Broomfield

Broomfield’s name likely comes from broomcorn, a sorghum crop grown here by early farmers and used to make actual brooms, though the exact story isn’t fully documented. A post office opened here in 1884, but the town most people would recognize today started in 1955, when the Turnpike Land Company began developing a planned community along the brand-new Denver-Boulder Turnpike, now US 36. The city incorporated in 1961.

How a city became its own county

As Broomfield grew, it annexed land in four different counties, Adams, Boulder, Jefferson and Weld, which meant residents on different blocks answered to different county governments for schools, courts, and services. Colorado voters approved a constitutional amendment in 1998 to fix that by letting Broomfield consolidate into a single city-county. After a three-year transition, the City and County of Broomfield officially took effect on November 15, 2001, making it Colorado’s 64th county, the newest and, by land area, the smallest.

A real tech corridor, and the Rocky Flats question

Broomfield sits on the US 36 corridor between Denver and Boulder, sometimes called Colorado’s own tech corridor, and it has real employers to back that up: Oracle, Intermountain Health Care, BAE Systems, which absorbed Ball Aerospace’s former headquarters here in 2024, Vail Resorts’ corporate offices, and Crocs. FlatIron Crossing, a 1.47-million-square-foot mall that opened in 2000, is mid-redevelopment now, with a roughly $400 million mixed-use and entertainment district under construction.

I want to address something directly, because I’d rather you hear it from me than find it later. Broomfield’s old water source, Great Western Reservoir, sits next to the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, which operated from 1952 to 1989 and made plutonium triggers for nuclear warheads. Contamination was found in the reservoir in 1973, and after a 1989 federal raid on the plant, Broomfield immediately switched its drinking water to Denver Water and hasn’t used that reservoir for drinking water since. Rocky Flats is now a national wildlife refuge, and state health officials say soil testing shows low radiation risk on the publicly accessible trails. That said, it’s not a settled argument: advocacy groups have sued over a planned regional trail through the refuge as recently as 2025, worried that disturbing the soil could resuspend contamination, and some studies of former plant workers found elevated cancer risk. I’m not going to tell you there’s nothing to it, and I’m not going to tell you it’s dangerous to live in Broomfield today. I’ll tell you what I know and let you decide for yourself, especially if you’re looking at something in the northwest part of the city near the refuge.