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Issue #6 — September 27, 2026
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Why I’m Supporting Aquiles La Grave for Mayor
Boulder needs a fresh voice. And we need to donate to his campaign.
This Engage Boulder Newsletter reflects the personal opinions of Dan Caruso, written with the support of the Caruso Ventures team.
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The last five issues laid out the severe challenges facing Boulder.
Boulder’s non-student population is shrinking. Young families keep leaving, and schools are closing. Office vacancy has climbed to nearly 25 percent. That means less tax revenue for the City and fewer customers for our restaurants and Pearl Street shops. Housing is less affordable in part because Boulder’s excessive regulations drive up the cost of new market-rate housing, which suppresses supply.
Yet the City keeps spending more, and not on these problems. $366 million is the City’s own tally for Alpine-Balsam, most of it for a fancy new campus with its own parking garage: 8.8 acres on Broadway, beside North Boulder Park, a few blocks from downtown. That land could have been a neighborhood of 250 to 350 homes. Market-rate homes would have added property taxes, customers for local businesses, and students for our schools. Instead, most of it will be a government office complex, for a City workforce that largely works from home and, in many cases, lives outside Boulder.
The City is asking voters to approve a bond of up to $400 million. And the City Council keeps looking for new ways to raise taxes, which makes Boulder a harder place for families and businesses to stay or to choose.
On November 3, Boulder elects a mayor, and I am supporting Aquiles La Grave.
Please join me in donating to his campaign. Contributions are capped at $100 per person, so every donor counts. And forward this to your friends, neighbors and colleagues, and ask them to join us.
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Mayor Aaron Brockett
I know Mayor Aaron Brockett. He is a genuinely nice person with good intentions. He is quiet by nature and avoids controversy. He has given many years to this city: four on the Planning Board, then eleven on City Council, the last five as mayor. I respect him for that service.
But in those years I have seen little of the leadership Boulder needs in a moment like this, and little of the management discipline a city with a $552 million budget demands.
He and I see many issues differently. That matters less than this: the challenges laid out above grew during the fifteen years Mayor Brockett has helped lead Boulder. For more than a decade, he has had a vote on every budget, every land-use decision, and every regulation that shapes what gets built here. The results of the policies he has championed are a shrinking population, closing schools, empty offices, unaffordable housing, and accelerating City spending. He helped drive the $366 million Alpine-Balsam project, and he voted to ask voters for $400 million more.
More troubling, he has never publicly acknowledged the scale of these problems, and he is offering no plan to address them.
Does the buck stop with Aaron Brockett? It should. And it is up to us, the voters, to hold him accountable. Re-electing Mayor Brockett to another term is not in Boulder’s best interest.
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Councilmember Taishya Adams
Councilmember Taishya Adams is also running. Asked to name Boulder’s biggest challenge, she said:
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“We had maybe three flakes of snow this year, and so I’m going to say that my number one is ecological collapse.”
“The health of the coral reefs matters. The deforestation matters.”
— Councilmember Taishya Adams, on KGNU, July 2026
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She has never run a large organization and has no obvious background in financial management. I don’t view her as a serious candidate for mayor.
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Aquiles La Grave
I’ve heard some people say Aquiles is unproven because he has never held elected office. They wonder whether he can run an effective campaign. They question whether he has the name recognition to get the votes.
To this I say: really? He is running against Mayor Brockett, whose “experience” has led Boulder into the severe problems covered in the last five issues. Maybe someone with far more experience than Aquiles would be good for Boulder, but that is not the choice on the ballot.
The choice is a fresh voice or more of the same: the opportunity for a new perspective and a necessary level of disruption, or a status quo that digs the hole even deeper.
Aquiles’s own story is worth knowing. He came to Boulder from Venezuela in 1995, at age 15, with his mother and sister. The family lived through housing and food insecurity. He worked three jobs while in school: handyman in Section 8 housing, commercial plumber, and Daily Camera delivery. Then he founded companies and created jobs across Colorado. He serves on the BVSD Bond Oversight Committee and the Open Boulder board, and this year he led the neighbors’ coalition that saved Iris Fields.
I’ll come back to what Aquiles says he will do in a later issue. For now, I ask you to focus on the choice itself: Aquiles, a vote for change, or Brockett, a vote for more of the same.
I am supporting Aquiles La Grave because I want families, kids, twenty-somethings, and businesses coming back to Boulder. With them will come more tax revenue to address our other challenges and more retail spending to support our local businesses.
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How You Can Help
To those who wonder whether Aquiles can run an effective campaign and get his name in front of enough voters: that part is up to us.
Donate. Please join me in donating to his campaign. Contributions are capped at $100 per person, so this campaign is won by the number of donors, not the size of any one check. Every $100 matters.
Spread the word. Forward this issue to five friends, neighbors, or colleagues in Boulder, and ask them to do the same. Five become twenty-five. Twenty-five become a hundred and twenty-five. Name recognition gets built that way.
Rank Aquiles first. Boulder elects its mayor by ranked-choice voting. Ballots go out in mid-October, and Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.
Learn more about Aquiles and his campaign.
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Boulder can be a magnet again for families, for young people starting out, and for the businesses that want to be here. It starts with a new mayor.
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