by Mark Smiley | Oct 24, 2018 | Editorials
Penfield Tate
In spring of 2011, the citizens of Denver in their infinite wisdom decided to elect the unintelligent but gregarious Michael Hancock who as The Denver Post stated, had a “feel good story” rising from poverty to become the plaything of Green Valley Ranch developer Pat Hamill who owns Hancock lock, stock, and barrel along with his fellow crony capitalists at Colorado Concern. Of course The Denver Post never revealed who was actually running Hancock as it had become, as the only major paper in the city, as corrupt as the city government itself.
Hancock barely made the 2011 runoff beating out James Mejia by only 1,491 votes for the last spot behind first round leader Chris Roemer. Just think only 1,491 votes and the race would have been between two highly qualified and experienced candidates either of whom would have run Denver a multitude of times better than Hancock. For the last eight years high density developers and the Brownstein law firm have run and raped the city for fun and profit while Hancock has spent his time working out in gyms and chasing skirts.
Four years ago everyone realized what an awful mayor Hancock was but no credible candidate arose to run against him due in large part to the massive fundraising advantage Hancock had over anyone who would run against him. For a while it looked like 2015 would repeat itself with Hancock running essentially unopposed.
But over the last 30 days two highly credible candidates, Penfield Tate and Lisa Calderon, have thrown their hats into the ring for office of mayor of the City and County of Denver which will give Denver real choices.
Penfield Tate III is 62-years-old and an attorney with the national law
Lisa Calderon
firm of Kutak Rock. He was a state representative from 1997 to 2001 and state senator from 2002 to 2003. He represented northeast Denver which is the base of power for Mayor Hancock. He knows what he is up against having run for mayor in 2002, getting beaten out by John Hickenlooper.
He correctly points out how the rapid growth of Denver has been grossly mismanaged by the Hancock administration. The last eight years with all the wealth pouring into the city should have been Denver’s Golden Age, instead it’s been an unmitigated disaster for everyone but developers.
Tate has declared: “Development is out of sync with neighborhoods, disrupting the quality of neighborhoods. It’s imperiling open space and having an impact on parks. It’s driving gentrification. It’s impacting small businesses that are . . . getting driven out of neighborhoods. It is impacting affordable housing.” We could not have articulated some of the major problems of the Hancock administration better.
Lisa Calderon is a longtime community activist from north Denver and presently the co-chair of the Colorado Latino Forum — Denver chapter. Her parents were an African-American and a Latino. She has a law degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as a doctorate in education from CU Denver.
She has been a advocate against the treatment of prisoners at the Denver jail. She has held rallies against Michael Hancock’s harassment of and lying about his relationship with Denver Police Detective Leslie Branch Wise. She recently sued the City and County of Denver for canceling a contract to run a re-entry program for former inmates based on, she alleges, her criticism of the mayor and his harassment of Leslie Branch Wise.
She believes that the city is at a critical juncture: “So, I kept waiting for the candidate to emerge that I would support, who represented my values and my concerns about affordable housing and women’s issues, and concerns about the cultural preservation in our city. And I realized, I was waiting for me.”
Her platform centers around affordable housing, “resident-led” development, decentralizing the mayor’s office, and women and workers.
When asked how affordable housing and “resident-led” development mesh she stated:”We need to look at what does each community need in their neighborhood,” she said. “I can tell you right now I don’t need a big behemoth building shadowing over all of the other units, but there is a way to build for density that still takes into account community.”
She went on to note: “There are ways to do density that really centers a community in it, rather than a developer’s idea about cramming so many people in there.”
Eighteenth century diplomat and philosopher Joseph de Maitre declared that “in a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.” It is hard to fathom that anybody deserves a sexual predator and corrupt mayor like Michael Hancock, but we will find out next spring. Hancock has raised $700,000 from the worst of the worst in Denver, but no amount of money can scrub clean the permanent stains he has made across the city. We will have a choice next year in Denver and it can only be hoped that we choose wisely.
by Mark Smiley | Oct 2, 2018 | Editorials
The inaugural Grandoozy music festival had a reported attendance of 55,000 over the extended weekend.
