Every refugee must find a home and now I’ve found mine. But who would have thought it would be in the heart of what for 27 years I considered the enemy’s camp?
I feel like a kid who pitches rocks at a neighbor’s house every day on the way home from school until the exasperated owner finally comes out and invites him inside for ice cream. Hey, this stuff is good! Mind if I drop by tomorrow afternoon, too?
Even when Denver’s newspaper war officially ended with the joint operating agreement between the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post in 2001, I couldn’t quite shake the habit of taking shots at Post articles in the columns I wrote as the Rocky’s editorial page editor. Fortunately, I’ve encountered no hard feelings or lack of trust here — although to tell the truth, I could have done without the pat-down and briefcase inspection when I arrived at work this morning. But surely everyone gets that treatment — right, boss?
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Let’s start at the top of the Colorado political food chain this morning and ponder how the Ritter administration kept a straight face last week when it barred a strike by the Amalgamated Transit Union against the Regional Transportation District because a strike would “interfere with the preservation of the public peace, health and safety.”
The union’s month-long strike against RTD in 1982 did not paralyze the region or threaten the “public peace, health and safety.” Nor did the one-week fiasco of a strike in 2006. Both inconvenienced regular riders, who were forced to find alternatives to their buses or trains. But the overall peace, health and safety of the region survived the strikes unscathed.
So why did Ritter’s Division of Labor bar a strike and trigger a process to hire an arbitrator? Because it’s what the union wanted. The only reason the union filed its notice of intent to strike on Jan. 20 was to trigger the very decision the state has just made. With the economy in the tank, RTD’s revenues cratering and private-sector workers being laid off or taking wage cuts, a strike by the union would have been a PR disaster.
Ah, but with an arbitrator, the union’s prospects for pay hikes in this stricken economy are transformed. An arbitrator can swoop in from out of town, unencumbered by any responsibility to this community, and hand a victory to the union that it never could have secured on its own.
Indeed, the last time the state mandated binding arbitration on RTD, in 1997, an arbitrator from Chicago casually pumped up the labor contract by a cool $5 million before he jetted back home.
It’s always possible that RTD and the union will see eye-to-eye by March 27, when arbitration is scheduled to commence. But don’t count on it, given the new dynamics of the talks. The Ritter administration has thrown the dice on a transit contract at the very time when RTD is itching to ask voters if it can hike the sales tax again. PR disaster, indeed.
• • •
They arrested Brandon Marshall again? A mistake, of course. It’s always a mistake when Marshall is in handcuffs. You could ask his lawyer, if you doubt it, or take it from the Broncos wide receiver himself.
“For my career to go through what it went through and my character and personality taking a hit over something that basically wasn’t valid was an eye-opener to the high profile that me as an athlete has.”
That was the persecuted Marshall complaining two years ago about the publicity surrounding his arrest for domestic violence, after the charges were dropped. Goodness knows he’d only scared the daylights out of his girlfriend and a cab driver who’d been unlucky enough to pick her up as she attempted to flee from her enraged beau.
Now he’s had charges of disturbing the peace dropped in Atlanta after a confrontation there with his fiancee. “He shouldn’t have been charged in the first place,” his lawyer insisted.
Of course not. Why should a celebrity be treated like everyone else?
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
