Election Day · November 3, 2026
Fred Smith — the Grateful Fred — has lived in Boulder since the mid-1980s. He's running for mayor on one plain idea: before this city cuts one more program or leaves one more pool unfixed, it should collect from the tax break it's been handing the wealthiest households in town.
Amendment 87 replaces Colorado's flat income tax with a graduated one starting in 2027 — lower rates on smaller incomes, higher rates at the top. It is on the same ballot Fred is on.
This is a must win for this campaign. A great many of the policies on this site depend on Amendment 87 passing. Colorado has taxed every dollar at the same rate for decades; 87 is the vote that breaks that, and it is the precedent everything else here is built on. If you do one thing for this campaign, vote yes on 87.
| Taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| $25,000 or less | 3.7% |
| $25,001 – $100,000 | 4.2% |
| $100,001 – $500,000 | 4.4% |
| $500,001 – $750,000 | 7.4% |
| $750,001 – $1,000,000 | 7.9% |
| Over $1,000,000 | 8.4% |
Rates, revenue figure, and dedicated uses are from the nonpartisan 2026 State Ballot Information Booklet (Blue Book) published by Colorado Legislative Council Staff.
A better deal for students
Forty thousand people spend four years paying into this city — rent, sales tax, fees, and everything they buy — and are treated as a nuisance to be managed rather than a constituency to be represented. Fred's argument is simple: students are members of this community, not a source of revenue. And they are hit first and hardest by exactly the tax system this campaign is trying to change.
Through rent, sales tax, fees, and daily spending. Property tax rides inside every rent check — and roughly three quarters of it funds schools almost no student here will ever use. They pay in without building a dollar of equity.
Rent, food, fees, transportation. When Boulder gets more expensive, students feel it before anyone else, because there is no cushion between the price of a room and the money available to pay for it.
A regressive tax takes more from people with less. Students spend nearly all of a limited income on basics, so a city that leans on sales tax leans on them — at the same rate as a household making twenty times as much.
Every voter has a stake in how Boulder raises money. Students have the longest one: they will live with today's decisions about housing, mental health care, and affordability for the next fifty years, and they had the least say in making them. Most of the rules that shape daily life here were written without much student input at all.
Fairer revenue tools change that math directly. The money from a tax that starts above $184,500 pays for the things students actually need this city to fund — mental health care, permanently affordable housing, child care, and the services being cut. Students aren't asking for a carve-out. They're asking the city to stop balancing its budget on the people with the least.
Where the money students pay actually goes
Share of the property tax carried in their rent
Approximate.
"The city treats students like milk cows and keeps checking how much more it can get." Fred Smith
One more thing, and yes — this is the one Fred's known for
The 21 drinking age was built to stop young people from driving to a neighboring state, drinking, and crashing on the long way home. It was never designed to police college campuses — and on campuses, Fred argues, it has produced the opposite of what it promised: 19- and 20-year-olds shut out of bars and drinking far harder in basements instead, where nobody is watching and nothing costs anything.
This isn't about rewriting state law. It's about the city, the University, and law enforcement sitting down together and being honest about which setting is actually safer.
| Minimum age | Countries | Notable examples |
|---|---|---|
| Age 15 | 2 | Central African Republic, Mali |
| Age 16 | 18 | Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg |
| Age 17 | 1 | Malta |
| Age 18 | 126 | Global majority (~68%) — UK, France, Australia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Italy, Spain, South Africa |
| Age 19 | 2 | Qatar, South Korea |
| Age 20 | 6 | Iceland, Japan, Paraguay, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Benin |
| Age 21 | 19 | United States, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Bahrain |
| Age 25 | 1 | Eritrea |
| Variable by region | 3 | Canada (18–19 by province), India (18–21 by state), United Arab Emirates (18–21) |
| No minimum age | 7 | Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Timor-Leste, Togo, Vanuatu, Western Sahara |
| General prohibition | 1 | Alcohol illegal everywhere in the country |
Fred's point isn't that the rest of the world is automatically right. It's that the United States sits in a group of 19 — and the argument that 21 is the only safe line gets harder to make when almost seven in ten countries draw it at 18.
A better deal for students means lower pressure, fairer policy, and a stronger voice in Boulder's future.
Bring Boulder back
Fred wants Kinetics back at the Boulder Reservoir on the first Saturday in May. Not as a museum piece — as a daylight party with a purpose.
First Saturday in May. Even without the sculptures and crafts, it was the best daytime event in Boulder — and the people who went before will fill the Res again.
