A $65 million rec center with no plans and a 100-year-old pool with no money
A 2016 assessment predicted the building would wear out this year. It did. Since then, the replacement price has tripled, member fees have climbed, and the numbers the city is asking voters to trust don’t hold up.
BOULDER, Colo. In 2016, a city assessment predicted that the South Boulder Recreation Center would reach the end of its useful life by 2026.
It did, on schedule, and the city still has no funded plan to replace it. The estimated price has tripled in 17 months, to $65 million, for a building the city has not yet designed.
Neighboring cities are building far larger rec centers for similar money. Boulder, meanwhile, charges nearly twice what Longmont does for a single visit, attendance has stalled, and the city says it can no longer cover an $83,000 annual shortfall at a century-old neighborhood pool.
On Nov. 3, voters will decide on a $400 million bond that the city says would pay, in part, for a new South Boulder center. If it fails, the city says it will keep patching the old building, and may cut services or raise fees to cover the cost.
A WARNING ON THE CALENDAR
The center opened in the early 1970s, built with money from a small voter-approved recreation bond. By 2021, groundwater damage had corroded a load-bearing steel column, and the city tagged the building dangerous and closed it for repairs, according to the city’s own account. The boiler that heats its pool has failed before. If it fails again, the pool closes for good.
“The metaphor we’ve been using is how you don’t put a new engine in a very old car,” a parks department spokesperson told Boulder Reporting Lab in 2024.
The cost of waiting shows up in the city’s own figures. Boulder now spends about $11 a square foot to keep its deteriorating buildings running, city staff say, more than double the $5 industry standard for buildings in good condition.
NUMBERS THAT DON’T ADD UP
In April 2025, city officials put the cost of rebuilding South Boulder at about $21 million. That spring, the city proposed two new taxes for infrastructure and left the rec center out.
“These taxes are not intended to cover the costs of replacing this facility,” city communications director Sarah Huntley said at the time.
By January 2026, Parks and Recreation director Ali Rhodes put the replacement at a minimum of $30 million. The city now lists it as a $65 million project in its plans for the bond. It still hasn’t said what the new center would include or how big it would be.
The current center is about 30,000 square feet, according to the city’s visitor bureau. Grand Junction is building a 102,000-square-foot recreation center, with a lap pool, a leisure pool, a lazy river, a therapy pool and a gym, at an estimated cost of $82 million. Castle Rock plans a 145,000-square-foot center with an 11-lane competition pool and expects to spend $75 million on the building.
Not everyone agrees South Boulder’s building had to go at all. PLAN-Boulder, a local civic group, says a 2025 third-party condition report found only minor structural issues and described the center as in relatively good shape.
TAXES ALREADY PAID
Boulder voters have taxed themselves for recreation before. When they approved a quarter-cent parks sales tax in 1995, city code listed renovating and replacing recreation facilities among its uses. In 2013, 85 percent voted to extend it through 2035.
Last November, voters also made the city’s Community, Culture, Resilience and Safety tax permanent. Its allowed uses include maintaining and modernizing recreation facilities.
The city has committed $53 million of that tax to a retrofit of the East Boulder Community Center. When a member of the city’s parks advisory board proposed shifting some of it to South Boulder, Rhodes pushed back, noting that East Boulder had been promoted to voters as an example project.
“We want to catch it before we’re in the state that we are in at South,” she told the board.
PREMIUM PRICES, FLAT ATTENDANCE
A single adult visit to a Boulder rec center now costs $15, up from $12 last year. In Longmont, a resident pays $7.75.
A year’s pass to Boulder’s three rec centers costs a resident $756, and outdoor pools are extra. Longmont charges $551 for a year’s access to its recreation center, indoor pool and summer outdoor pools. Crunch Fitness, a private gym on 30th Street, advertises memberships starting at $9.99 a month.
City officials know it. Recreation costs have “increased phenomenally,” a deputy parks director told the advisory board last year. This summer, he said raising prices further wouldn’t work because Boulder already charges at the high end of the market.
Residents have noticed too. Visitation flattened in 2026, and projected growth for 2028 is modest, the department’s business services manager said in September. The city’s three rec centers take up about 7 percent of its building space but use nearly 30 percent of its building energy, according to a 2021 city facilities plan.
The proposed 2027 budget answers with less. It would shorten the season at Scott Carpenter Pool, cut indoor pool hours before Memorial Day and after Labor Day, offer fewer drop-in fitness classes and eliminate child care at East Boulder. Low-income residents who now use the facilities for free would pay a quarter of the cost.
AN $83,000 PROBLEM
Spruce Pool has served the Whittier neighborhood in some form since 1923. The city bought it in 1950. It is one of Boulder’s few public lap pools.
In 2024, it cost about $203,000 to run and brought in $120,000. The difference, $83,000, is what the city now says it cannot keep covering. The city’s proposed 2027 budget totals about $550 million.
Next summer is covered with $134,000 in one-time money. After that, a city spokesperson said, there is no funding. The pool is not among the projects the city has identified for the bond, and bond money cannot be used to operate it. The chair of the parks advisory board said members weren’t told the pool’s ongoing funding was being cut until the budget went public.
“For many of us, Spruce Pool means summer in Boulder,” said Lynn Stein, who has swum there for 32 years.
WHAT SOUTH BOULDER WANTS
Residents organized in late 2024 as Reimagine South Boulder Rec Center. This year the group launched a petition asking the council to guarantee that any replacement keep the center’s six-lane lap pool, full-size gym, and fitness rooms and classrooms. The city has not committed to any of it.
THE ASK
The bond on the Nov. 3 ballot would borrow up to $400 million, repaid through a property tax, at a total cost of up to $650 million. The ballot language does not name specific projects.
The city’s guide to the measure spells out what happens if voters say no: the city would keep patching its buildings with existing money, and that may mean scaling back or discontinuing services, raising fees, or both.
For South Boulder, the estimate has already moved from $21 million to $65 million without a design. For Spruce, the bond offers nothing at all.