Michael Hancock isn’t Denver mayor yet, but he certainly acted like a mayor earlier this week before a critical City Council vote — and local taxpayers have reason to be grateful.
In fact, if this is the kind of positive leadership we can expect from Hancock in the next four years, Denver should be in good hands.
As the week began, it appeared the council was deadlocked over a proposal to reform the Denver Employees Retirement Plan — a plan floated first by former Mayor John Hickenlooper and endorsed more recently by Mayor Bill Vidal.
Council members reportedly were willing to raise the retirement age for new employees from 55 to 60, but several balked at other ideas, including requiring 25 years of employment to qualify for a pension at the proposed minimum age.
Currently, you can qualify for a pension at 55 after 20 years.
Hancock had several choices. He could have sided with the dissenters (and union representatives) and rejected the 25-year threshold. He also could have allowed the deadlock to persist, or advocated postponing a decision on pension reform until he was mayor and a new council had been seated.
Rather than kick the can down the road, however, Hancock took a forceful stand in favor of the “Rule of 85” (60 years of age plus 25 years of service) and, we’re told, privately lobbied several council members to change their minds. To cap the performance, he then spoke publicly in favor of the Rule of 85 before the eventual vote.
And the result? An unexpected 9 to 1 tally on first reading for the more thorough reform, with only council president Chris Nevitt holding back. And even Nevitt issued a statement praising Hancock for his “great job in taking on the stalemate we faced and helping us reach a resolution.”
Hancock, meanwhile, rightly touted the council’s willingness to “save Denver millions of dollars” over time. “We knew that addressing Denver’s structural budget imbalances would not be painless,” he said, “but together we will make the tough decisions necessary to improve the health of our city.”
The pension reform will save little money in the near term, but it’s important because of the signal it sends taxpayers who are being required to increase their contribution to the system (as are city employees).
First, the reform reassures Denverites that additional contributions from the general fund will be supporting a system that isn’t so wildly out of kilter with the sort of retirement package most of them are likely to receive. In that regard, suffice it to say that almost no one in the private sector is eligible for a pension after 20 years — at either 55 or 60.
And secondly, as Hancock suggested, the vote sets the right tone for tackling the long-term structural gap in the city’s finances, in which revenues have been increasing at a slower rate than expenditures. Indeed, council members may discover that raising the number of service years to 25 for new employees turns out to be one of the easier decisions they have to make in resuscitating Denver’s finances.
