Matters Memo

City of Boulder City Council Agenda Item Meeting Date: October 8, 2026 Agenda Title Council Priority Project: Power Reliability and Resilience Community and Council Forum

Staff Contact • •

Carolyn Elam, Sustainability Senior Manager Jonathan Koehn, Climate Initiatives Director

Executive Summary The Community and Council Forum concept was developed in response to community feedback as part of the Better Public Meetings Project. It is part of the city’s ongoing efforts to ensure community voices are heard and address the need for greater inclusivity and engagement in city governance. The forum creates opportunities for meaningful community engagement earlier in City Council’s decision-making process and provides space for perspectives and experiences that may not always be represented through traditional public engagement opportunities. The Power Reliability and Resilience Community and Council Forum builds on previous community engagement that helped identify key areas of reliability and resilience. Feedback from the forum will be used by staff to refine and prioritize strategies for the Power Reliability and Resilience Roadmap. The forum is intended to inform the development and prioritization of future work; it does not constitute a decision to fund or implement individual strategies. Strategies requiring additional resources or further development will be brought back to council for consideration as appropriate. The forum will include a brief staff presentation followed by a facilitated discussion with council and participating community members, which will include small breakout groups along with larger group discussion.

This effort supports the 2026 City Council Power Reliability and Resilience Priority Project, which is intended to establish a comprehensive understanding of the investments Xcel Energy (Xcel) is making in its electric infrastructure, the effectiveness these investments will have on improving power reliability and resilience, and strategies that can be pursued to improve the community’s resilience to power disruption. The forum is the next phase of a year-long engagement process that has included a community survey, listening sessions, outreach at community events, and a workshop with frontline leaders.

Questions for the Forum The following questions will be discussed during break-out sessions with community members and council. 1. What changes or additions to the proposed Power Reliability & Resilience Goals, if any, would you like to see? 2. What refinements to the list of strategies would you suggest? 3. What are the top three (3) strategies that you think would bring the most benefit to you and your community?

Alignment with City Plans and City Council History Sustainability, Equity and Resilience (SER) Framework and Citywide Strategic Plan Alignment SER Framework Goal Area Safe - Ensures that all residents are secure and cared for during emergencies and natural disasters. Public infrastructure is well-maintained and reliable. Plans for and provides equitable, timely, and effective response and recovery to emergencies and natural disasters. Builds and maintains resilient infrastructure to mitigate existing and future hazards and risks. Citywide Strategic Plan Strategy 2. Advance efforts to enhance regional disaster prevention, preparedness, and response that leverage existing partnerships and prioritize city investments. Strategy 9. Increase community and ecosystem resilience to the current and future impacts of climate change. Staff Notes Power reliability and resilience are central to the safety, health and well-being of the community. Power infrastructure must be well-maintained and constructed to withstand extreme weather. The community must be ready for and able to successfully navigate power disruptions when they do occur.

Alignment with Additional City Plans This project aligns with the City’s Climate Action Plan and Hazard Mitigation Plan, as well as the City’s Franchise and Energy Partnership Agreements with Xcel Energy. It is also closely aligned with City Council’s priority on wildfire resilience, including the planned comprehensive assessment and analysis of current and planned City wildfirerelated programs, projects, and actions.

City Council History This project was identified by council to be a 2026 Council Priority at their retreat in January 2026. On February 5, 2026, council offered support of the project scoping summary as presented by staff. On April 23, 2026, council held a Study Session and provided feedback on staff’s proposed approach and the final deliverable for the project. On August 27, 2026, council held a Study Session to receive updates on the Xcel Energy Partnership, including Xcel’s wildfire mitigation and power reliability efforts.

Analysis The Boulder community has experienced significant challenges with power reliability over the last several years, with outages occurring more frequently, lasting longer and impacting larger areas. The sources of these outages include Xcel’s use of Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) and Enhanced Power Safety Settings (EPSS), which proactively or automatically de-energize power lines during high-risk conditions to mitigate wildfire risk; aging infrastructure that is now failing; and weather-related damage. These power disruptions have threatened public health and safety and caused economic harm to residents and businesses throughout the community. In response to this growing concern, council identified Power Reliability and Resilience as a 2026 Council Priority. The goal of this effort is to develop a clear, data-informed understanding of the current and future challenges facing Boulder’s electric system and identify strategies and actions available to the city to improve reliability, reduce wildfire risk and strengthen community resilience to power disruption, including: •

The current and planned investments by Xcel to improve grid reliability and reduce wildfire risk; • The near- and long-term risks to Boulder’s electric system; and • The roles, authorities, and strategies available to the City to reduce outage frequency, duration, and community impacts. As shown in Figure 1, there are three main tasks for the 2026 project: •

Data Collection and Analysis: In partnership with Xcel, staff has collected and analyzed information related to the electric system serving Boulder, including outage information, underlying risks and improvements Xcel has planned for the coming years.