Every dollar it raises goes to the Addiction and Alcohol Treatment Center of Boulder County. A party that pays for the help this town actually needs.
Fred expects local breweries would donate the beer, students would turn out, and a Boulder legend gets revived at very little cost to the city.
"It was the best party in Boulder in daylight hours. Let's bring it back — and let the revenue go where it does the most good." Fred Smith
Where Fred stands
Boulder's mayor does not set foreign policy, and Fred does not pretend otherwise. He gets asked anyway — and he would rather answer plainly than say nothing. In his own words:
"The situation in Palestine is beyond terrible — especially when it is happening to the people who have inhabited the land for centuries, by the very people who were victimized by the same inhuman atrocity. And the people of Israel act like everything is fine and all is fair in love and war. Especially with American armaments, which of course pushes the apple cart even further over — it is the most unfair fight. It is amazing how much suffering a poor country has to endure because of what a dozen radicals in their country did. Most animals have a better standard of living than a Palestinian." Fred Smith
Priority one · A fair share tax
A household in the bottom fifth hands over 8.1% of everything it earns in state and local taxes — most of it at the cash register. The top 1% pays 7.0%. That's not a loophole anyone snuck through; it's what happens when a city is only allowed to raise money through sales tax. Fred's proposal is a 10% city tax on household income above $184,500. Nothing below that line is touched, four out of five Boulder households owe nothing at all, and it raises about $178 million a year for mental health care, housing, child care, and the services being cut.
Who actually pays what
Total state & local taxes as a share of household income — today, and under this proposal
Read the fifth bar. Under this proposal the Next 15% ends up at 9.7% — exactly what a middle-class Boulder household already pays today. That's the whole idea: not punishing anyone, just asking the top of town to carry the same share as the middle of it.
About that $184,500 line
It's the 2026 Social Security wage base — the point where Social Security withholding stops. Fred uses it because it's a number people already recognize and it lands almost exactly where "comfortable" turns into "wealthy" in this town. To be plain: this is not a change to federal payroll tax, and it doesn't recapture anything from Washington. It's a city tax that borrows a familiar line to draw its own.
What it would mean next to today's budget
Annual dollars, City of Boulder
Roughly the size of the entire general fund — which is why Fred calls it the difference between a city that patches and a city that builds.
Where the revenue comes from
Projected annual collection by income tier · 10% on income above $184,500
Steeply concentrated by design: only dollars above $184,500 are taxed, so the further above the line a household is, the more it contributes.
| Income tier | Households | Avg. household income | Avg. income over the line | Total Boulder income over the line | Tax at 10% | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $184,500 (bottom 80%) | 36,720 | — | $0 | $0 | $0 | 0% |
| Next 15% | 6,885 | $212,200 | $27,700 | $190,714,500 | $19,071,450 | 10.7% |
| Next 4% | 1,836 | $504,600 | $320,100 | $587,703,600 | $58,770,360 | 33.1% |
| Top 1% | 459 | $2,357,300 | $2,172,800 | $997,315,200 | $99,731,520 | 56.2% |
| Total | 45,900 | — | — | $1,775,733,300 | $177,573,330 | 100% |
These are the campaign's own estimates, not an official City of Boulder projection. Effective tax rates by income group are from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Who Pays? — statewide Colorado figures applied to Boulder households.
What the money pays for
The first question anyone asks about new revenue is the right one: what does it actually buy? Fred's answer is deliberately short. Not studies, not consultants, not a new department — four things this city keeps cutting, deferring, or telling people to wait for.
Real capacity, not a referral list. Boulder currently answers a mental health crisis with a police car and an emergency room, because that's what's funded. Fred wants treatment beds, crisis response, and ongoing care that a person can actually get into — the piece of this he knows firsthand.
Rec centers, pools, library hours, road and park maintenance, county human services. Boulder has spent years quietly trimming the things residents assume a city does. This restores them and stops the annual hunt for which one goes next.
Buy the units and hold them. Not vouchers that expire and not covenants that time out in twenty years — city-owned or land-trust housing that stays affordable permanently, so the money spent once keeps working instead of being spent again every cycle.
Child care in Boulder costs about as much as a mortgage, and it's the expense that decides whether a parent can hold a job here at all. Direct support for working families — the difference between staying in Boulder and commuting into it.
Fred's position is that the list should be short and public before a single dollar is collected, and that the city should publish where the money went every year.