The inaugural Grandoozy Music Festival was held over the extended weekend of September 14-16, 2018, at the Overland Golf Course off of Santa Fe Drive in southwest Denver. Why at Overland Park Golf Course? At first it would seem a strange choice. With virtually no on-site parking the golf course site is stuck between the extremely busy Santa Fe Drive on one side and a raft of homes on the other. The lack of on-site parking necessitated free shuttles from far away parking lots with the vain hope people would hike in from the nearest, not so convenient light rail station.
As part of the June 2017 presentation for City Council approval of the event on public land a bullet point was the that the organizer, Superfly Productions, negotiate with RTD to include public transportation as part of the $270 event ticket. But Superfly Productions apparently was uninterested in paying anyone for anything. RTD offered additional cars for the extended weekend and requested from Superfly $72,000 to cover the additional service, security and personal costs and when Superfly said no RTD dropped it down to $33,000. But the production company was still uninterested, and no additional service was added for the event for public convenience.
Stevie Wonder performed during the final night of the 2018 Grandoozy music festival.
The RTD kerfuffle was emblematic of why Superfly was at Overland Park Golf Course in the first place and not at the many different existing concert venues in the area such as Fiddler’s Green, Mile High Stadium or Red Rocks. Superfly had come to Denver to take every last penny it could beg, borrow or steal from the community. The existing venues cost real money while Overland Park Golf Course is on public land and could be obtained for a fraction of the cost. The City and County of Denver under Michael Hancock is trying to get rid of, or alternatively monetize, every possible inch of open space under its control.
Superfly could get everything it wanted for a relative song from the mayor’s office and the always compliant Denver City Council. In turn, the production company brought in a hodgepodge lineup which was far skimpier than almost any other marque event it holds. Headliners being Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar and Florence + the Machine, all of which have performed in Denver before. The gaps were filled with numerous local acts Superfly could get to perform at the Festival on the cheap.
The Denver golf community and the Overland Park neighborhood vociferously opposed the event which has partially destroyed the oldest golf course west of the Mississippi. But as one insider noted: “Those groups are composed of old white people who the city is hoping to drive out as fast as possible. No one is going to pay any attention to them.” She was right. The City Council blew right past them with hardly an acknowledgment at the June 17 meeting.
So how was the three-day festival? Depends on who you ask. For the neighbors and the golfers it was a disaster, but that was expected from them. For many festival concertgoers the event was okay, but lacked the big names they had expected. They are hoping in future years Superfly will spend the money it takes to bring them better lineups. Don’t count on it.
But for Superfly Productions, Stevie Wonder’s greatest hit “Isn’t She Lovely,” best summed up the event. They made a killing. Good crowds at top dollar prices and very low overhead. Nineteenth century con man Soapy Smith found that Denver was a perfect place to pull off his many scams with a rube seeming to be waiting on every street corner. In Michael Hancock’s Denver not much has changed. If you are unscrupulous enough and have access to the powers that be in Denver government, there are fortunes to be made in the Queen City on the Plains.
by Mark Smiley | Aug 24, 2018 | Editorials
In 2002 Denver went to great lengths and time to compile Blueprint Denver to guide future growth in Denver. It envisioned “areas of change” and “areas of stability.” In areas of change rezoning for more density and height would be envisioned while in areas of stability, like many of the city’s highly prized neighborhoods, rezoning would not be permitted for other than single family homes. It also envisioned high-density around the many new light rail stations where, because of that public transportation, residents would not need a car, at least in theory.