•

•

Community Engagement: Staff conducted broad community engagement, including community surveys, multiple listening sessions, outreach at community events and a workshop with frontline leaders. The summary of the engagement can be found in Attachment A to this memo. Roadmap Development: The final project deliverable will be a roadmap that outlines the goals and prioritized strategies that will be used to inform work planning for the coming years.

The roadmap will be structured into near-, mid- and long-term priorities, with each phase informed by time-based goals against which progress can be measured as illustrated in Figure 2. These goals are intended to frame year-over-year improvements in power reliability, as well as enhancements in community resilience to power disruption and disasters. Progress toward the reliability and resilience goals will be tracked through key performance indicators (KPIs), which include measures of both power system performance and community preparedness and resilience: • • • • •

Average outage frequency and duration measured at the community level, by power line (circuit) and at the census block group. Number of community resilience hubs available to support community members or maintain critical services. Number of residents and commercial businesses with backup power. Number of community members enrolled in emergency alerts. Number of community members who have participated in preparedness training.

Equity will be incorporated into both the evaluation and prioritization of strategies, as well as the tracking of KPIs, to ensure that strategies are reducing disparities in reliability and resilience experienced by vulnerable populations.

Figure 1 – 2026 Power Reliability and Resilience Work Plan overview detailing the initial priority adoption by City Council at the beginning of the year, data collection and analysis performed by staff in partnership with Xcel, community engagement and development of a roadmap, which serves as the final project deliverable and will guide future work planning.

Figure 2 – Proposed Power Reliability and Resilience Goals demonstrating progressive improvement in community experience

The strategies fall into three categories (see Attachment B to this memo for additional descriptions of each strategy): •

•

•

Core Services: Those strategies that are part of existing work plans associated with the city’s obligations under the Xcel Franchise Agreement and Energy Partnership and/or Climate Action Plan. These strategies are shown in Figure 3 and would not require additional funding or resources. Service Enhancements: Those strategies that could be implemented quickly, potentially within existing budgets or with modest enhancements. For example, the city’s business advisory team is already working with the non-profits selected for resiliency hub grants. The team could work with other businesses to develop preparedness plans as part of their ongoing business advising. The service enhancement strategies are represented in the “Enhance Preparedness” and “Support Community-Led Resilience” columns in Figure 4 (first two columns). Long-term Investments: Those strategies that would require more substantial incremental resources and would also require further development to quantify the resource need and financial strategy to implement. These vision strategies are represented by the “Invest in Local Energy Systems” and “Improve Infrastructure” columns in Figure 4 (last two columns).

Figure 3 - Strategies classified as ongoing core services including partnership work with Xcel, regulatory and legislative advocacy, navigational support for residents and businesses and cross-department collaboration.

Figure 4 - Strategies identified and prioritized through community engagement organized by the outcome those strategies would support. Dollar signs ($) denote increasing resource and investment needs. Asterix (*) denotes strategies that were added because of input received through community engagement.

Once the goals and strategies are refined and prioritized based on feedback received from council and the community through the forum, they will be incorporated into the final roadmap. Figure 5 shows an illustrative example of how the final roadmap will be structured. The roadmap is intended to distinguish between identifying a strategy as a priority and making a future decision to invest in or implement that strategy. Phase 1 Near Term strategies would include early actions that staff could begin advancing in 2027 within existing or already identified resources. Staff envision a Phase 2 that would represent additional development of strategies that have higher resource needs based on the priorities adopted by council. This Phase would include regular check-ins with council in which staff would provide updates on the feasibility, results of subsequent community engagement and proposed approaches to address resource and fiscal needs. Phase 3 would represent implementation of those strategies that pass a go/nogo decision by council once further development has been completed.

Figure 5 – Illustrative example of roadmap showing near-term focus on core services and early wins, further development of more resource intensive priority strategies through additional engagement and study, and then implementation of those priority strategies over the longer term.

