by Charles Bonniwell | Sep 26, 2023 | Main Articles
Neighborhoods In Revolt / Cries For Recall Of Sawyer
by Charles C. Bonniwell
Aerial View: The project by DOTI at the intersection of 7th Avenue created ugly and highly dangerous conditions for automobiles, bicyclists, and pedestrians, and has residents up in arms.
The redesign of the intersection at 7th and Williams was supposed to be a neighborhood friendly effort to make it more safe and pleasant for non-automobile traffic in one of Denver’s more pleasant areas near Cheesman Park. Instead, it’s become a Rube Goldberg contraption endangering bicyclists, automobiles, pedestrians, and even children.
Instead of admitting its errors, Denver’s Department of Transportation (DOTI) and the area’s City Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer have dug in their heels and refused to remedy a highly dangerous situation exposing how government seem to be no longer responsive to its citizenry.
The project was part of DOTI’s Neighborhood Bikeway program which was supposed to improve safety for people riding bikes on city streets. Instead, according to Kitty Koch, a 7th Avenue Historic District resident, “these measures are unnecessary, unsafe, and negatively impact the beauty, character, and integrity of this historic neighborhood.”
The Intersection
A confused motorist crosses 7th Avenue and Williams Street, heading West through a Do Not Enter sign, and endangers the woman with her baby on the right.
The intersection at 7th Avenue and Williams Street is an asymmetrical four way stop where the 7th Avenue Parkway median begins. Heading east on 7th Avenue, a traveler needed to simply to move over to the south side of the median. This was not deemed a problem until DOTI intervened. It constructed a kaleidoscope of colored signs, bike lane bollards (110 in this intersection alone), street markings, and caution bumps. Bicyclists, pedestrians, and automobiles are directed every which way, sometimes into oncoming traffic.
In just standing at the intersection for an hour this reporter observed over a dozen unintentional traffic violations. Bicyclists
are confused on where to go and pedestrians are unsure where to walk. When DOTI was alerted to the dangers, it refused to make any significant changes declaring in Orwellian fashion everything they did was in the name of “safety.” The minor changes that were made have made the situation worse.
The Strange Roundabouts
Strange Roundabouts: DOTI constructed three so-called “traffic calming” roundabouts on a narrow two-way street which fire trucks, garbage trucks, and other large vehicles have extreme difficulty navigating.
Heading east on 7th Avenue from the Country Club area there are a series of three strange roundabouts. Roundabouts were first designed in Europe to help with the flow of traffic but they require space to work. On 7th Avenue DOTI built three of them on a narrow two-way street as a “traffic calming” device. But garbage trucks, fire trucks, and other larger vehicles get stuck trying to get through the intersection. Resident Natalia Ballinger indicates that there have been at least four accidents at the 7th and Gilpin intersection within a span of six weeks. There is an informal moratorium on these types of roundabouts due to criticism from the Denver Fire Department but the 7th Avenue roundabouts remain.
The Rigged Meeting
The physical work on the project in April of this year came without the city informing the 7th Avenue Neighborhood Association of the project but notifying all other uninvolved neighborhood associations. The 7th Avenue area residents only learned about it belatedly from the Capital Hill United Neighbors Association. Residents do not believe that was simply an interferant mistake by DOTI.
“They didn’t say anything to the neighborhood about this,” said Rob Brown, a cyclist and a resident in the area. “This was something that was done to us and not with us. I think you would find everybody in the neighborhood is incredibly happy to promote safety in this corridor.” As more and more residents became upset, calls were placed to Amanda Sawyer, District 5 Councilwoman, to intercede on their behalf with DOTI which was ignoring all their complaints.
Concerned Citizens: Left to right, Rob Brown, Larry DiPasquale, and Kitty Koch are three of the many residents of the 7th Avenue Parkway area that are outraged at the actions of DOTI and District 5 Councilperson Amanda Sawyer.