The problem was Denver’s crooked high-density developers had not yet bought their very own mayor in 2002. Developers do not want to put high-density upscale apartments and condominiums in lousy neighborhoods that were considered areas of change. Nor did they want the expensive units they were building by the light rail stations which were not the fav of people who could afford to buy the upscale units … The developers could make a great deal more money by exploiting and raping the traditional highly prized areas including Country Club, Crestmoor, Virginia Vale, Cherry Creek North, etc.
In 2011 the high-density developers like Pat Hamill found the extraordinarily horny and intellectually vapid Michael Hancock and installed him in City Hall as the 45th Mayor of the City and County of Denver.
But when developers got rezoning they wanted in violation of Blueprint Denver through the Orwellian named Denver Community Planning and Development headed by the clinically obese rancher Brad Buchanan as Executive Director and the obsequious City Council they were subject to lawsuits. And sued they were over Crestmoor Park, Cherry Creek North, Hentzell Park, Denver Highlands, etc. etc. None of the lawsuits were successful because you can’t as a practical matter sue City Hall on development matters even if you have a valid claim for some unwritten rule of Denver municipal politics.
The problem was the well-grounded suits took time and money out of the developers’ pockets and who knows, one of these days the citizens might find an honest District Court judge in the City and County who would rule in their favor.
What to do? Well, change Blueprint Denver to squash any legal basis stopping high-density developers from doing whatever they want to do in wide-open Denver.
Well, of course, you can’t tell the sucker citizens that is what you are doing so you pretend you went out and sought public input from thousands of citizens or as Sarah Showalter, Citywide Planning Supervisor noted, numerous think tank meetings, 
21 task force meetings, 25 street team events, eight community workshops, and over 8,500 contacted.
What did all these people indicate they wanted? Well, of course, their neighborhoods destroyed with high-density development while making driving in Denver the equivalent to transporting down the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
When politicians and city bureaucrats in Denver say they consulted thousands and thousands of people, they mean they are going to do whatever developers like Pat Hamill and his cronies at Colorado Concern tell them to do.
On August 28 at City Park Pavilion at 5:30 p.m. your betters will share with you the details of what they are going to do to you, your family and your city. The slogan for Denveright is “Your Voice. Our Future.” Rest assured your voice is irrelevant to the politicians and planners in Denver.
We could tell you all the awful things they are planning to do to you under the wonderful sounding rubrics like “affordable housing” and “pedestrian friendly transportation,” but why bother? You won’t be able to do anything about it anyway.
As the early Greek historian Thucydides stated: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The high-density developers and the politicians they own are the “strong” in the City and County of Denver while the citizens of the city like you are the “weak.” We have watched the suffering of our neighborhoods ever since Hancock became mayor and the suffering will continue for the foreseeable future and get much, much worse under Denveright.
As you can’t do anything about it, just sit back and accept it. Be as happy as you can and pretend “your voice” in fact matters at all in determining “our future.” As it turns out ignorance is in fact bliss in today’s City and County of Denver.
Pat Hamill
Mayor Michael Hancock
by Mark Smiley | Jul 20, 2018 | Editorials
Jolon Clark
Never in the 160-year history of the City of Denver has its governmental coffers been so bountifully filled as they are today. The extraordinary rise in property values have brought in untold millions of dollars in real property taxes even if it is breaking the back of small business in the city. [See Chronicle p. 1, July 2018.] Sales tax revenue is also skyrocketing and the myriad taxes on marijuana is a bonanza for the city. As for copious amounts of funds for capital projects the city’s voters approved an almost $10 billion in bonds. The original goal for bond proceeds was much smaller but grew and grew as optimism skyrocketed about the state of the city’s economy.
The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce is gathering signatures for a statewide ballot to increase the state’s sales tax by 2.9 percent or 29 cents per $10 purchase for roads and transportation projects. Since Denver will be the largest contributor to the funding it can be expected to garner the lion’s share of the proceeds for projects it is interested in.
