Boulder wants the oil companies to chip in on a changed climate. The goats aren't waiting on the ruling.
The goats reported for duty in the middle of June, sixty-five acres of ground along the western edge of Boulder, chewing a belt a hundred to three hundred feet wide where the houses quit and the grass takes over. The city allowed six weeks for the first pass. More acreage on the south end is penciled in for August and September.
Chainsaws started on Tram Hill back in March, two miles of corridor that happens to lie between all that fuel and the city's drinking water, a hydroelectric plant, and a good run of electrical gear. A $900,000 state grant pays for it. The slash they cut sits in piles until somebody can burn it, and that will happen sometime between late this year and 2028, because you burn when the weather says you may and not one day sooner. Last winter came in warm and dry, which shortened the spring window, so some of the piles wait. The rest of the 2026 plan is thinning, mowed strips, and five hundred acres in south Boulder that get worked over again and again, vegetation having never once accepted the concept of a finished job. The county went to Stage 2 fire restrictions up in the mountains on June 30.
Seventeen hundred miles east of the goats, there is a docket. Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, No. 25-170. The Supreme Court took the case on February 23. Boulder filed its main brief on July 27. The next day the federal government's lawyer filed a motion asking for ten minutes of argument time, standing on the oil companies' side of the podium. As of today there is no argument date on that docket and no order on the ten minutes.
Two calendars, then. One of them belongs to livestock and has a start date.
Between them works a city budget officer named Charlotte Huskey, who spent part of last year establishing something you would assume was already written down someplace obvious. What Boulder spends on not burning down.
Eight departments and one fire
On September 6 of last year, City Council member Mark Wallach dropped a note into the council's public correspondence pile under the subject line "THE BUDGET!" He had noticed that the wildfire money coming out of the city's dedicated climate tax was getting smaller: about $1.8 million as revised for 2025, roughly $1.5 million proposed for 2026. "In light of the extreme danger we face from wildfires," he wrote, "I believe this amount is woefully inadequate relative to the danger that we face."
Huskey wrote back, and her answer is the more interesting document. Yes, the climate-tax allocation was $1.56 million, and the open space fund kicked in another $550,000 or so, the two together covering 47 percent of the fire department's wildland unit. Call it $2.1 million with the word wildfire penciled beside it. But those accounts, she explained, were not the city's wildfire budget. The work runs through eight departments. Reviews done over the course of 2025 had turned up another $3.8 million sitting in open space and mountain parks, and $2.6 million more in fire-rescue.
Read that again at half speed. A competent budget officer had to go hunting through her own government to learn what her town lays out to keep itself from burning, and came back with six and a half million dollars nobody had bothered to put in that column. Nobody was hiding anything. It's that a wildfire runs sideways through every function of a city while the bookkeeping runs up and down. The crew on the brush saw gets charged to parks. The engine is fire. The culvert is public works. The mowing belongs to whichever fund holds title to the grass.
File that away. In court, the party asking for the money is the party that has to prove what it lost.
Nobody appropriates a lawsuit
What this Supreme Court case does to Boulder's finances right now is nothing. Not one budget document I could find treats a judgment or a settlement as revenue, as money owed, or as a contingency anybody names out loud. Not the city's $521 million 2026 budget, not the county's $745 million, not the capital plans, not the fund summaries.
Nobody's being coy. It's the only move on the board. There is no line item called Pending Litigation, Anticipated. You cannot hire two-thirds of a fuels crew against a 5-4 vote scheduled for who knows when. A budget is a rack of toggle switches, each one up or down. The crew goes out in April or the season passes without them. The culvert gets upsized inside the construction window or next spring the water comes down and finds the same low spot water has always found.
So the officials do the arithmetic they actually have. City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde said it about as bluntly as the job permits in last summer's budget publication:
"There is, quite honestly, a limit to what our budget can absorb. We have a significant list of unfunded or underfunded needs."
She also mentioned that 68 percent of city revenue is legally or administratively restricted, which is how municipal finance admits that most of the money was claimed in advance by the ballot measure that created it and cannot be walked over to whatever is currently on fire.
The county's dedicated wildfire money comes off a permanent tenth-of-a-percent sales tax. For 2026 that fund budgets $12.149 million of spending against $9.342 million of revenue, which means pulling roughly $2.8 million out of savings to make the ends meet. A second tenth-of-a-percent tax, the one holding up emergency services, dies at the end of 2027. And the county has separately told itself it needs to find $30 million to $40 million in cuts over three years.
The oldest idea in shipping
I put in five years on cargo ships in my twenties, and the oldest idea in that trade is one almost nobody ashore has heard of. General average. The ship is in trouble, the master orders part of the cargo over the rail to save the rest, and the loss does not land on whoever happened to own the crates that went into the water. Everybody with a stake in the voyage pays a share. Merchants worked this out thousands of years ago, before insurance, before corporations, for the flat practical reason that otherwise nobody would ever load anything onto a ship again.
