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Boulder staff outline major comprehensive-plan update and ask utilities board for input
Summary
City planning staff briefed the Water Resources Advisory Board on the Boulder Valley comprehensive-plan (comp plan) update — a 50-year visioning process that will shape growth projections, land-use maps and policies affecting utilities, flood risk, housing and climate resilience — and solicited the board’s input on policy areas to explore.
Planning staff presented the scope and timeline of a major update to the Boulder Valley comprehensive plan on Sept. 15 and asked the Water Resources Advisory Board to identify topics it would like staff to examine in greater detail.
Sarah Horn, senior planner on the comprehensive-planning team, and Kathleen King, principal city planner, described the comp plan as a high-level, 20-year policy guide that informs subsequent plans, capital-improvement priorities and development rules. The team said this is a 50-year-scale update process that began with community engagement and will produce a draft for review in early 2026, with adoption hearings to follow.
Planning staff said the update will address the long-term policy framework that informs utilities planning — for example, growth projections and the timing and location of new services — and that advisory boards’ feedback will be folded into policy drafts. “We use growth projections that are established in the comp plan to give us … for what number of people, jobs are we planning for water supply in future?” Joe Tediuchi, director of utilities, said during the discussion.
Board members highlighted priorities they wanted staff to explore further: floodplain and high-hazard event resilience, the climate-change implications for water supply and water quality, interjurisdictional coordination and redundancy with neighboring utilities, and approaches to cost allocation and cost recovery for shared infrastructure and growth-related upsizing of pipes and facilities.
Why it matters: staff and board members said the comp plan guides long-term capital planning and land-use decisions that determine when and how utilities must expand or upgrade infrastructure. Utilities staff noted trade-offs such as when to upsize pipes in anticipation of growth versus replacing at current capacity and then upsizing later, and how those choices affect who bears costs.
Staff described the update process phases: current-conditions analysis (Boulder today), community engagement on values and priorities (Boulder tomorrow), policy development (now) and drafting/adoption of the plan (this winter into next year). Planning staff said outreach includes an online statistically valid survey and a community assembly; the online survey was scheduled to go live Sept. 22.
Ending: Staff asked the board which policy areas they wanted prioritized; board members requested follow-up sessions that drill into growth projections, floodplain management, water-supply reliability, and cost-allocation approaches, and staff said they would bring more detailed materials to future meetings for comment.