What is a little surprising is that, notwithstanding this mountain of cash, Denver appears to be ignoring various standard expenditures. One would perhaps not be shocked to find out, according to City Councilman Jolon Clark, that Denver Parks and Recreation has a $127 million deferred maintenance backlog. Mayor Hancock and the developers who own him see open space and parks as future apartment house and affordability sites. Why bother to maintain them when in the natural course of business in Denver they will be cemented over, turned into drainage ponds and/or monetized as concert venues and the like.
Nonetheless, Councilman Clark has proposed, and the City Council approved by a 12 to 1 margin, a dedicated parks sales tax of 0.25 percent or 2.5 cents per $10 purchase for park maintenance and acquisition of new or replacement parks. That would produce approximately $46 million next year. Given how fast the City Council is destroying parks and open space in the city, the $46 million would appear modest. The only person voting no was Albus Brooks who instead wants to turn all of the city’s sidewalks into runways for some reason known only to the mayor’s developer friends who want to make him the next mayor of Denver after Hancock retires in 2022.
Clark has noted that the remaining green space in the city “has become too crowded.” A good point since Denver has gone from one of the leading American cities in parks and open space per capita to one of the worst in only a couple of decades.
Kendra Black
This caused Councilwoman Kendra Black, affectionately known as “the dumbest person in America with a master’s degree,” to declare, “There’s definitely a need for this.”
It was left to Councilman Kevin Flynn to point out that what will happen is that the city will simply cut back park maintenance to almost nothing and let the dedicated park fund pay for it all. In effect the dedicated parks tax will become just another feeder to the general fund. Others have noted the Mayor, and his cronies, will use the fund to purchase virtually worthless land that no one wants, even the scummiest developers, from the highly connected. That inescapable logic caused Councilman Flynn to propose a successful amendment that the Council hold public hearings and take votes on five-year plans for the spending of the money. This way the crooks who run the city will have to grease not only the mayor but also individual councilmembers.
Others are gathering signatures for dedicated sales taxes for a myriad other good causes including, but not limited to, mental health and substance abuse treatment; college scholarships; and healthy food programs.
We say yes to all the sales tax initiative that make the ballot in Denver. All the money will eventually end up in the back pockets of CRL Associates, Norm of Arabia, the mayor’s favorite developers and other politically connected individuals. But the public does not appear to appreciate the fact that the mayor spends all his time working out and chasing skirts while the City Council does virtually nothing. Shouldn’t the people who run the city and do all the work be handsomely rewarded for their endeavors? We say yes and thus the voters must approve sales tax hikes for one and all. We are confident, based on past performance, that the Denver voters will do the right thing and vote yes on any and all tax hikes that make the ballot, no matter the purported purpose.
— Editorial Board
by Mark Smiley | Jun 24, 2018 | Editorials
Plato
In the 4th century BC, Plato wrote the highly influential treatise The Republic. Plato was no fan of democracy — either direct democracy where every eligible citizen would have the opportunity to vote on legislation or representative democracy where eligible citizens would vote on representatives who would in turn vote on legislation. He postulated that the best system would involve rule by “philosopher kings.”
He envisioned that a special class of people be given a specific education, available to few, which would include men and women as philosopher kings and queens. Out of this collective elite only the most virtuous and capable would become rulers. They would live simply and rule benevolently for the common good.
While his treatise has been widely read and praised for over two millennium no one has actually sought to institute rule by “philosopher kings,” at least until now. Here in Colorado we have begun to adopt a form of rule by philosopher kings that would have thrilled Plato.
Federal District Court judges in many ways resemble Plato’s ideal. They have a very specialized education (law) that is available to only a few. They live simply as federal court judges presently make only $169,300 annually. Like kings they are appointed for a life tenure. Among this class of philosophers (i.e. lawyers) federal district court judges are chosen by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the US Senate for their purported knowledge and virtuousness.
In Colorado we have seven regular philosopher kings (with one present vacancy) and five senior philosopher kings. They are almost evenly divided among Democrats and Republicans and include both men and women as desired by Plato.
