Sitting through Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City speech last week, I remembered a conversation with then-Aurora Mayor Dennis Champine in 1977.
Aurora and Denver were involved in some minor dispute that staff members from both cities had been unable to resolve. I asked Champine if he had ever brought the issue up directly with then- Denver Mayor Bill McNichols.
“Actually, I’ve never met Mayor McNichols,” Champine replied.
The fact that the mayors of the metro area’s largest and second-largest cities had never even met illustrates how bad relations were in the ’70s between the core city and the suburbs.
The nastiness was rooted in Denver’s unique status as the only combined city, county and school district in the state. Like other cities, Denver could annex new land within its city limits. But unlike any other city, such annexations also advanced the county and school district boundaries.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Denver to become the first city outside of the old Confederacy to junk its “neighborhood schools” policy and begin busing children throughout the district for the purpose of racial balance. Other court rulings, however, forbade crossing district lines in quest of such balance. The paradoxical result was that Denver, far more integrated than the suburbs, struggled frantically to achieve the right racial mix while suburban districts were free to continue neighborhood school policies that led to virtually lily-white schools.
Meanwhile, McNichols, intent on keeping a vibrant economic base, aggressively sought to annex new residential and commercial developments into the capital city. Denver’s privileged position as the region’s chief water supplier gave it an enormous incentive to lure owners of suburban tracts into the city. Basically, McNichols’ pitch boiled down to: “Mr. Developer, would you like to annex into Denver, where we can give you cheap and reliable water supplies? Or would you rather drink sand?”
But as the city’s lines moved, so did the county and school district lines. That left many suburban residents alarmed that their own children would eventually be drawn into the program of busing for racial balance. They responded in 1974 by passing the Poundstone Amendment, prohibiting any county from annexing land in another county unless voters in the county losing the land – not just the affected property owners – gave their approval. Since Denver was then the only city/county combination, the amendment stopped its annexations, with the notable exception of the approval later given by Adams County voters to Denver to annex the land that is now Denver International Airport. But it also led to frigid relations between Denver and its suburbs.
That cold war is now long over, as evidenced by the amazement the current Aurora mayor, Ed Tauer, displayed when I recounted the “Champine never met McNichols” tale to him Wednesday after Hickenlooper’s speech. Tauer had just finished a brief but technical discussion with Hickenlooper over their joint efforts to unsnarl the region’s transportation network. Tauer said he has lost count of the times he’s talked with Hickenlooper, but their discussions are continuous and fruitful. And he rates Denver’s current mayor as by far the most committed to metropolitan cooperation of any of the city’s modern leaders.
There are many reasons for today’s far healthier political atmosphere. Racial busing is long gone, and many inner-ring suburbs like Lakewood and Englewood, as well as Original Aurora, are now flanked by new “exurban” developments of their own. The Metro Mayor’s Caucus and the Denver Regional Council of Governments have pulled the region together to work on common problems – and as a result can celebrate such victories as the FasTracks rapid transit system now under development.
Above all, the new spirit comes from a new breed of leaders who recognize, as Tauer does, that “None of the big problems we face – air pollution, growth, transportation, water and economic development – respects political boundaries.”
Denver and the suburbs, once adversaries, now recognize the truth of Ben Franklin’s quip: “We must all hang together or we will surely all hang separately.”
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@
denverpost.com) is The Post’s deputy editorial page editor.
