Monaco Inn
Mad Peaches
Gaylord Rockies Christmas Festivities Run Through January 5
Three Million Christmas Lights Decorate The Resort With Activities For The Entire Family
by Mark Smiley
Many families travel during the holiday season but holiday break is longer than most travel plans allow. If you are looking for something to do with the kids that is close to home, consider Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center near Denver International Airport.
Gaylord Rockies launched its first Gaylord Christmas in November and the festivities run until January 5, 2020. The resort and convention center is complete with a Mistletoe Village that includes Santa Claus, storytime and cookies with Mrs. Claus, gingerbread decorating, Build a Bear Workshop, and ICE! featuring Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Walk through a winter wonderland carved from more than two million pounds of colorful ice.
The decorations throughout the resort make for a festive atmosphere and in addition to the Mistletoe Village, there is plenty to do outdoors as well. Weather permitting, the lazy river and hot tub are open but as always, the indoor pool and water slides are operational.
And, more than three million Christmas lights surround every bend of the resort. Guests can ice tube, ice skate, and slide around in the bumper boats on ice. And, the resort offers free s’mores to roast on the outdoor patio.
Guests can also book reservations for Rudolph’s Holly Jolly Breakfast complete with character visits and photo opportunities, a Naughty or Nice escape room, and a scavenger hunt. And the usual hotel amenities are available year-round including the spa, restaurants, and a full-service concierge.
Tickets are also available for Cirque Dreams Holidaze which is an in-the-round theatrical experience including the world’s best acts and dazzling costumes featuring aerialists along with singers and dancers. This 75-minute Broadway musical and new cirque adventure is performed on stage and in the air by toy soldiers, snowmen, penguins, reindeer, gingerbread men, Santa and holiday characters imagined by Broadway director and Cirque Dreams founder, Neil Goldberg.
The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer theme of 2019-2020 will rotate to one of the other four Gaylord properties next year so look for a new theme at Gaylord Rockies next season.
The Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center is located at 6700 North Gaylord Rockies Boulevard. For more information about the resort or to make a reservation, visit www.gaylordrockies.com.
Cycle Lane Lunacy? B-Cycle Is Shutting Down
Public Works Scrambles To Find A Substitute; The City Is Also Ending Its Electric Scooter Program
by Glen Richardson
Despite a 2020 Denver bike lane budget of $11 million, another $4 million for bike safety plus $3 million for “high-comfort” bike lanes on 18th and 19th Streets, Denver B-Cycle is shutting down on January 30, 2020, and won’t be replaced any time soon.
The company’s exit from Denver will take 737 publicly available bikes off the street at the end of this month.
Moreover, the city is also ending its electric scooter permit program and hoping to replace it with a system where scooter and shared bike providers will compete for a city contract.
Bid Peddling
Denver Public Works is now in the process of looking for a new company to operate bike and scooter services through a competitive bidding process that isn’t expected to be completed until the middle of this year. That means months are likely to pass between the end of B-cycle availability and the debut of a new system.
Amid competition from electric scooter and bike companies, dwindling ridership and shallow revenues — the city peddled 5,280 annual bike-share passes for free to incentivize biking instead of driving —many are questioning if the B-cycle era can make a comeback.
City government has helped fund the bike-share system but did not operate it, and it will not run one in the future, according to Mike Strott, a spokesman for the Mayor’s Office. In the first six months of Denver’s sanctioned dockless transport program, six e-bike and e-scooter companies combined to average about 5,100 trips a day.
Cost Cutting
By issuing a request for proposals from private bike-share and scooter-share companies to operate in Denver, Public Works hopes the system will be less costly. The contracts will replace the permitting system that has allowed companies like Lime and Jump to operate.
The competitive bidding process “will help Denver better manage and coordinate the delivery of these commercial operations and help ensure the city partners with the most qualified operator(s) to further its mobility goals,” according to a DPW statement. A decision on who will operate the program(s) won’t be made until at least this summer, Pubic Works admits.
But even if Public Works is able to get a new company or companies by this summer, getting a new bike share system up and running could take several more months. That, many observers including bikers, worry will make the delay even more lengthy. Upshot: Such a wide gap in service is likely to push B-cycle users into buying cars. Moreover, many families used B-cycle so they would only need one car.
Dated System
Denver’s B-cycle bikes and docking stations needed to be replaced. Many dated to when the system was launched in 2010, according to Mike Pletsch, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing, the nonprofit that runs B-cycle. But the organization doesn’t have the money to replace the equipment or renew its contract with Trek, the bicycle manufacturer that developed the system.
“The continued aging of the system and the cost to work with B-cycle is too high for us,” he said. “The funding is just not there to do it.”
The organization’s 2018 budget totaled $1 million, according to its annual report. The city provided it with $800,000 in 2019, and about half of that was dedicated to a program that handed out the 5,280 free passes.
