The Denver City Attorney’s Office is an enormous operation employing over 100 attorneys and hundreds of paralegals and staff personnel. It not only advises the Mayor and all City Department agencies as well as the City Council but also the City Auditor. It also represents and defends the City in all legal matters including initiating and defending lawsuits.
In recent years the job of City Attorney, which is considered a great political plum, has attracted the good, the bad and the ugly. Cole Finegan broke the record for hutzpah in office by claiming that the City Attorney position was not really a full-time job and so he became City Attorney and Chief of Staff simultaneously for then Mayor John Hickenlooper. His successor Larry Manzanares committed suicide after being charged with stealing a government computer and putting pornography on it.
In 2014 Mayor Hancock appointed 34-year-old Scott Martinez to the position. We noted that he had little or no qualifications for the job and the people who knew him called him a “legal lightweight” and “a political hack.” His appointment was apparently due to political pressure put on the Mayor by the Colorado Latino Forum which claimed, probably validly, that Hancock had appointed very few Hispanics to important positions in his administration.
For pointing out Martinez’s lack of qualifications we received a scalding, if not unintentionally hilarious letter, from the Board of Directors of the Colorado Latino Forum Denver Chapter accusing the Chronicle of all types of political incorrectness including racism, ageism and anti-nativism.
Since our story wherein we criticized Mr. Martinez concerned Hentzell Park, the Board of the Colorado Latino Forum Denver Chapter for good measure also severely castigated those individuals and neighborhood groups opposing the park being traded away for development. The Board specifically excoriated the everyday citizens for failing “to ask permission of those tribes that have historical claim to the land, the C
heyenne and Arapaho Nations, and explain how their homeland will be used for the good of the people.” Ostensibly any person challenging any land use decision or rezoning in the City and County Denver would be subject to the same criticism. Wow, as if opposing the entire city bureaucracy and the all-powerful real estate developers isn’t bad enough.
The Board then went on to declare that they were standing up for Mr. Martinez and others like him who they knew have “earned their leadership positions” and that they would take their “rightful places in history.” The Board extensively publicized its letter throughout the Internet.
Well Mr. Martinez has taken his “rightful place in history” after being forced to resign in disgrace after two and half disastrous years as City Attorney. He is under criminal investigation by the District Attorney for destroying his letter terminating Assistant City Attorney Stuart Shapiro that was being sought by investigative reporter Brian Maass of Channel 4 News pursuant to a Colorado Open Records Act request.
Related thereto the Denver City Council has just approved paying Mr. Shapiro a $660,000 settlement of claims that he was “scapegoated by higher ups” (read Scott Martinez and his deputies) regarding his suspension for his apparent unethical actions during the investigation of the Sheriff’s Deputies abuse of Jamal Hunter, who the city paid $3.25 million. No one appears to doubt that Shapiro engaged in unethical conduct as highlighted by Federal Judge John Kane, but instead it appears he did so so on the instructions of Scott Martinez and his deputies.
Why that entitles Shapiro to $660,000 of the taxpayers’ money is a little unclear, but as the headline to the lead Denver Post editorial declared, “Something stinks about Denver’s Shapiro settlement.” Thanks to an obsequious and secretive Denver City Council we will, in fact, probably never find out what really happened.
We, along with neighborhood groups like Friends of Hentzell Park, are anxiously awaiting the heartfelt apology to us from the entire Board of the Colorado Latino Forum Denver Chapter acknowledging that we were correct and they were wrong about Mr. Martinez’s fitness to be City Attorney, but somehow we get the feeling it will never come.
So out with the incompetent and apparently ethically challenged City Attorney Scott Martinez and in with the new one Kristin M. Bronson from the national law firm Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie, LLP. She too is a virtually unknown and by all appearances is not much more than a mediocre attorney stuck in a huge firm with little or no qualifications for municipal legal work, but her predecessor had a similar background.
How did our esteemed mayor find her? That is easy — he didn’t. She was found by Pat Hamill and/or his real estate development buddies who knew her from the fact that a significant part of her legal work, according to her law firm’s website, was representing “lender, developer and property management clients in all facets of real estate, construction, and banking law.” No reason for the mayor to kowtow to the Colorado Latino Forum any longer when the real estate developers can have their gal put in place who will undoubtedly “do as instructed.”
Will she be as inept, incompetent and ethically challenged as Scott Martinez? We doubt it, but that is a very low bar to hurdle. Will she represent the interests and concerns of the citizens of the City and County of Denver? You have got to be kidding. She knows who got her appointed — real estate developers — and that is who will give the necessary marching orders.
So, the beat goes on in Mayor Michael Hancock’s Mile High City.
— Editorial Board