Scrape the press releases off both sides and Boulder is asking a court for something with that shape. A contribution toward a bill. And where the comparison quits is exactly where the whole fight lives. General average splits a loss among parties who booked the same voyage and agreed beforehand to the sacrifice. Nobody in this case signed the bill of lading.
The 2018 complaint puts no dollar figure on anything. It pleads categories, and they read like the agenda of a public works meeting: wildfire response and mitigation, drought, heat and allergy and insect-borne disease costs, flood control and drainage, repairs to roads and bridges and buildings, water rights, agricultural losses, monitoring, administration, money already out the door. The legal theories are ordinary state-court stuff, public nuisance first among them, the same family of claim that got run at lead paint and tobacco. You created a condition that is costing my community money. Help pay to clean it up.
The merits brief filed last week narrows the ask down hard. It describes the suit as seeking damages so the companies carry a portion of costs that otherwise fall on local taxpayers, for harm to property inside Colorado and for protecting the health and safety of the people who live there. And it says what Boulder is not after: no injunction, no restriction on the companies' operations or sales, no emissions controls. Money toward physical work, not an order that anybody stop selling anything.
Nobody collects a dime in Washington this term. The Justices are settling one question only: whether federal law wipes out state-law claims like these before a state judge ever gets to hear them. Whether the courthouse door stays open.
Four hundred thousand dollars under 119th Street
At the tail end of a county public works budget presentation from last October, behind ten operational requests, sits a ranked list of things the department would like to build:
| Project | Amount | |
|---|---|---|
| Rank 11 | Road surface construction | $7 million |
| Rank 12 | Ditch structure, Niwot Road | $500,000 |
| Rank 13 | 41st and Lefthand Creek, phase 2 | $40,000 |
| Recommended | Culvert upsize, 119th Street | $400,000 |
| Recommended | Bridge over Dry Creek at Baseline Road | $2.21 million |
| Recommended | Repairs at two sites along the St. Vrain | — |
Four recommended projects. About $4.19 million, all in.
Four hundred thousand dollars. In a $745 million budget that's lint in the pocket, and it is also the precise sort of item that decides whether a road is where you left it in the morning. That's the register this case has to be read in if it's going to be read at all. Never mind the law of nations. A pipe under a county road, sized for rain that stopped being representative some while back.
Winning and getting paid are two different animals
Readers here have watched me worry at the distance between what an institution calls done and what a person can live in. A buyout gets awarded. Awarded is a condition of a file. Housed is a condition of a family. The institution keeps the first clock, and the family pays for the second one.
The Suncor case is that same architecture in a robe.
Say Boulder wins. The Court affirms the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling that federal law does not erase these claims. What Boulder receives is not a check. It's a bus ticket back to district court in Boulder County, where the Colorado justices went out of their way to say they had decided nothing whatever about whether the claims are any good. Then discovery. Then expert testimony on causation, which in this instance means persuading a factfinder how much of one particular fire, one particular flood, one particular buckled stretch of pavement traces back to these defendants' conduct. Then motions, maybe a trial, then appeals. The county's own case page concedes this could run years, and notes that the outside lawyers get paid only out of a recovery, up to 20 percent of whatever eventually turns up.
There is a third door nobody puts in a headline. The Court asked both sides to brief whether it has authority to review a state-court case at this stage at all. Walking away on that ground would leave the Colorado ruling standing, settle nothing nationally, and send the case back to the same trial judge by a shorter road.
And say Boulder loses. A broad ruling could finish the case on remand. A narrow one might kill off some theories and leave others breathing; Boulder's brief argues that even an adverse holding about out-of-state emissions could leave room for claims grounded somewhere else. Either way, a loss changes nothing at all about what Boulder owes. The bill was never contingent on the verdict. The culvert holds no view on federal preemption.
The size of it, said once, as proportion and not prophecy
Nobody has demanded a number, so nothing here is a forecast. It's scale.
The nearest thing to a price tag on adaptation is a study the county commissioned in 2018: $96 million to $157 million countywide through 2050, with $16 million to $36 million of that falling inside the city limits. The caveats belong to the study and they matter. 2018 dollars. Thirty-two years. Multiple jurisdictions. And a list of things deliberately left out: residential air conditioning, extreme-drought water supply, dead-tree removal, public health, business interruption. Set the county range against a single year of that wildfire tax and you get ten to seventeen years of every dollar it collects spent on nothing else whatsoever. The city range runs roughly 8 to 19 percent of one year's general fund.
Now suppose, as an exercise only, that money someday arrived at the full weight of the county's own top estimate. Take the counsel share off the top and you're near $125 million, spread across a county and a city and three decades. Against that, set the city's capital-maintenance backlog, which it now puts around $400 million. Six firehouses need modernizing and there's money identified for two. The far reaches of the Goose Creek plan have none. The 119th Street culvert doesn't appear as funded anywhere a member of the public can check, because the adopted budget rolls roads and bridges into a $9.2 million lump and leaves the particulars to your imagination. And the original complaint mentioned that the city had already identified some $170 million in additional investment needed just to handle the one-percent-annual-chance storm under historical rainfall. Not tomorrow's rain. The rain that already fell.