Falling Ridership
B-cycle ridership has been falling steadily since its peak in 2014. The system’s riders took 377,000 trips that year compared with 305,000 in 2018, a 19 percent decline, according to the annual report. The decrease in riders corresponds roughly with the rise of ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft, and the arrival of dockless scooters and bikes last year.
But Denver’s bike share system has never had the high number of stations needed to reach high ridership levels, like those in Paris, New York, or Mexico City. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, successful systems provide 28 stations per square mile. Denver B-Cycle had about a half-dozen per square mile.
“We’ve got 89 stations currently and there certainly needs to be more,” says Pletsch. Those docking stations are spread out over seven neighborhoods and host the system’s 716 bikes.
Time For Investigations Of Lew’s CDOT
In Colorado there has been little notice that the storied multi-billion dollar department in charge of the state’s transportation needs, CDOT, has evolved into little more than a massive piggy bank for former employees who have set up consulting firms to perform the jobs that CDOT used to perform itself.
When the State Auditor did a Performance Audit on CDOT it found that 80 of the 84 consultant contracts it looked at had serious flaws including “unapproved consultants labor rates, contracts without proper approvals and contract terms that did not comply with state requirements.” Yet in 2019 another quarter billion dollars will have been squandered on consultants by CDOT. A total revamping of how CDOT performs, or fails to perform, its basic functions needs to be undertaken.
Even more scandalous is the anti-competitive practices undertaken by CDOT pursuant to a 2013 change in the law whereby instead of requiring low bid for projects over $50,000 they are awarded on the so-called “best value” method of Design Build (DB) or Construction Manager/ General Contractor (CMGC). Since there is no clear public criteria for determining who wins a contract under this system it has become a cesspool of potential corruption. Not surprisingly it has led to only two firms controlling over 80 percent of the market — Kraemer North America (a subsidiary of the Japanese mega firm Obayashi Corporation) and Kiewit Corporation out of Omaha, Nebraska. Experts estimate that the CMGC method is costing over 30 percent more than of what it would cost under low bid competition and in turn costing Colorado taxpayers billions of dollars every year.
The change in the 2013 law was comically called the “Keep Jobs In Colorado Act.” Instead the act has resulted in destroying or badly damaging Colorado firms who previously dominated the competitive bid process. While the Colorado press has largely ignored the scandal at CDOT it has not escaped the purview of federal authorities. The national Engineering News-Record on November 29, 2019, announced that the United States Department of Justice had “launched a multipronged effort to root out bid-rigging, price fixing and other forms of collusion in construction and other sectors on local, state and federal government funded contracts.” There is now a strike force which is comprised of prosecutors in Washington as well as 13 U.S. Attorneys offices in addition to FBI investigators and personal from four inspector general offices.
One of the key U.S. Attorney Offices is that of Colorado. One of the items that possibly brought Colorado onto the radar screen was the purported statement by a key member of CDOT. The high ranked CDOT official allegedly stated that the $20 million contract for repair of the Highway 36 sinkhole should not be competitively low bid because CDOT could not guarantee, under such a method, that it be awarded to their friends at Kraemer.
Federal authorities are apparently aware that bid rigging has expanded far beyond various contractors illegally getting together and now may involve state agencies.
In looking at CDOT one of the key areas of investigation may be “bid suppression” as a form of a collusive bidding scheme. The “Guide to Combating Corruption & Fraud in Development Projects” notes:
“Corrupt government and procurement officials can facilitate the bid suppression efforts (e.g. by disqualifying other legitimate bidders during the bidding process) . . . .”
Many local contracting firms in Colorado are increasingly upset that they are not allowed to take an actual part in bidding for CMGC projects. They are falsely urged to apply to make it seem that the process is legitimate and then excluded by CDOT on criteria that only applies to massive national or international firms like Kraemer and Kiewit.
According to federal sources one of the red lights for a corrupt bidding process is lack of transparency. Under the prior low bid process the exact figures for all parties were available after a contract was awarded so losing bidders could see where they fell short. When an in-state contractor asked CDOT for a copy of the winning bid under a recent CMGC project he was given a document with almost all of the key relevant information redacted by CDOT as shown at right.
Federal authorities are apparently hoping to bring a case of bid suppression that would make national news as to ensure the greatest effect. The indictment of Shoshana Lew or other high CDOT officials regarding the duopoly that has overtaken state construction projects would certainly fit the bill. However, there is no present indication of personal financial benefit by any present CDOT official, which while not necessary in such cases, is still preferred by some federal authorities.
Regardless of federal efforts to clean up uncompetitive bidding in Colorado, it is clear that CMGC method of awarding projects should be suspended in Colorado until a transparent competitive system that will save Colorado taxpayers billions of dollars is undertaken. That and tight restrictions on consulting contracts with CDOT are both long overdue and badly needed.
- Editorial Board