On July 20, 2023, she finally responded and agreed to a neighborhood meeting but two hours before it was to occur Sawyer changed it to a webinar with a panel that included herself, Sawyer’s aides, and Nick Williams, the Deputy Manager of Internal and External Affairs, being the only ones who could talk. “They were the only ones able to speak,” said Koch. “Everyone else was a call in. It was clearly staged in my opinion because they did not accept our questions [50-60 questions].”
According to those involved, which included over 180 citizens, the calls were screened so that only the questions from a small number of people who were in favor of the project were allowed.
Recall Candidate: District 5 Councilperson Amanda Sawyer’s actions regarding 7th and Williams have so outraged residents that petitions are being drawn up and funds raised for her eventual recall.
Sawyer originally got into office as a neighborhood advocate against high density apartment projects in single family neighborhoods. She was a graduate of the scandal plagued Emerge Colorado program to get Democratic women elected. The group was dissolved by Emerge America under claims of fraudulent mismanagement. Sawyer became known in the city for her haughty and contemptuous attitude to the mayor’s staff and others she comes in contact with, and she even threatened to shut down road projects in the city over a dispute with a city employee.
After the rigged webinar meeting Sawyer stopped taking calls from individuals she deemed not approving of the 7th and Williams fiasco. Rob Brown indicates that he called her seven times and never received a return call. He noted: “The reason I am here now is because I am a cyclist. I know the city is trying to promote safety. I just don’t think they got it anywhere close to right.” He went on to note: “If they want to elevate the safety of this intersection, I think they need to go back to the drawing board. As a cyclist, I consider this intersection to be dangerous.”
Natalie Ballinger agrees: “We’re all thrilled to have a bikeway. This was such an opportunity for them [the City of Denver] to reach out to the people who live here to get their input and collaboration and to build community. It is almost a textbook example of how not to roll out a bikeway. “
Sign incorrectly labels the distances to the Congress Park and Cherry Creek neighborhoods.
Automobile about to illegally take a right on Williams Street from 7th Avenue. The motorist was required to somehow know that it had to go on the right of the bollards 100 yards back.
The Recall Momentum
Many activists in Sawyer’s District 5 do not intend to let the dangerous situation go unaddressed. Sawyer was re-elected in the spring election over Michael Hughes on a campaign of championing street safety. One activist noted: “We can’t recall until six months from the time she began her second term, but we are drawing up the petitions and raising money for the fight. We have had enough of this crooked politician and her intentional endangerment of our kids and others.”
Until Then
Until Sawyer can be recalled, DOTI most likely will not do anything to make the situation any better. Residents note that accidents will inevitably happen at 7th and Williams and the roundabout come winter. Some other wonder out loud what type of horrific accident will have to occur for city officials to act.
by Charles Bonniwell | Jul 20, 2023 | Editorials
Mike Johnston is sworn in as the 46th Mayor of Denver on July 17, 2023.
Although the Biden Administration may dispute it, most people would view seven million people illegally crossing the United States southern border in the last several years as a financial disaster. That does not mean that there is not a lot of money to be made from it. Certainly, the Mexican drug cartel bringing fentanyl and other drugs, the coyotes smuggling in illegal immigrants, the nonprofit groups sheltering the immigrants once they cross, and the federal contracts paid to disburse them throughout the country; all are doing very well indeed.
Denver has absorbed only a small fraction of the recent immigrants with Denver officials estimating approximately 1,200 at any one time with the cost estimated to be up to $1,000 per immigrant per week (an estimated $17 million total). The immigrants have been housed in recreation centers and anywhere else space could be found.
The Hancock Administration in its final days wanted to burden the new Johnston administration with a one-year contract with GardaWorld Federal Services to operate a single 1,000-person shelter with intake services, food, and transportation for $40 million.
Denver’s nonprofit world went bonkers. They screamed about the city of Denver hiring a Canadian detention company with an awful record of waste and abuse when they could provide an equal amount of waste and abuse with money staying right here in Denver. Sometimes people fail to comprehend that “nonprofit” is simply a federal tax status and the people running them are every bit as rapacious and money hungry as their counterparts in the for-profit world.
