The city has been pursuing municipalization since the voters authorized it in 2010. Over the course of that decade, the city has spent $25 million on outside lawyers, engineers, and other professionals fighting Xcel in court and before the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. That doesn’t include nearly $5 million in internal costs of Boulder city staff. The voters authorized $29 million in special taxes to pay for the municipalization litigation, with only $4 million left in the warchest. To put that remaining amount in perspective, Boulder spent more than $5 million on municipalization litigation last year, and will spend $4 million more this year. So, if we were to keep going, we’d probably be out of money in the next year or so, and the city would have to go back to the voters and ask them for more tax funds to pay for the continued litigation.
Of course, those millions for litigation do not include the estimated $300 to $400 million (on the low side) that a municipal utility would cost to start up. The city is still doing the engineering work to figure out how to separate the Xcel electric network from that proportion of the network that the city wants to buy. The amount of just the network separation cost alone has mushroomed from an estimated $10 million in 2016, to $110 million in 2018, to a predicted $180 million today. That doesn’t include the cost of actually buying the network assets themselves.
As far as timing, the city has completed the legal work with the Public Utilities Commission, but has not yet moved forward with the condemnation lawsuit or the legal proceedings before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Using a baseball analogy, Boulder is on first base, with a long way to go to get home.