Broomfield: The City That Broke the Map
Near Boulder, Colorado
Broomfield, Colorado, is the only place in the United States that was simultaneously a city in four different counties at the same time, and the story of how that happened explains a great deal about suburban growth on the Front Range.
The name comes from broomcorn, a variety of sorghum whose tall stalks were used to make brooms. Farmers grew it here in the eighteen eighties, and when the post office opened a station in eighteen eighty-four, they called it Broomfield. It sat on flat farmland between Denver and Boulder, unremarkable country that seemed unlikely to become anything except more farmland.
Then the suburbs came. After the Second World War, the Front Range began expanding rapidly outward from Denver. Broomfield incorporated as a city in June of nineteen sixty-one, with about six thousand residents. As it grew through the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, it kept annexing land to accommodate new housing developments and commercial strips. The problem was that this land sat in four different counties: Boulder, Adams, Jefferson, and Weld. Each annexation moved the city line into a new county. By the nineteen nineties, Broomfield had residents who got their county services from four different governments depending on which block they lived on. Emergency responders had to check which jurisdiction applied. Property taxes flowed to different county seats. The situation was not just bizarre, it was genuinely dysfunctional.
In nineteen ninety-eight, Colorado voters approved a constitutional amendment creating a new county. The state's sixty-fourth county, the City and County of Broomfield, came into existence on November fifteenth, two thousand one, combining city and county government under one roof. It joined Denver, which has operated as a combined city and county since nineteen oh two.
Today Broomfield is a prosperous suburb of about eighty thousand people, home to tech companies and aerospace contractors. But the cartographic puzzle it once created stands as a reminder of how growth on the American frontier, even suburban growth, could create situations for which no map had a ready answer.
