For the last eight-plus years the Denver City Council served no earthly purpose whatsoever. Thirteen individual council members drew six figure salaries, had gold plated health insurance and pension plans, along with expensive office space and assistants, but did absolutely nothing in return other than rubber stamp everything that a figure head Mayor and the high density developers who controlled him, put before them.
Citizens by the scores appeared before the City Council to beg them for relief from the depravations of the merciless business cartels such as the CEO driven and Orwellian named “Colorado Concern” and the rapacious “Downtown Denver Partnership” but to no avail. The City Council even decided, with the Mayor’s support, to essentially legalize (subject to state approval) heroin sales to all, including children, under the rubric of caring “safe injection sites.”
On the night of the second City Council meeting since the 2019 Spring municipal election there was nothing on the agenda which would cause the Mayor and his staff to expect anything but the normal supine behavior from the City Council that they had so long enjoyed. But on that night, however, newly-elected City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca arose to object to utterly mundane contracts to two outside contractors who run halfway houses for approximately 500 convicts in the city. The money for the contracts was not even from Denver, but rather the State. CdeBaca objected to the contracts on the grounds that the contracts were with companies whose parent entities provided detention facilities for ICE, and the fact that she did not like for-profit companies making money off doing services which are normally performed by government.
She stated she did not expect support from a single other councilperson. To the shock of one and all, a majority of the Council supported her, and the contracts were canceled. The cancellations shook the political insider world of Denver. If a run-of-the-mill, non-controversial contract could be cancelled at the whim of a single councilperson, how safe are the literally hundreds of workie-workie contracts of the Mayor’s friends and city lobbyists? Is anybody’s piece of the municipal corporate gravy train safe?
After that meeting came the equally shocking proposal by Council President Jolon Clark of a $43 million carbon tax on businesses to fund, inter alia, a city climate change office. Clark and his six Council co-sponsors are a majority on the 13-person Council. The Mayor and his lackies at the bought-off Denver Post, howled. How dare Clark act as if the City Council was a democratically elected legislative body. Notwithstanding the protestations, the Finance and Governance Committee approved passing on the proposals to the full Council by a 4 to 3 margin with CdeBaca, Hines, Gilmore and Clark voting in favor and holdovers, Ortega, Kniech and Black voting against.
As a practical matter we don’t support either the cancellations of the halfway house contracts or the carbon tax on businesses, the latter of which has to be approved by the voters even if passed at the Council level. But far more important to us than the actual merits of these actions is the fact that a majority of the City Council are no longer willing to act as a doormat for a corrupt Mayor and his backers. We are hoping that the new majority will also oppose the rape of Park Hill Golf Course by Westside Investments, LLC., and the destruction of the Elyria and Swansea neighborhoods by the ill-conceived and unbelievably corrupt I-70 expansion, along with hundreds of other projects designed to destroy what was once a truly beautiful city and its neighborhoods.
Is it possible that representative democracy is returning to the Mile-High City at long last? We certainly hope so.
- Editorial Board