To placate the Colorado masses, we have both pretend direct and pretend representative democracy but that is largely window dressing. Any time the masses do something egregiously stupid any of our philosopher kings can change it for the good of all of us.
Back in 2006 the Colorado hoi polloi in their atavistic ignorance and bigotry voted to have “their” state constitution define marriage as union of a “man” and a “woman.” Luckily philosopher king Judge Raymond P. Moore struck down that ridiculous bit of direct democracy as his legal wisdom was recognized as being correct in the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Obergefell v. Hodges.
Do not think that a dutiful philosopher king like Raymond Moore bothers himself with simply hotly contested issues. Recently in the case of Holland v. Williams he went after another bit of voter approved idiocy concerning campaign state finance reforms. In his wit and wisdom Moore decided he didn’t like the fact that private attorney generals (everyday citizens) could just bring claims against candidates or their campaigns without the claims being vetted by someone so he struck that provision down as unconstitutional.
It was the perfect case for a modern philosopher king where the plaintiff, Tammy Holland, and the defendant, Secretary of State Wayne Williams, both adamantly disliked the campaign finance laws in Colorado and so neither argued for it. Moore refused other parties who do support the campaign finance laws from entering into the case. What is so cool about the case is that since both plaintiff and defendant don’t like the law neither will appeal Moore’s decision to the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit so that Moore’s ruling can’t and will not be reviewed by anyone.
The best thing about being a ph
Judge Moore
ilosopher king like Moore is you can be as lazy as you want to be at times. Moore was too special to say how you vet the campaign finance complaints, just somebody should do it.
Secretary of State Wayne Williams is widely viewed as an establishment Republican hack who protects at any cost other establishment Republicans like Bob Beauprez and Walker Stapleton. He has now declared that he will simply do all the vetting of any complaints himself. Obviously, the voters of Colorado did not want politicians like Williams being the gatekeeper, but who cares what the voters want. The philosopher king can’t be bothered to decide and in in his absence the politically avarice Williams fills the void.
Other Colorado federal judge philosopher kings have also been active in their benevolent rule. In order to be placed on the primary ballot in Colorado, Colorado statutes provide one of the ways to obtain a sufficient number of signatures is to have petition gatherers who are Colorado residents. Six-term Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn could not be bothered with getting Colorado residents for petition gatherers and he was in danger of not making the ballot. First, he went to state court and lost all the way up, including the Colorado Supreme Court.
Luckily Federal District Court Ju
Judge Brimmer
dge Phillip Brimmer somehow decided that having Colorado residents collect signatures was a stupid idea that he didn’t like so voilá, he declared it unconstitutional and the Republican Congressman was back on the ballot.
Federal District Court Judge William J. Martinez recently decided he didn’t like parts of Amendment 41 which made it harder to change the state constitution by voters. He simply found significant portions of the constitution amendment to be unconstitutional.
These are but a few of many wonderful decisions by Colorado’s federal district court judges that make it clear dem
Judge Martinez
ocracy is largely a thing of the past here in Colorado.
Mark Twain sagaciously declared: “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” We here in Colorado can vote and approve directly or through the legislative process anything we want, but it really doesn’t matter. We have evolved into a form of Plato’s ideal of rule by philosopher kings. Hopefully our experiment will continually be improved upon and we can dispense with the cost and annoyance of the pretend direct and representative democracy. We can then just directly petition our philosopher king federal district court judges to direct all aspects of our lives. It has taken almost 2,500 years to recognize that we need to live under the rule of philosopher kings as outlined by Plato but we here in Colorado have finally gotten it right and it will only get better and better over time.
by Mark Smiley | May 25, 2018 | Editorials
The Colorado primary season will come to a dramatic conclusion on the evening of June 26, 2018. It has already been a topsy turvy primary season. The leading Republican candidate for governor, Walker Stapleton, had to abandon his petition drive after already submitting his petitions to the Secretary of State for fear that a large number of the signatures would be thrown out for using unqualified petition gatherers. Instead he went the Assembly route and only beat second place fi
Kent Thiry
nisher Greg Lopez, whose only claim to fame was being the young Mayor of Parker 30 years ago, by less than 10 points. Lopez was virtually an unknown individual at the beginning of the process. Lopez does not have any personal wealth and raised little or no money prior to the State Assembly, but he traveled all 64 counties of Colorado and gave a rousing speech at the Assembly.
