unsustainable.”
Rent outpaced sales. Market saturation. Low foot traffic.
“…a high stakes poker game, and then the rules are changed in the middle of the game.”
And that is only the window in the chart.
Owners’ own public statements. Farow: Boulder Weekly, Jan 7, 2025. 1914 House: Boulder Reporting Lab, May 2, 2024. Powder Keg: Left Hand Valley Courier, Mar 2018. Colterra: Denver7.
Business is hard. The county is making it harder.
A pause, not a repeal. Wage increases were never taken off the county’s agenda — and the next schedule is still theirs to set, not ours.
Our own LID committee formally recommended against it. The Commissioners proceeded — and all three of them live in incorporated towns, not in the unincorporated county where the policy applies.
Wage schedule per Boulder County; Ordinance 2025-1 adopted Nov 20, 2025. LID recommendation and Commissioner residency per business-vitality-v1.md.
It isn’t just the people at the bottom.
Not one of those numbers was set here.
Our floor is $16.82; Longmont’s is $15.16 — a gap of $1.66 an hour, or $3,320 a year at 2,000 full-time hours. Only that first row is exact. $25.23 is 150% of our floor, the reach Brookings measured for ripple effects (Harris and Kearney, The Ripple Effect of a Minimum Wage Increase on American Workers); the rows between assume the pull fades evenly across that span, which is our assumption, not their finding. Wage cost only — payroll taxes add 7.65% before unemployment insurance and workers’ comp, so every figure is a floor. Method: niwot.town/business-impact
And it was never just the wage.
- Downtown storefronts turn over to offices, and the incentive structure that shapes what fills them is set elsewhere
- Sidewalks a crushed wrist in 2019. Seven years on, the pavers still sit below the curb.
- Home size 2025 — their own Planning Commission voted it down, unanimously. Adopted anyway.
- Roads residential streets that don’t get fixed, on nobody’s schedule
Nobody’s in charge. Or we are.
One rulebook for 328,000 people across cities, farms, and mountain canyons.
We moved that number once, and it cost us a year. That isn’t power. That’s permission.
One place, a few square miles of it. Wage floor, zoning, permitting, franchise.
- A mayor
- A council
- A manager they hire
Every one of them answerable to 4,300 people.
Lyons is half our size and owns its own power company.
Neither Longmont nor Lyons is an Xcel customer.
Not a list of what we would do. A list of what a town can do.
Sources: Town of Lyons, Electric Utility; Town of Erie Urban Renewal Authority, Old Town Revitalization Grant Program; Longmont Power & Communications / NextLight, PCMag 2025.
Here’s what we’d push for on Day One.
- 01Take up the wage first. Longmont’s floor is $15.16. Niwot’s is $16.82. That gap becomes a Niwot decision on Day One.
- 02Convert the LID into the Business Vitality Action Committee. New mandate: sales growth and business retention.
- 03Direct meetings with every restaurant, retail shop, and wellness practice. What do you need? What’s in the way?
- 04Cooperative revitalization of Colterra, Tribune, and Xcel buildings — with their owners, not around them.
- 05Start the Downtown Authority process. Urban Renewal Authority or Downtown Development Authority — the funded vehicle for revitalization.
Monarch Park and Boulder Tech Center get their own retention strategy — same commitment. We can’t promise how a new Council will vote. This is our recommendation.
And we start the Master Plan.
Seven areas, drawn in detail. Not one of them started.
The LID can adopt a plan; the county can receive it. Neither can build one. niwot.town/master-plan
Every turn pays for the next one.
A town is how we stop being a passenger.
The real threat to your business is a townwide PID.
Both columns: a $2M building, $40K of taxable purchases, two full-time employees at the floor. The wage line assumes a council matches Longmont — a decision nobody can promise.
Pay for the PID, and we are exactly where we started.
Thank you.
However you vote, show up on November 3 — and pass this along.
Paid for by the Niwot Incorporation Committee. Educational material · Election November 3, 2026.
Six tools, on Day One.
The full treatment, with sources: niwot.town/papers/business-vitality