At $40,000 per immigrant, per year, there is plenty of gravy to go around, especially considering that many more shelters will probably be needed and for an indefinite period of time. Moreover, the educational and health needs of every immigrant will also need to be provided.
Luckily, our new mayor Mike Johnston has indicted that he can solve all these problems, as well as the indigenous homeless quagmire, all in a single year with his tiny homes and other programs. Previous mayor, now Senator, John Hickenlooper had promised he would end homelessness in a decade, but later said that was just sales puffery for the always gullible Denver residents.
With Mike Johnston being sworn in on July 17, 2023, it is exciting to know that all these problems, some of which have plagued mankind since civilization began, will be solved in less than one year. In the meantime, don’t you be handing out any lucrative contracts. Keep the largesse right here in Denver, on the off chance that the problems might go on slightly past July 16th of 2024.
— Editorial Board
by Charles Bonniwell | Jun 23, 2023 | Editorials
Your property taxes will be going sky high after Governor Polis and a bi-partisan majority in legislature convinced us voters in 2020 to do away with the Gallagher Amendment which limited property tax hikes for homeowners. The Gallagher Amendment saved homeowners $82 billion in taxes since its adoption in 1982. But no more.
Having suckered voters so successfully last time, Governor Polis has come up with another POLIS con job, Proposition HH. This will go before the voters in the fall. This time it is being done without Republican connivance, but Republican opposition may no longer matter. Rushed through at the end of the session, the Democrats in the legislature closed all debate, causing Republicans to walk out.
Proposition HH appears to have drawn inspiration from the old confidence man’s three-card monte card trick. In that card game you are supposed to pick out the black ace from three cards. Trick of hand makes sure you never do. In Proposition HH the voters are supposed to pick out the tax relief but by sleight-of-hand language you are voting yourself a “tax raise.”
If you vote “Yes” on Proposition HH you may think you are getting property tax relief from the effects of the revocation of the Gallagher Amendment, but you have not followed the cards closely enough. While your property tax will be slightly reduced for 10 years you would allow the state to keep more of your Tabor refunds permanently with a portion going to favored entities to backfill what they would lose from the slight reduction in property tax rates over the 10 years. Without going into all the byzantine meandering of the proposition, you are, in effect, voting yourself a tax raise under the guise of “tax relief.”
The governor has always been something of a flimflam man, but he has proven it works. His real name was Jared Shutz, but he changed it before going into public life to hide some of the more unsavory parts of his past, in particular, an assault on a female employee. He pushed the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission idea as an effort to promote confidence in our government institutions when it is perhaps the greatest bureaucratic con job in all of Colorado government.
He has promoted himself nationally as a Democrat who is also something of a small “l” libertarian, which is comical, but the national press is dutifully calling him by that description. Reason Magazine recently wrote an article on him titled “Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America?” He is considered by some as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President should Joe Biden pull out for some reason.
Will his three-card monte trick called Proposition HH fool the voters? If the past is any indication, don’t bet against Polis as the dealer.
— Editorial Board
by Charles Bonniwell | May 22, 2023 | Main Articles
by Charles C. Bonniwell
Bureaucratic Power Duo: Observers of the IEC have indicated the Executive Director Dino Ioannides, above, and legal counsel Senior Assistant Attorney General Gina Cannan, right, have filled the power vacuum left when Commissioner Bill Leone was not reappointed to the IEC. They in turn have carried on Leone’s vision of the IEC as an all-powerful entity to be used by insiders to crush political opponents.
In 1902 the Colorado voters authorized home rule governance for municipalities by amending the state constitution and extended it to counties in 1970. It allows for municipalities and counties who adopt home rule governance to act and legislate on local matters and, in general, home rule ordinances addressing local matters supersede state law. Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission (the “IEC”) under the control of the power-hungry New York lawyer Bill Leone decided it did not like home rule cities and counties having more power than it on local ethics matters, so starting in 2015 it began to scheme on methods to put the home rule towns, cities, and counties under its oppressive yoke.