In addition, six-term Congressman Doug Lamborn of El Paso County was thrown off the ballot by the Colorado Supreme Court for ineligible petition gatherers, only to have that decision overturned by Federal District Court Judge Philip A. Brimmer.
Karen Kataline
On the Democratic side the three gubernatorial candidates — Jared Polis, Cary Kennedy and Mike Johnston — have raised and/or personally contributed record breaking amounts of money for their campaigns. Johnston hit a fountain of cash from anti-gun Bloomberg groups while Kennedy is being generously funded by Colorado’s public employee unions. Polis is perhaps the richest man ever to run for Colorado governor and is strongly backed by Bernie Sanders progressives.
The Democratic National Congressional Committee (DNCC) has recruited moderate “blue dog” candidates across the country in an attempt to win back the House from the Republicans. The DNCC has even run smear campaigns in Texas and other states against Bernie Sanders progressives in favor of their establishment candidates. In Colorado, progressive Levi Tillemann, a candidate for the Sixth Congressional District now held by Republican Mike Coffman, recorded Steny Hoyer, the second in command for Congressional Democrats, demanding he withdraw his candidacy in favor of DNCC candidate Jason Crowe, a lawyer who doesn’t even live in District Six.
But all of that brouhaha will be nothing compared to election night when who will take the primaries for the respective parties is absolutely unknown. This conundrum is due to three factors. First is Proposition 108, approved by the voters by a close margin in 2016. It provides that unaffiliated voters will get both a Democratic and a Republican ballot and they can choose one or the other. Prop 108 was the brainchild of disreputable and sleazy businessman Kent Thiry who spent millions to get it passed and desperately wanted to be Colorado’s governor in 2018. Thiry knows that the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with him but he had calculated that a highly diluted Republican Party, with the help of unaffiliated voters, could be persuaded to make him its candidate if he spent enough money. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. Thiry’s cutthroat and unprincipled business tactics in running DaVita, a kidney dialysis company, were devastatingly exposed by television comedian John Oliver in a segment of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO.
While Thiry’s political ambitions lay in tatters at least for 2018, the state’s voters are left with Proposition 108. Its intent was to allow middle of the road moderates, particularly Republicans, to prevail in primaries. Will it have that effect, no one knows. It will allow one party to play in the other’s primary. On the Republican side so-called “strategic voting” has become all the rage for the upcoming primary. Operation Chaos Colorado has been promoted by radio show host Karen Kataline who is urging Republicans to unaffiliate, get both ballots and vote for the weakest Democratic candidates. For example, most Republican strategists believe Jared Polis would be a far weaker candidate than Cary Kennedy in the day of the #MeToo Movement. Kataline points out that the Democrats have been playing this game for a long time, as demonstrated by the financial and other support that Democrats gave to Dan Maes in 2010, over a much more electable Scott McInnis.
Prop 108, in combination with the all mail-in ballot election, makes it almost impossible to determine who will vote and in what primary. Moreover, establishment candidates of both parties once had an enormous advantage due to the fact that The Denver Post seldom promoted or even covered lesser known candidates. The slow demise of The Denver Post, which no longer even has an editorial opinion writer, means that the lesser known candidates may have a greater chance of winning than ever before.
So get the popcorn out and watch the results roll in on the night of June 26. There may be some amazing upsets.
