After years of successfully pushing reforms and new initiatives, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper wants to make sure all the hard work lasts.
The mayor in his annual State of the City address Tuesday repeated the same message from a year ago: stay the course. That course, he emphasized, provides a blueprint for the future and will help government earn the trust of the people.
“It is not the role of government to solve every challenge,” Hickenlooper said in the speech, delivered on the plaza at the city’s new justice center complex. “The role of government is to create a collaborative environment and to provide the resources to facilitate solutions that spring from the community itself.”
He continued: “Good government is not just for the people but of the people, addressing the needs and drawing on the talents of residents across the entire breadth of our society.”
He unveiled no new major initiatives but instead said he wants to make sure that what his administration has put in place has “deep roots.”
As he said in his speech: “Fifty years from now, we want Denver residents to be proud of their city and proud of the world this community imagined for them.”
The mayor pointed to a series of policy successes since he took office in 2003. At his urging, voters have approved new initiatives and at times new taxes that overhauled the way city workers are paid, built a new courthouse and jail, built better roads and sewers and put in place a new FasTracks light rail transit system, considered the largest transit expansion in the nation. He also convinced the voters to increase sales taxes to pay for preschool programs, an initiative the voters rejected in 2000 and 2001 before Hickenlooper was in office.
He followed through on his pledge to raise money for new college scholarships for low-income Denver high school graduates. He put in place new programs that have driven down the rate of homelessness. There’s now a new discipline system for police. Property throughout the city has been rezoned, a move the mayor said will create more predictability and, hopefully, more construction from developers and builders.
Even the way citizens access city services is different. Instead of calling agencies separately, Denver residents now punch in 311 on their telephones and are greeted with this message: “Hello, this is Mayor John Hickenlooper. Thank you for calling the city and county of Denver, and we look forward to serving you.”
Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, the lone Republican on the council who has clashed with Hickenlooper in the past, said the mayor’s pace has slowed since his early years, in part because of the down economy and perhaps now because of his Democratic gubernatorial campaign.
“I don’t think any of the gubernatorial candidates really believes talking about higher taxes and great big projects fits with the mood of the people today,” Faatz said. “Maybe silence is best.”
Faatz added that when she first heard Hickenlooper had decided to run for governor in January, she doubted that role would be a good fit for him. She said his tenure as mayor has been marked by a council that for the most part is philosophically aligned with him. The strong mayor system that exists in Denver also gives him all the leverage, she said.
The partisan environment that faces any governor would be far different than the municipal politics he has faced so far, she said.
“The saying used to be that when the governor files a budget, he ought to file it in the round file, meaning the waste basket,” said Faatz, a former state legislator.
Councilman Doug Linkhart, though, predicted after hearing the speech that Hickenlooper likely will win his race for governor.
“He’s got places to go and things to do,” Linkhart said referring to the gubernatorial race, adding that Hickenlooper’s state of the city address was a “good summation of his two terms” as mayor.
Throughout his speech, Hickenlooper credited a collaborative process with paving the way for success in Denver. He said the plan to attack homelessness came from a broad coalition of religious, nonprofit, business and neighborhood leaders that also reached out for input the homeless.
The mayor successes have come during a time of fiscal austerity. Last year, he slashed the city’s spending by $160 million, and this year, ongoing problems with the economy, mean he will have to slash an additional $100 million from the budget for 2011.
The mayor contends that payrolls show that the city workforce has shrunk by 7 percent since July 2002, the year before he took office.
When asked during a meeting with the editorial board of The Denver Post whether he envisioned a new theme developing than the one he has continually pushed that has asked municipal workers to do more with less resources, the mayor said he did not.
“We can’t begin to have that discussion until the public has trust and respect for government,” the mayor said. “And that’s what we have been working toward.”
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