That backlog isn't a climate number. A firehouse does not get excused from aging because it sits in the wrong column. A win at the study's own full freight would be real money and would not retire the list.
The other future needs no hypothetical, being the one currently adopted. The drawdown of savings, the $30 to $40 million in cuts, the emergency services tax going dark on December 31, 2027. A November bond measure under discussion and not decided, which is to say the residents of Boulder may be asked to tax themselves for the very thing the lawsuit is about, before anybody knows how the lawsuit comes out.
Where the lawyers stop agreeing
For the landscape: Maryland's highest court went the other direction on March 24, holding that Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County could not proceed with comparable claims. Colorado waved Boulder through. Maryland shut its cases down, and did it a month after the Supreme Court had already taken this case, which tells you the ground was contested before the Justices got there and got more contested while they were reading. An adjacent piece in this issue works through the Maryland reasoning.
The scholarship hasn't settled either. Nicholas Eberhart argued in Ecology Law Quarterly in 2021 that a deliberately modest public-nuisance remedy, money for local abatement and adaptation instead of global damages, could work on the lead paint and opioid model. Benjamin Reese, writing in the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law back in 2015, argued the doctrinal and evidentiary walls are close to unclimbable and that a federally administered compensation program would beat litigation outright. Both were written before this docket existed.
The sharpest recent warning comes from Francesca Leucci of Columbia's Sabin Center, who noted in April that pinning down an attributable share is still technically expensive and legally half-built, and that rulings friendly on liability have not reliably produced substantial money.
Which loops right back to Huskey and her eight departments. Her city spent a good chunk of a year determining what it spends on one hazard in one year and found millions it had never tallied. The lawsuit asks a court to take a multi-decade, multi-hazard, multi-jurisdiction stream of cost and render it as a percentage that will hold up under cross-examination. Municipal accounting was never built for either job, and nobody ever required it to be.
On how far a ruling might reach, the lawyers split clean. Beveridge and Diamond's team expects it could reach dozens of municipal suits and state cost-recovery statutes besides. Analysts at Jenner and Block emphasize that a dismissal on jurisdiction would leave the field roughly where it stands today, and that any opinion's reach depends wholly on how the thing is written. Both are client advisories, not disinterested studies. Their procedural claims check out against the docket.
What gets built while nobody knows anything
Boulder is not standing around waiting. The city has $66 million in bonds out for South Boulder Creek flood mitigation, construction running 2026 through 2031, protecting an estimated 2,300 residents and 260 structures. Gregory Canyon Creek Phase 1, around $19 million, is expected to break ground this year. The Goose Creek plan has money for design and a first phase, with one reach looking at one to three years of design and then eight to sixteen months of building.
That's what a hedge looks like inside a public agency. Nobody keeps two budgets for two futures. One budget, phased, sequenced, eating its own savings, with the far end of every project shoved into a future tense that has no dollars attached to it yet.
The Marshall Fire is the reminder that the arithmetic can get settled abruptly and from outside. The county's private-property debris removal program ran about $35 million across 566 properties before FEMA closed it out last September, plus $2.1 million in tax rebates to 676 households that rebuilt. One program, out of one afternoon in December. There is still no consolidated public accounting of what that fire finally cost the governments of this county, which tells you about how badly anybody wanted the number.
The Court will rule sometime in the coming term, and the ruling will matter enormously to the law of who pays for a changed climate in this country. It will also, on the morning it comes down, change nothing about whether a crew goes out in April, or whether four hundred thousand dollars the adopted budget never says out loud shows up under 119th Street.
The goats will be back in south Boulder in August regardless. Somebody signed off on that in the spring, knowing nothing about how any of the rest of this ends, and the bill will land on Charlotte Huskey's ledger in whichever of the eight departments turns out to own it.
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Whether the Solicitor General argues: The federal government moved on July 28 for ten minutes of argument time on the oil companies' side, and no order granting it had appeared on the Supreme Court's docket as of July 31, along with no argument date.
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Boulder's November ballot question: The city floated a possible infrastructure bond measure against a backlog it now describes as roughly $400 million in its Fund Our Future update, but had not finalized whether to put it to voters.
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The hazard plan being rewritten now: Boulder County began updating its multi-hazard mitigation plan in June, which is where the priced-but-unfunded project list gets rebuilt for the next five years — worth reading against the 2022–2027 version's still-unstarted entries.
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Where federal mitigation money lands: FEMA's reopened $1 billion resilience-grant window closed on July 23 after a year of litigation over the program's attempted termination, per the agency's application notice, and which Colorado projects get selected will shape local budgets sooner than any verdict.