The plan was apparently to attack a small town, have it bend to the IEC overlordship, and then use that as precedent for its claim of power on all ethics issues over all home rule municipalities and counties. It was important not to attack a powerhouse like the City and County of Denver, which would have the influence and funding to fight off the rapacious IEC.
As disclosed in our prior front-page articles on the IEC, it takes only the cases it wants to take with little rhyme or reason other than increasing its power. It doesn’t want a lot of cases because it only meets once a month and has only one investigator (its Executive Director), so it restricts the cases to people and places it wants to attack, such as Secretary of State Scott Gessler, Governor John Hickenlooper, and it turns out, the City of Glendale.
2015 – The Saga Begins
Glendale was targeted because it is a small home rule municipality (population of 4,613) which has its own ethics code and complaint procedures which Commissioner Leone apparently believed would make a perfect target.
How Glendale came before the IEC was a labyrinth. In 2015 the city filed an Urban Renewal Plan for what is now known as “4 Mile District.” The owners of Authentic Persian Rugs on Colorado Boulevard, through an entity known as M.A.K. Investments, which owns approximately 3.8 acres along Cherry Creek wanted to build a massive condo building on this site which violated Glendale’s Zoning Code and Master Plan. Glendale residents nicknamed it the “Death Star Project.” The Persian rug merchants apparently believed with enough bullying they could get Glendale to bow to their plans.
Enter The FBI And The Oath Keepers
Jam-Packed: The Glendale City Council meeting of May 12, 2015, to reauthorize its urban renewal authority’s eminent domain powers was jam-packed by people brought to the meeting by Ali, Saeed and Nasirin Kholghy owners of Authentic Persian & Oriental Rugs. Residents of Glendale have accused the Kholghy family of attempting to bully and intimidate them by bringing in the paramilitary militia group the Oath Keepers whose banner is shown on the right.
In 2015, the rug merchants went to the state, local, and national press claiming that Glendale was going to use eminent domain to condemn the rug business and surrounding acreage for the project formerly known as the Glendale 180 project. (See Fight Over future of Glendale Persian Rug store heats up, Denver Post, July 2015.) Glendale believed that no assurances to the contrary mattered as the rug merchants were simply trying to pressure Glendale to approve the “Death Star Project.”
The rug merchants engaged the Oath Keepers, a feared rightwing paramilitary group, to engage in an armed “shock and awe” march on Glendale City Hall and threaten the City Council to accede to the rug merchants’ demands or face recall or worse.
At or about the same time the rug merchants began meeting with the Denver Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the “FBI”) to encourage the FBI to investigate the City of Glendale on their behalf. It is widely believed that the FBI had infiltrated, and perhaps controlled, the Oath Keepers a long time ago. It is not clear if the FBI helped arrange or were involved inthe armed march to threaten Glendale City Council by the Oath Keepers.
What is known is that city officials began receiving suspicious proposals from previously unknown businessmen for what could possibly lead to potential bribe attempts. One well known Glendale businessman reported to City Hall that the FBI asked him to wear a wire and attempt to bribe the mayor which he refused to do stating the mayor was not going to take bribes.
Moreover, infamous undercover FBI agent Charles Johnson came to Glendale pretending to be a journalist and began harassing the city clerk and citizens who publicly opposed the “Death Star Project.” He went directly to the home of Glendale City Clerk Sherry Frame on the pretense that he had been “hired to look into an ethics complaint” against the mayor. The threats against the city clerk resulted in his arrest at the Denver International Airport. The FBI then intervened and got then Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler to dismiss all charges against Johnson as a “professional courtesy.” D.A. Brauchler then publicly revealed what the FBI was up to. (See Trevor Anderson, How an Undercover FBI Agent Ended Up in Jail After Pretending to Be a Journalist, The Intercept, May 16, 2016.) The rug merchants were caught on camera meeting with FBI officials in a Denver restaurant.
