Journalists generally don’t waste much sympathy on politicians who complain that their speeches receive scant news coverage.
After all, not every oration is a Gettysburg Address, no matter how fervently the official giving it may believe the world should long remember what he says here.
Even so, we share Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s dismay that his important call for regional cooperation in his July 1 State of the City was largely overlooked in the furor over a guest singer’s mangling of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Not everyone missed the mayor’s message. Here at The Post we picked up on his theme that “The most powerful changes in America today are taking place not in cities or states, but in metropolitan regions. As I’ve crossed the country these past 18 months raising money for our convention, I am frequently asked how Denver has achieved such success on a regional basis.”
Today, we’d like to answer that question. Denver has made regional cooperation a success the same way couples succeed in marriage — by working very hard at the task.
That success didn’t come easily. Indeed, if anyone had called the Denver area a model of regional cooperation in the ’60s or ’70s, the audience would have probably concluded the speaker was smoking dope.
In that era, relations between the core city and its suburbs were inflamed by an aggressive Denver policy of annexing suburban land. Such annexations also extended the core city’s school district lines — at a time when Denver schools were under a court order requiring busing for racial desegregation.
Suburban parents, afraid the advancing boundaries would draw them into the busing case, fiercely opposed the Denver annexations. Things got pretty ugly until a 1974 amendment to the state constitution required the approval of the voters of any county losing land to another county to approve that annexation. That amendment ended the annexation wars — though in 1988, Adams County voters did authorize Denver to annex 45 square miles to build Denver International Airport.
As tempers cooled after 1974, core city and suburban leaders began to realize they needed to work together to solve problems such as air pollution and transportation that don’t recognize political boundaries. Fortunately, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, founded in 1955, was eager to provide just such a forum for regional problem solving.
Over the last three decades, DRCOG, which now has 55 municipal or county members, has helped midwife a new era of regional cooperation that has saved taxpayers millions of dollars while improving services. Working with other regional bodies, it has helped forge common approaches to wastewater management, urban drainage, transportation and even services to the elderly.
For example, the Regional Transportation District’s FasTracks project would be no more than a jumble of rail and concrete without careful zoning and transportation planning by the cities and counties served by the project. The Denver area originally formed along its rail and streetcar arteries. Today, it is being transformed by careful plans for transit-oriented development that not only help business and residential users take maximum use of the coming transit lines but also position the region for the end of the one-car, one-rider fixation that is now drowning in $4 a gallon gasoline.
The Denver area hasn’t become the Peaceable Kingdom. Obviously, cities and counties still have their own points of view on many issues.
But they have learned to work together for the common good. And that happy fact is worth celebrating.
