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Newsletter — Issue 39 — Thursday, August 13, 2026
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This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado.
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The Bear Roars — Feature Interstitial
The Boulder Mayoral Candidate Who Wants to Lead Boulder to Achieve Its Full Potential
This Engage Colorado Newsletter reflects the personal opinions of Dan Caruso, written with the support of the Caruso Ventures team. The Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future Coalition did not review and has not endorsed this Engage Colorado Newsletter.
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The topic of this newsletter is Boulder. The content applies to every community in Colorado.
If Colorado is going to regain its momentum, we need to improve our governance in all of our communities.
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A New Voice in the Boulder Mayoral Race
A new candidate is running for Mayor of Boulder — and he's ready to shake things up.
Aquiles La Grave is my latest guest on The Bear Roars — and we go deep.
Aquiles arrived in Boulder in 1995 as a 15-year-old immigrant from Venezuela. He arrived with his mother and sister. When he turned 18, the family lost immigration status. They lived in a friend's guest bedroom, then in a CU student's basement. His mother worked as a caretaker and housekeeper. He graduated from Naropa University in 2003. He built companies. He raised a family here — he now lives with his wife Megan and their 13-year-old daughter near Broadway and Iris. He became a U.S. citizen in 2022.
Within a single generation, his mom, sister, and he built thriving lives in Boulder. If they arrived today, he told me, they could not stay in Boulder for long.
That is the story at the heart of this campaign. It is also, in miniature, the story of what has gone wrong — in Boulder, and in Colorado more broadly. And it is a reminder that pragmatic leaders willing to step forward can still lead us to address these problems and get Colorado moving in a better direction. Our job, as voters, is to identify candidates like Aquiles — and others willing to make the same case — and elect them.
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Aquiles's Vision for Boulder
Aquiles wants to see young families return to Boulder and fill up our schools. He yearns for Boulder to regain the interest of 20-something year olds, especially those graduating from CU Boulder. He wants to see the offices and storefronts of Pearl Street fill up, and the offices in East Pearl attract growing tech businesses. He believes in safety, security, and accessibility.
That is the vision. The reality looks different.
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▼ 3,600
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K-12 students lost in Boulder over the last decade — a decline, not a plateau.
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Pearl Street storefronts sit empty. East Pearl's office buildings, once anchors of Boulder's tech ecosystem, are running well below capacity. And a generation of young Coloradans who would once have chosen Boulder are choosing other places instead.
Aquiles is running because he believes each of those problems has a specific cause — and a specific fix.
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Housing
Aquiles wants more housing built on land already zoned for development.
The barrier is twofold: Boulder's permitting process — its reviews, its appeals, its stack of process steps that turn a modest infill project into a multi-year ordeal and a duplex into a financial risk few builders will take. And policies that add significant avoidable costs to projects — which means little housing is built, and the costs (and prices) of what is built are far higher than necessary.
Aquiles wants to gut the barriers — cut the process and policies that add years and costs to projects, barriers that prevent the housing needed by families who would fill up our schools and be part of our local businesses.
Affordability in Boulder is a supply problem. Every year of paralysis is another year of rising prices — and another cohort of Boulder families pushed to Arvada, Erie, Lafayette, Longmont, Louisville, Niwot, and Superior because the City of Boulder blocks the housing needed for them to stay.
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The City as an Employer
Boulder's City government has become one of the largest sources of friction for the people it supposedly serves. Residents and business owners trying to build, hire, permit, open a restaurant, or run a small operation too often experience the City as an adversary — a place where every request is met with more process, more delay, more cost, and more reasons that what they are trying to do cannot be done.
The problem isn't a lack of resources. The City of Boulder employs ~1,500 authorized Full Time Equivalents. But six years after the pandemic, most of them still work remotely — and many (most?) don't even live in Boulder. This means they rarely use the parks, the public parking lots, the hiking trails, or the bike paths — and the lack of housing supply doesn't impact them. Boulder is their paycheck. The city they live in is their community. You cannot serve the Boulder community while living and working elsewhere.
Aquiles calls this a “crisis of empathy” — Boulder is putting the priorities of city employees ahead of the needs of Boulder. He notes that simply bringing those employees back to their offices in Boulder could add millions of dollars per year to Pearl Street businesses alone. And if they came into Boulder every workday, they would be better able to serve Boulder.
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The New City Office Complex
The City of Boulder is currently building itself a lavish new office complex on the most expensive land north of Pearl Street. Aquiles's question is direct: even when City employees do come in to work, they will not be walking to Pearl Street restaurants or supporting the district that anchors downtown. And should City staff — funded by Boulder taxpayers — really be working in one of the most luxurious office complexes in all of Boulder?
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A Further Question — From Me, Not Aquiles
With all the empty office space already sitting in Boulder, and with land ideal for residential development in short supply, how did the City conclude that building itself a massive new office complex on that land was the right call?
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Spending Levels and Accountability
Boulder faces a real budget shortfall and hundreds of millions in deferred maintenance on existing city buildings. The bigger issue is the aggregate level of city spending and the constant need to seek higher taxes to offset it. Aquiles wants a detailed public accounting of the Community, Culture, Resilience and Safety tax revenue and a prioritized inventory of city-owned buildings. Boulder needs to spend less — and stop asking taxpayers to underwrite the ongoing bloating of city spending.
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Another Commentary From Me
What is particularly gut wrenching about the current trajectory is that Boulder could generate significantly more revenue not by raising taxes, but by doing the things that would make Boulder economically vibrant again. Fill the empty office space by making it easy — not hard — for growing companies to operate here. Enable enough new housing so that the families of people who work in Boulder can actually live in Boulder.
A thriving Boulder generates the revenue Boulder needs. A shrinking Boulder chases residents and businesses away with tax hikes — which shrinks Boulder further, which triggers more tax hikes. This is a viciously unhealthy cycle, and Boulder has to break it.
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Security, Safety, and Cleanliness
These are baseline expectations of a functional city.
Boulder should not have to argue about whether Pearl Street should feel safe at night, whether the parks should be usable during the day, or whether small business owners should have to accept regular break-ins and property damage as the cost of operating downtown.
Safe streets. Safe parks. Safe storefronts. Clean public spaces. These are the minimum standard for a city that wants young families to return, 20-somethings to stay, and businesses to invest.
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A Campaign Built on Leadership
What struck me most about Aquiles La Grave is this: his entire campaign is built on the promise that, if elected mayor, he will actually behave as a leader.
He has been direct about what that means:
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He will set the agenda, not be a passive follower. He will be proactive, not reactive. Aquiles is running to drive the conversation — on housing, commercial viability, affordability, spending, and safety.
He will challenge the status quo in support of Boulder's families, businesses, and Pearl Street. He will guide Boulder to be a place where CU graduates are able to stay and build their lives, supported by available housing and a thriving tech and creative ecosystem. He will fight to make Boulder a better place.
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You can disagree with any of his specific positions. What you cannot do — after listening to him — is doubt that he means to lead.
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Listen to the Full Conversation
Aquiles and I covered all of this and more — his family's arrival in Boulder, what he learned building companies here, and what he believes it will take to get Boulder moving again.
Listen to the full episode of The Bear Roars →
And if what he says resonates, share it with someone who will be voting in November.
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