The Rug Merchants’ Lawyers
– Ireland Stapleton
Secret Meeting: It has long been believed that Glendale rug merchants were in cahoots with the local FBI to force the City of Glendale to allow the building of a massive condominium complex on Colorado Boulevard and East Virginia. Such suspicions were supported by the above picture taken on October 6, 2015, at Panera Bread on Colorado Boulevard north of Yale. At the back of the booth, left to right, are FBI Special Agent Kimberly Milka, and FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing; at the front of the booth, left to right, are the owners of Authentic Persian & Oriental Rugs, Nasrin Kholghy, Mohammad Ali Kheirkhahi, and Saeed Kholghy.
The rug merchants also hired the law firm of Ireland Stapleton to file a series of lawsuits in state and federal courts to tie up the city in a legal quagmire. While the lawsuits were in motion, the rug merchants, hoping the city had been sufficiently softened up, demanded a meeting with the Zoning Department bringing with them an all-star development team that included Dana Crawford, the founder of Larimer Square, famous Denver architect David Tryba, and an RTD Director.
The meeting was openly taped with Crawford declaring “there is, you know there’s some sugar in it, a special sugar in it for the community…” When the tape was publicly revealed it was an embarrassment to the rug merchants and its team of developers. (See Wealthy Rug Merchants Plans Exposed, Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, March, 2016.)
Lawsuits Galore And Bernie Buescher
Glendale did not fold to the barrage of lawsuits and Glendale eventually prevailed in all of them. (See Rug Merchants Lose All Court Battles, Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, December 2016.) But the one legal move made by the Persian rug merchants’ attorneys that proved to be fruitful was to bring in attorney and former interim Secretary of State Bernie Buescher of Ireland Stapleton, an expert on how the IEC can bring down political opponents. For an organization that was able to bring to heel such powerful political players as Scott Gessler and John Hickenlooper, Glendale appeared to be an easy target.
First the rug merchants had a political hit group known as Ethics Watch to file ethics complaints in Glendale against then Councilman Jeff Allen and Mayor Mike Dunafon. The complaint was based on the seemingly specious claim that both were members of the Greater Glendale Chamber of Commerce and that the city utilized and paid the Chamber as its economic development arm. The second complaint against the mayor was for breaking a tie vote involving a final zoning approval for a business which the rug merchants claimed his wife was one of the shareholders. The problem with this complaint was that the woman was not his wife and moreover another vote was taken at the next meeting without his participation.
A hearing was held with an independent attorney who investigated the matter and presented the evidence to the City Council which in turn dismissed the complaints as frivolous.
FBI Agent Arrested: Charles Johnson (left) allegedly harassed, stalked, and intimidated former Glendale City Clerk Sherry Frame, right, and individuals who wrote letters or were quoted in the Chronicle as being critical of Mohammad Ali Kheirkhahi or M.A.K’s proposed massive condo project on Colorado Boulevard. All charges were dropped and all warrants quashed in Arapahoe County Court per the request of the FBI “for reasons that cannot be disclosed.”
That would appear to be the end of the matter but the rug merchants legal counsel Ireland Stapleton filed the exact same complaint with the IEC. Ethics Watch refused to file it with the IEC as it did not believe it had jurisdiction in the matter as Glendale had adopted ethics rules, and as a home rule city those applied over the IEC. Leone, however was looking for a small home rule city it could crush with massive legal bills, just as it had with Hickenlooper and Gessler.
It took seven years for the IEC to find the first complaint against Allen to be frivolous, but not frivolous against Dunafon, although they were exactly the same. Apparently, the IEC found the mayor an easier target.
Eight Years Later
After hundreds of thousands in legal bills later, Glendale is still standing for the people of Colorado and home rule. After eight years of the IEC holding hours of closed-door deliberations and refusing to make records public, the IEC has finally set a hearing for August 15, 2023. However, the Executive Director Dino Ioannides refuses to inform Glendale attorneys what the hearing will exactly be on so it can prepare witnesses.