Local control
A rule written into the state constitution in 1992 makes this plan illegal for Boulder to pass on its own — no matter how many people here vote for it. Fred's position: stop treating that as permanent.
Publish, every year, the dollar figure Boulder gives up — so it stops being an abstraction and starts being a number in the budget.
Refuse to treat another quarter-cent as the automatic answer every time the budget comes up short.
Organize with other Colorado cities and college towns to put a fix on the statewide ballot — the only route that exists.
What TABOR is, and why it's the obstacle
The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights — Article X, Section 20 of the Colorado Constitution, passed by voters in 1992. It's known for one thing: government has to ask voters before raising taxes. Fred has no argument with that. But the same amendment quietly wrote two other rules into the constitution.
No Colorado city or county can create an income tax that didn't already exist in 1992. Not just a progressive one — any one. A few pre-1992 city taxes were grandfathered. Boulder didn't have one, so Boulder can't start one.
Any change to Colorado income tax law has to tax all taxable income at a single flat rate. That's the sentence that makes a progressive income tax unconstitutional anywhere in the state.
Which means Boulder cannot do this by itself. A city ballot measure can't override the state constitution — not a unanimous council, not a landslide city vote. The only door is a statewide amendment, which is why the plan runs on a statewide petition instead of a Boulder ballot question. The petition isn't ambition. It's the only door there is.
Don't take our word for it. Read Article X, Section 20 of the Colorado Constitution — it's two pages — or the nonpartisan Legislative Council Staff summary written for legislators, not for a campaign.
So Boulder gets austerity instead of options, and exactly one lever it's allowed to pull: sales tax. That's the most regressive tax there is. A student buying groceries and a household making two million dollars pay the identical rate on the same loaf of bread — except one of them feels it. Every time the city reaches for another quarter-cent, working people and students cover the gap.
"What I don't understand is how much austerity the City of Boulder has to go through before it looks for new revenue. We can't even fix a pool." Fred Smith
How it gets done
Changing a rule in the state constitution takes a statewide vote, and getting on that ballot takes a petition. That's the whole door. It isn't a mystery — it's arithmetic, and the arithmetic is smaller than the headline number makes it sound.
Split 125,000 across 200 circulators and it's about 625 signatures each. Spread that over three months and it's seven signatures a day — call it ten with a cushion for the ones that get thrown out. That's a table outside a dining hall for an hour. Colorado has three million registered voters; roughly one in twenty-four needs to sign, and only one in fifteen thousand needs to help collect.
The hard part isn't the total. It's the map. The rule also requires 2% from every single senate district — all thirty-five. A campaign can gather every signature it needs in Boulder and Denver and still fail, because it never showed up in a district on the Eastern Plains or the Western Slope. Volume is easy. Coverage is what kills petitions.
Which is why the colleges aren't a nice-to-have — they're the strategy. There's a campus in essentially every senate district in Colorado, already full of the people with the most at stake in a fairer tax system and the least to gain from the one we have. The network the petition needs already exists. It just hasn't been asked.
"Many hands make easy work." Fred Smith
What it actually takes
From signature one to the statewide ballot
If you can give four hours on a Saturday, that's the whole ask. Email Fred with "petition" in the subject line and he'll send you a packet and a partner.
About Fred
Fred Smith is a farm boy. He grew up on a hog farm outside Carthage, Illinois — rural, remote, and a long way from here — and took a degree in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois before landing in Boulder in the mid-1980s. He's been here ever since, including a long stretch working for the University of Colorado. This is his fifth run for city office — and his first for mayor — and he's made the same argument every time: this city has money it refuses to collect, and residents — students especially — are carrying a load that isn't theirs.
He talks about mental health the way he does because he's lived it. Fred has personal experience with mental illness, and he's spent years on the other side of it too — serving on a mental health board, working with Bridge House and the people it serves, and belonging to the Odd Fellows, an organization built on the plain idea that neighbors take care of each other. That's not a line in a platform for him. It's why mental health care is first on the list of what the new revenue pays for.
He isn't a consultant's candidate. He writes his own platform, he does his own petitioning, and he's still here making the case after four campaigns, which is more than most people who agree with him can say.
In the news: "Grateful Fred Smith: Boulder should lower drinking age, raise minimum wage" — Daily Camera, Oct. 18, 2013.
What Fred is running on
The whole platform, in one place
Get in touch
No forms, no list, no fundraising pitch. If you want to argue with the plan, help circulate a petition, or ask him a question, reach out directly.