Both the Denver Election Commission and the city auditor’s office raised security and safety concerns about the warehouse where the city stores all of its voting machines.
Communications between election commissioners obtained through an open-records request reveals worries about the facility’s housing $7.5 million worth of Denver’s election equipment.
“The Hickenlooper administration was either incompetent in their brokering on our behalf or they intentionally duped the DEC for their own short-term gains,” Commissioner Sandy Adams wrote to her colleagues Sept. 12.
Among Adams’ concerns was the need for climate control at the warehouse, given voting machines’ vulnerability to extreme heat.
John Huggins, the head of Denver’s Office of Economic Development, said his agency spent about $600,000 to update the warehouse.
“The Office of Economic Development was never advised by the Election Commission that their warehouse space needed climate control,” Huggins said.
Adams voiced her concerns shortly before Auditor Dennis Gallagher noted major safety and security issues at the facility in a stinging audit of the entire Election Commission.
Gallagher’s report also warned about air conditioning and a water-based fire-prevention system, threatening the electronic machines in the event of fire.
In a response to the audit, the commission agreed, noting that the warehouse is “not suitable for its assigned purpose.”
On Sept. 8, Adams contended that a city employee was promoted from asset management to the Office of Economic Development as “a pay back for cramming that warehouse down our throats???”
Huggins dismissed Adams’ suggestion, saying there was “absolutely no connection.”
The city wound up using the warehouse as the result of what one council member called “almost a no-win situation” before the deal was even made.
Last summer, city officials proposed the $2.2 million deal – including 8 years’ rent and more than $600,000 in renovations – on the warehouse as a way of helping a nonprofit, the Inner- City Community Development Corp., which was delinquent on a $3.8 million city loan.
In return, the city would pay itself the monthly rent and credit it toward the outstanding loan.
Monday, Huggins said the city spent nearly as much as it gained from the lease.
“We provided $610,000 from our budget to use at their direction,” he said. “That amount is approximately three years of rent on their four-year lease … I’m sorry, with that kind of rent concession, that they were not able to make the space meet their need.”
