The Open Space Vote: The First City in America to Tax Itself for Land

In the early nineteen sixties, a group of landowners proposed to build a hotel on Enchanted Mesa, the broad shoulder of land rising above the University Hill neighborhood. Activists began raising money to buy the mesa outright. They came close, but the episode revealed something the city had not yet resolved: without a dedicated mechanism, Boulder would lose its open land one parcel at a time.

A group of University of Colorado professors, led in part by physicist Albert Bartlett, organized a campaign for a city charter amendment. They published and distributed a report that Frederick Olmsted Junior, son of the man who designed Central Park, had written around nineteen twenty, calling for a greenbelt around Boulder. The proposal they put to voters in nineteen sixty-seven was specific: a sales tax of four-tenths of a cent, dedicated entirely to the purchase of open space.

It passed with fifty-seven percent of the vote. Boulder became the first city in the United States to tax itself specifically for open space acquisition.

The Blue Line had come first, a nineteen fifty-nine charter amendment that simply prohibited the city from extending water service above an elevation of five thousand seven hundred and fifty feet, which quietly capped development along the mountain slopes. But the nineteen sixty-seven sales tax created something ongoing, self-replenishing, and perpetual.

With those funds, Boulder has now protected more than forty-five thousand acres, the grasslands, wetlands, and mountain parks that ring the city and keep the Flatirons in open country rather than in the backyards of a continuous suburb. It is, by one measure, the most successful land conservation experiment in American municipal history.