BOULDER — There won’t be any free cut-your-own Christmas trees in Boulder this year.
The city is calling off a 4- year-old program that invited people to chop trees on city- owned open space. Boulder officials said the Christmas tree invite has been canceled because of budget cuts and because the open-space forest is sufficiently thinned.
City officials say they don’t have $4,000 to spend on staffers to guide the usual 1,000 tree-seekers atop Flagstaff Mountain.
Steve Mertz, a spokesman for Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks Department, told the Daily Camera newspaper that the mountain’s tree reserve is tapped out.
“Part of the reason we do this is for fire mitigation and to stop the spread of pine beetles,” he said. “But the area we have been working in for years is kind of out of trees.”
Boulder residents who had made the tree-cutting a holiday tradition were saddened by the news. Some had taken to gathering on Flagstaff Road after the cutting for carols and hot chocolate.
“It really added to the whole festive feeling of Christmas,” resident Durango Steele told the newspaper.
Mertz said the funding cut comes because of low sales-tax receipts. The city’s open-space program relies heavily on sales taxes for funding. Boulder sales-tax collections were down 7.5 percent in August, the most recent month with available data. It was the 12th consecutive month of declining revenue for the city.
“We are 97 percent tax- based,” Mertz said. “So when that goes down, we take a larger hit than other government agencies.”
Melissa Fernandez Reed of Boulder said she and her husband have taken their 3-year- old son to get a Christmas tree for two years now.
“That makes me so sad,” she said of the cancellation.
