Our Story

How the Niwot incorporation effort began, who started it, and why.

The Niwot Incorporation Committee did not start with a grand plan. It grew out of a series of events that, taken together, made a growing number of residents conclude that Niwot needs the ability to govern itself.

The Development Moratorium

On September 20, 2018, with no advance notice, the Boulder County Commissioners voted at a routine business meeting to impose a six-month moratorium on all new development applications in the Niwot Rural Community District — the three-block stretch of Second Avenue that comprises downtown Niwot. The moratorium was subsequently extended well beyond six months.

The moratorium directly blocked Colterra Restaurant, a community anchor that had suffered a kitchen fire, from pursuing the permits needed to rebuild. Owner Bradford Heap stated publicly that the moratorium was preventing him from reopening. The community was told to wait.

Niwot had no mechanism to seek an exception and no authority to set its own timeline. Business owners who initially opposed the moratorium later asked the county to extend it — because the proposed replacement regulations were so restrictive that a rushed adoption would have been worse than continued delay. Niwot’s business community found itself caught between a freeze and a bad set of rules, with no authority to shape either outcome.

Colterra eventually closed, and Bradford Heap sold the property in 2019. The closure of a signature dining anchor — a restaurant that drew visitors from across the region and gave the downtown a culinary identity — left a vacancy at the heart of the historic district that persisted for years.

This was not county-wide policy touching Niwot. This was the county imposing a targeted freeze on Niwot’s specific downtown, without warning, and Niwot having no ability to respond except to petition the same body that imposed the freeze.

The First Incorporation Exploration

In the wake of the moratorium, two separate threads of conversation started in Niwot — one about business vitality, one about roads. Both arrived at the same conclusion.

Downtown, a group of business owners and community members began exploring what incorporation could mean for Niwot’s commercial future. Cotton Burden, Anthony Santelli, Cornelia Sawle, Tucker Huey, Anne Postle, and Mary Coonce started looking at incorporation as a way to give Niwot control over its own land use and economic development — the authority it had lacked when the county imposed the moratorium.

Separately, Steve Lehan had been called in to participate in a road study for the Somerset HOA. Working with Paula Hemenway, he was evaluating the cost of repairing the neighborhood’s deteriorating roads. The county came back with a proposal that Steve thought was unreasonably high, and he began making a case that the road problem applied to the entire town — that incorporation could provide the economies of scale needed to solve it affordably, because the whole community would benefit from shared infrastructure investment.

The two groups found each other and joined forces. The pattern would repeat six years later: different problems, same solution.

Steve began presenting to HOAs around Niwot about the potential benefits of incorporation, building an early base of awareness in the community.

Then COVID happened. The effort stalled. The people who had been exploring incorporation turned their attention to more immediate concerns, and the conversation went quiet for three years.

The Minimum Wage Fight

In 2023, Boulder County passed a minimum wage ordinance increasing the minimum wage to $25 an hour. In 2024, the first raise went into effect.

A Niwot resident named Jim Schaefer recognized the potential impact on local businesses and started pulling together a group through the Niwot Business Association. The question was straightforward: what was Niwot going to do?

Nicholas Little, who has an office downtown, had been watching Niwot’s commercial district struggle. Several businesses had closed or relocated in recent years — including the 1914 House and Farow Restaurant — and while the causes were complex, the trend was hard to ignore. He faced a choice: watch the town decline, or show up and fight the good fight. He chose to show up — because he wanted to live in a thriving community, not one that was quietly losing its anchor businesses.

Nicholas learned about the minimum wage issue and joined the NBA’s working group. The group grew into an informal coalition called the Boulder County Farms and Jobs Alliance, bringing together the NBA, the Coalition of Organic Farmers Association (COFA), and a group of volunteers.

The Niwot Future League

During the minimum wage fight, the NBA president invited Nicholas Little to present an update to the Niwot Future League, an informal group of volunteers that had been created years earlier to oversee an economic developer hired by the Local Improvement District (LID).

During the discussion, a key insight surfaced: if Niwot incorporated, the town would have the authority to set its own minimum wage. Incorporation was no longer just about land use — it was a viable alternative if the county would not adjust its policy.

The Niwot Future League took a vote and agreed that someone should dust off the paperwork and investigate incorporation. Since Nicholas was already co-leading the minimum wage task force, he volunteered to start looking into it. Incorporation became Plan B.

Three Threads Converge

That summer, a separate group of residents was working on a Public Improvement District (PID) proposal to fix Niwot’s deteriorating roads. Bruce “Biff” Warren, Heidi Storz, Chris Crangle, and Mike Keffeler were developing the PID plan.

Paula Hemenway and Steve Lehan, hearing about the PID effort, started talking about incorporation again. Steve had been through this before in 2019, and he believed incorporation was a better path to getting the roads fixed — it would give Niwot the authority to address infrastructure directly, rather than through a one-time district.

In August, the Boulder County Farms and Jobs Alliance held a rally in Niwot — the first rally in the town’s history. After the event, Paula Hemenway and Melissa Koller approached Nicholas. They had heard he was looking into incorporation. Paula had been talking with Steve Lehan. The threads came together.

Nicholas Little, Steve Lehan, Paula Hemenway, Deborah Fowler, and Melissa Koller began working together as the founding team of what would become the Niwot Incorporation Committee.

The Committee Takes Shape

Through the fall, the incorporation effort and the PID group were working independently. But as the two groups compared notes, the people behind the PID came to believe that incorporation offered a more comprehensive solution — not just for roads, but for all the issues that stem from Niwot having no local governance. One by one, the PID group members joined the incorporation effort.

The committee retained Widner Juran LLP as legal counsel — the same firm that had represented the incorporation committees for Keystone and Castle Pines.

The committee conducted its initial feasibility study and began presenting it — first in small, private meetings with residents who the team believed would support the effort, and then publicly. The first public meeting was held in December 2025.

People thought the plan was viable, and fundraising began. Residents and local business owners contributed loans and donations to support the legal, survey, and election costs required by the incorporation process.

The Niwot Incorporation Committee was formally organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, with Nicholas Little as president, Steve Lehan as secretary, Paula Hemenway as treasurer, and Deborah Fowler as community engagement lead.

As the committee took shape, residents kept discovering new examples of the county making unilateral decisions for Niwot. In September 2024, the commissioners had imposed a moratorium on home expansions — dropping the allowable size from 125% to 100% of the neighborhood median, with no warning to homeowners who had been planning additions. When the county’s own Planning Commission unanimously recommended against making the new limits permanent, the commissioners overrode them and adopted the restrictions anyway. For families who had bought homes with plans to grow into them, it was the development moratorium all over again — this time applied to their houses instead of their businesses.

No one set out to incorporate Niwot. A development moratorium, a minimum wage ordinance, a road problem, home size restrictions, and a handful of people who kept arriving at the same conclusion — Niwot needs the ability to make its own decisions. That is where this effort came from.