So who speaks for Bill Daniels? Who ensures that his intentions are honored regarding the exotic Cableland mansion he gave to Denver before his death, and which Mayor John Hickenlooper wants to sell off to support a charity he’s been touting since its inception?
“Legally, it’s the Daniels Fund that speaks for Bill Daniels,” Jack Finlaw, the city’s director of theaters and arenas, declared with intended finality at a City Council committee meeting last week. And the Daniels Fund, significantly, agrees with Hickenlooper.
Finlaw is surely right — from a strictly legal perspective. But Robert Russo begs to differ about who should speak for the late cable magnate, and what Daniels would actually want. “I’m here today to fulfill a commitment I made to Bill,” the former Daniels associate told committee members — namely, to prevent Cableland from being sold off for someone’s “pet project.”
“I think that’s morally wrong,” he said.
The committee tabled the proposal to sell Cableland to raise money for the Denver Scholarship Foundation, but the plan is far from dead, and the administration and Daniels Fund board remain strongly in its corner.
Still, council members and Russo, a former chairman of the Cableland Home Foundation that administers the mansion at no cost to taxpayers, raised the right questions about the proposed sale.
• If Denver is going to sell off an asset — even an asset such as Cableland that it only jointly controls — shouldn’t it try to direct the proceeds to a municipal responsibility? Scholarships are wonderful — the Daniels Fund itself has given away 2,000 scholarships over the past 10 years — but the city is not the school district. It has many worthy obligations of its own, a number of which the mayor believes could use a boost in funding.
• Daniels has been dead barely a decade. Shouldn’t his vision for Cableland be honored at least for another mayor or two before we decide it’s unworkable and must be overturned? Does a philanthropist’s writ run for so few years?
Russo says Daniels never expected a mayor’s family actually to live at Cableland, but hoped it would be used to host dignitaries and charitable events. We’ve had two mayors since Daniels died. Wellington Webb tells me he used Cableland to host meetings involving the National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors, National Conference of Black Mayors, as well as other events — although he is steering clear of the debate over its sale.
Does the very first mayor who considers Cableland a lousy venue to entertain get to unload it on his terms? Isn’t there something, um, presumptuous about the move, however stellar the beneficiary?
Perhaps inevitably, Finlaw later invoked the “poor and brown and black kids in the city” who might benefit from additional scholarships. “When you weigh that against a fancy mansion that’s underutilized,” he declared, “it’s just not right.” Well, I toured the mansion last week, and it’s certainly fancy (although the living quarters are dated, idiosyncratic and claustrophobic, and need a total renovation). You could also argue that the mansion is underutilized, although as recently as two years ago it hosted the maximum number of non- profit fundraisers allowed under a deal protecting neighbors.
Bill Daniels was acutely aware of the less fortunate, which is why he ensured the bulk of his vast fortune would help them. But he also gave away assets for other purposes. Would he have changed his mind about Cableland had he lived a few more years? It’s odd that some people seem so sure.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