The Colorado courts have ruled that Glendale cannot appeal the question of whether the IEC has jurisdiction over home rule cities until after it has been fined or otherwise punished by the IEC. The fines that the parties are subject to are no more than a couple of hundred dollars. So just like in the Hickenlooper and Gessler cases Glendale is forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the IEC power grab over a miniscule potential fine.
Bureaucratic Takeover
Since the end of Bill Leone’s reign at the IEC in 2021, there has been a power vacuum at the IEC pursuant to which insiders believe the bureaucratic staff of Executive Director Dino Ioannides and Senior Assistant Attorney General Gina Cannan have filled the void. The two dominate the volunteer and inexperienced commissioners and carry on Leone’s vision of an all-powerful IEC to crush political opponents for those who know how to operate inside of the bureaucratic chamber of horrors.
Cannan in particular has raised the ire of IEC observers. While in theory she has the obligation to be neutral until an investigation has taken place she does not comply and lets her biases show from the very beginning. She was caught in briefs before the investigation saying “when Mayor Dunafon is fined” which assumed his guilt even before an investigation had even occurred.
Reporters, longtime observers, and critics of the IEC are expected to attend the August 15th Glendale hearing where they expect the bias of the IEC to be on full display, along with its unceasing unethical conduct for all to see.
by Charles Bonniwell | Apr 21, 2023 | Main Articles
‘No One Is Above The Law’ — Except The IEC
PART II
by Charles C. Bonniwell
Selina Baschiera, Chair
Annie Kao
Cole Wist, Vice Chair
Sarah Mercer
Elizabeth Espinosa Krupa
The IEC Commissioners: It is argued that persons with strong unethical traits often volunteer for unpaid ethics panels in order to hide their own potential improprieties. Critics have opined that is particularly true of the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission which has successfully exempted itself from all laws and ethical restraint other than expressly found in in the Colorado State Constitution.
President Theodore Roosevelt in his presidential address to Congress in 1903 stated that no one was above the law, but he had never encountered the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission (the “IEC”).
It was formed December 31, 2006, after passage of Amendment 41 to the State Constitution which voters thought to watch over excessive gifts to politicians. The IEC likes to portray itself as having “no investigators, little authority” (The Denver Post published January 3, 2016). But any citizen who has ever encountered the IEC as a target would never concur.
Dirty Tricks Operation
As indicated in our April 2023 edition, the IEC has grown into a massive dirty tricks operation where savvy political operatives from both parties can wreak havoc on the lives of their political opponents. Due to a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, the IEC now has the ability to go after any citizen who comes under the very broad heading of “public officers, members of the general assembly, local government officials [or] government employee” who is subject to any type of “standards of conduct” however that is defined. The group covered by the definition is potentially hundreds of thousands of Coloradans, which is referred to as the “Target Group” of the IEC.
Once people begin to understand the incredible breadth of the IEC, jealous boyfriends, vengeful ex-spouses, unscrupulous business competitors, and shady lawyers will learn to manipulate the IEC system to attack and greatly harm anyone in the IEC’s Target Group. That is if they have friends inside the IEC.
Supreme Court Wreaks Havoc
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in Gessler v. Smith (2008) that the IEC could force the one-time Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler to appear before its tribunal and fine him on the basis of a complaint by his political opponents that he used his state provided discretionary funds to help partially pay for a trip to Florida to speak at a” National Election Law Seminar” before the Republican National Convention. The claim was that he misused $1,456.89 public funds would normally be a criminal matter. Gessler’s political opponents in fact sent a letter to the applicable chief of police and the district attorney who apparently found the claims to be spurious and declined to charge the Secretary with any wrongdoing.
Prior to the IEC that would have the end of the matter but Gessler’s opponents also filed the same complaint letters with the IEC which to Gessler’s shock claimed it had jurisdiction. The basis of the jurisdiction was the claim that Colorado law holds in C.R.S. section 24-18-103 that a public office is a “public trust” and “that [a] public officer shall carry out his [or her] duties for the benefit of the state.” The IEC claimed the trip was more partisan or personal in nature and fined Scott Gessler $1,278.90. Gessler’s fees in fighting the IEC were over a half million dollars.
