“You can try to sugarcoat it, but a pay cut is a pay cut.””

Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann

BOULDER - Boulder County Commissioners on Tuesday took the first steps toward undoing part of their planned minimum wage increases. The preliminary, unofficial vote comes just two years after adopting a plan to raise the wage to $25 per hour by 2030.

The initial plan called for the minimum wage to increase 8.58% each year from 2026 to 2030, after which the minimum wage would adjust along with inflation. Under pressure from small businesses in unincorporated Boulder County, commissioners put forth a proposal for the minimum wage to increase 1.5% next year and align with inflation every year thereafter.

Commissioners Claire Levy and Marta Loachamin supported the proposal. Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann was opposed. 

The proposal will now be scheduled for a first reading at a date to be determined. A formal vote and public hearing have been scheduled for November 20.

Commissioners Levy and Loachamin cited the burden on local businesses and the lack of buy-in from other Boulder County towns as motivating factors for adjusting the wage. 

The City of Boulder is the only other local municipality to adopt a higher minimum, though they set it lower than the County’s. Boulder’s wage is set to rise to $16.82 next year, $18.17 in 2027 and thereafter adjust with inflation. 

Every other Boulder County municipality is aligned with Colorado’s hourly minimum of $14.81, which next year will increase to $15.16. Colorado first began allowing local minimum wages in 2019. 

“When we made that decision, we did it with the premise that other municipalities in Boulder would adopt a similar schedule and that we could have a regional minimum wage,” Levy said. “We haven’t seen that happen.”

There has been “no concerted effort to make a regional wage,” Stolzmann responded, noting that “commissioners did not attend” a recent meeting on the wage in Longmont. 

“If we to want to see a regional wage, we must convene a regional process.”

Stolzmann also took issue with the process surrounding the wage changes, echoing participants in an October 14 public hearing who said groups representing workers were not engaged. 

“We were not involved in the preliminary conversations,” Karl Lapham, an organizer for New Era Colorado, said at that hearing. New Era represents young adults and their interests. 

Limited engagement to a single public hearing “at 1 p.m. on a workday keeps workers from showing up to advocate for themselves,” Lapham said.

County staff noted that recent feedback showed “a large deviation from what our office initially received.” Commissioners, too, said engagement surrounding the changes were not a full stakeholder process as required by law, but a “supplement” to the County’s 2023 efforts.

Nonetheless, Levy, Loachamin and County staff believe the legal requirements have been met, they said.

“The statute is what is needed to adopt a minimum wage,” Levy said. “It’s silent as to modifying your local minimum wage after that.”

The current minimum wage in unincorporated Boulder County is $16.57 per hour. The 2023 plan would have seen that rise to $17.99 in 2026. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, that equates to an annual salary of $37,419.

The 1.5% increase proposed by commissioners would be an hourly minimum of $16.82, or $34,985.60, some $2,400 less in yearly earnings. By 2030, assuming a 3% inflation rate, that gap will widen to more than $6 per hour between the original plan and the suggested new wage schedule — a decrease of $12,600 in annual wages.

“You can try to sugarcoat it,” Commissioner Stolzmann said, “but a pay cut is a pay cut” Noting that many minimum wage workers were called “heroes” during the pandemic, she added: “Rather than talk about how valuable workers are, let’s pay them.”

Commissioner Loachamin countered that the minimum wage is not meant to be a “sustainable” or “living” wage—it’s a “floor,” she said, “of what [the] government is interested in getting involved in.”

“We have structural inequalities in our community that are the result” of larger forces, Levy said. There are things “we need to work on, the federal government needs to work on… It’s not the work of small business people.” 

The October 14 public hearing was dominated by farmers and small business owners who begged commissioners to adjust their plan. 

Christian Toohey, owner of Toohey & Sons Organic, a Niwot farm, said his workers “all make more per hour than I do. Many farmers are eligible for SNAP and other benefits. We can’t relocate our businesses.

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask small businesses in unincorporated Boulder County to solve a problem that they didn’t create and can’t solve.”

There are an estimated 22,216 workers in unincorporated parts of the county, including towns like Niwot, Hygiene and Allenspark. It is unknown how many of those workers earn minimum wage.