The following example illustrates how a strategy requiring substantial additional analysis, community engagement and resources could move through the roadmap process; it does not represent a recommendation to establish a city-funded undergrounding program. •

•

•

Phase 1: The city would continue to partner with Xcel to advance their targeted undergrounding projects and to propose additional undergrounding as part of future Xcel applications to the Public Utilities Commission. The city would also continue to conduct regulatory and legislative advocacy to support and expand upon what Xcel has proposed. Phase 2: Assuming this is identified as a council priority, staff would perform additional analysis to evaluate the feasibility, cost and barriers to city-led undergrounding. Additional community engagement would be conducted to enhance community understanding of the benefits, challenges and costs of undergrounding; further the city’s understanding of the challenges and barriers to implementation; and explore community support for different financial strategies (e.g., improvement districts, bond initiative, utility tax, other). Phase 3: Council would approve the establishment of an undergrounding enterprise, and contracts would be put in place with Xcel to begin city-funded undergrounding work. The city would launch supportive programming and allocate resources to oversee the enterprise.

Staff will complete and publish the roadmap and would then return to council in early 2027 for a check-in during which council can identify any needed updates or revisions.

The roadmap is intended to be a living document that would be updated periodically to reflect Xcel’s progress in improving reliability, emerging issue and learnings from project implementation.

Anticipated Fiscal and Workplan Impacts This project is a 2026 Council Priority and part of staff’s 2026 Work Plan. All core service items represented within the roadmap are planned 2027 (and beyond) work plan items. Other strategy items presented within the roadmap are expected to have fiscal and work plan impacts. Some items may be able to be accommodated within existing budgets and workplans, while others would have substantial fiscal impacts. Following completion of the roadmap, staff will identify the fiscal and workplan implications of prioritized strategies. Strategies requiring additional resources, new funding mechanisms or significant changes to existing workplans will be brought back to Council for consideration and direction before implementation.

Equity Analysis Data indicates that outage impacts are disproportionately experienced by a subset of the community, including residents of manufactured housing communities, medically dependent residents and lower-income households with limited backup power access. This project prioritizes strategies that reduce these disparities by integrating the Racial Equity Instrument throughout the project to identify disparities in power reliability and resilience and to develop recommendations for policy action.

Climate, Resilience, and Sustainability Considerations Boulder, like the western United States as a whole, is realizing the acute effects of global climate change in the form of more frequent drought, increasingly warmer and dryer winters and weather extremes. Already, Boulder has realized a near doubling in extreme heat days and a seven-fold increase in fire risk days. (see Table 1) The evolution of the electric grid resulted in the construction of hundreds of miles of overhead high voltage power lines running through forests and grasslands to carry electricity from where it is generated to city gates. While it has always been true that a spark from a power line could start a fire, the risk grows as the areas these lines run through become increasing stressed by chronic drought and disease. Similarly, it has always been windy in Boulder, but recent years have seen an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme wind events. The intent of this project is to identify and implement strategies that will improve power reliability and resilience.

Indicator (per year)

Historic Baseline

Today (Current)

2030 Projected

2050 Projected

6

10

28+

42+

96°F

57 98°F

151+ 10 101°F

168+ 12+ 103°F

16

116

192+

230+

Days over 95°F Average Drought Days Extreme Precipitation Events Heat Wave Peak High Fire Risk Days

Table 1 - Effects of climate change on indices of fire risk and extreme weather showing change over historic baseline and forecasted projections based on climate science. (source City of Boulder Climate Action Plan)

Community Engagement The engagement strategy for this project integrates varying levels of the engagement spectrum to elevate historically excluded voices. •

Inform: For all audiences, information sharing and education was used to enhance community preparedness to power disruptions.

•

Consult: For the general public and business community, a community survey and other feedback tools were used to understand impacts of power disruptions and preferences for potential strategies. This included tabling at multiple events, as well as several listening sessions.

•

Involve: In partnership with frontline community leaders, staff co-designed and held a workshop to identify strategies and solutions to support adaptive capacity and community resilience during power disruption.

•

Collaborate: Through the council forum, the community will be directly engaged in developing and prioritizing the strategies and policy actions that will serve as the final deliverable from the project.

A summary of the engagement and results are included as Attachment A to this memo.

Next Steps for City Council Based on feedback from the forum, staff will complete the Power Reliability and Resilience Roadmap, which will conclude the 2026 Work Plan project. Following the forum, staff will complete the Power Reliability and Resilience Roadmap, incorporating feedback from Council and participating community members. Staff will return to Council in early 2027 to present the completed roadmap and seek direction on next steps, including further analysis, community engagement, resource development or implementation of prioritized strategies, as appropriate.

Digital Accessibility The City of Boulder is committed to digital accessibility. Some content may not be fully accessible due to technical limitations or issues. For alternate formats or accommodations, please visit Accessibility | City of Boulder or contact accessibility@bouldercolorado.gov.

Attachments Attachment A – Community Engagement Summary of Results Attachment B – Overview of Draft Strategies