Pandora’s Box
Insider: Bernie Buescher, a shadowy lawyer, is believed by those in the know to be an expert in the dark arts involving the IEC.
By that decision the Colorado Supreme Court opened an enormous Pandora’s box which vastly exceeded what any voter thought they were approving when they voted for Amendment 41. There are now literally tens of thousands of cases that can be brought before the IEC every year.
The key, however, to the IEC scam is that you must have an “in” at the IEC or know someone who does like lawyer and former interim Secretary of State Bernie Buescher. The IEC has only one investigator and the IEC tribunal meets only once per month, thus it can take very few cases. It has rejected almost 90% of the cases brought before it. Under Amendment 41 the IEC “may dismiss frivolous complaints without conducting a public hearing. Complaints dismissed as frivolous shall be held confidential by the commission.”
The IEC meets in private and decides what cases are “frivolous” without rhyme or reason or explanation. The IEC often waits months or even years before deciding if it wants to hear a complaint, and during that time the IEC must keep it confidential. But that does not mean the person filing the complaint has to. He or she can go to the media and herald that it has filed an ethics complaint and attack you about a complaint you have never seen and is not a public record that is available for review.
Bringing Hick Down
This is exactly what happened to Governor, now Senator, John Hickenlooper. Frank McNulty, the former Republican Speaker of the House, is speculated to have heard that the lead commissioner of the IEC, New York attorney Bill Leone, was dying to get back at Hickenlooper for not reappointing him to the commission. Leone had outwitted Hickenlooper by having the Republican leader of the Senate do so. McNulty formed something called the “Public Trust Institute” to lodge an IEC complaint on October 12, 2018 claiming Hickenlooper had accepted flights, lodging, and meals from private individuals in 2017 and 2018. McNulty went on the media about his ethics complaint which Hickenlooper had never seen and could not get a copy of.
In record time with Bill Leone riding the herd, the IEC declared the complaint “non-frivolous” and was off to a yearlong investigation that dogged Hickenlooper until he finally gave up and a paid a $2,750 fine after spending hundreds of thousands in legal fees.
Above The Law
The IEC argues that it is subject to no ethical rules or standard of conduct because Amendment 41 was an amendment to the State Constitution and is therefore superior to the laws of the state. Amazingly the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed. M.A.K. Investments LLC d/b/a Persian and Oriental Rugs had brought a flurry of lawsuits against the City of Glendale starting in 2015 to try to get Glendale to approve a colossal apartment building. Glendale was successful in getting all of the lawsuits dismissed. At the same time, M.A.K. filed an ethics complaint against a mayor and a councilman in Glendale which it trumpeted to the media but which no could see and which under IEC rules, the IEC would neither confirm or deny.
However, Glendale believed the IEC was scheming for hours behind closed doors to get around the fact the provisions in Amendment 41 expressly deny its jurisdiction over home rule cities and counties that have their own ethical rules and proceedings like Glendale. Colorado Open Meetings Law expressly prohibits such unethical conduct.
Moreover, the IEC appeared to be hiding documents from the public as prohibited by the Colorado Open Records Act.
IEC claimed that it is not subject to such laws as it was formed under an amendment to the state constitution and only “the [state] constitution constrains the IEC….” Notwithstanding, the Colorado Freedom of Informational Coalition, and the Colorado Press Association opposing that interpretation, the Colorado Court of Appeals held in its favor in an unpublished 2020 opinion. . Unpublished opinions are supposed to be for unimportant decisions but it is also a way of hiding opinions that a court is ashamed of.
As pointed out by attorney Josh Weiss it is not clear that anyone could challenge the IEC if it decided to never have another public meeting or make available a single record as “they appear to operate in a special space where they make their own rules but aren’t subject to much review.”
No one is above the law, except the IEC.
Next Edition: Part III, The Glendale Saga
