Several Boulder County municipalities are looking into the possibility of raising the minimum wage.
Colorado's minimum wage currently sits at $14.42. Boulder County officials voted unanimously in November to increase it to $15.69 in 2024. There's a plan to raise it incrementally each year until it reaches $25 in 2030.
But there's a catch: Boulder County's vote to raise the minimum wage only affected unincorporated parts of the county—and local towns and cities have not yet followed the county's lead.
BizWest editor and publisher Chris Wood spoke with KUNC's Michael Lyle on Monday about a regional effort to consider raising wages in some Boulder County municipalities.
"Communities including Boulder, Longmont, Lafayette, Louisville and Erie have formed a consortium to take a regional approach," said Wood. "They believe that raising the minimum wage in one community affects the entire region. They also believe that a regional approach would provide some consistency to employees and employers who might have operations in multiple locations."
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Wood also said those municipalities have announced a series of engagement sessions to hear from different constituencies, including local consumers and business leaders.
"They say that regional collaboration is not a commitment to raise the minimum wage, but recognition that any decision will affect all communities," said Wood. "So they'll take the information they gather from these engagement sessions and decide how to move forward."
If the effort were to approve a minimum wage increase, those changes wouldn't go into effect until Jan. 1, 2025.
