Denver Mayor-elect Michael Hancock hosted a round table Thursday morning and business leaders expressed concerns about improving education and health care for children, cutting red tape and eliminating a questionable tax.
But for some veteran executives present, the meeting created a sense of “deju vu all over again.”
“Everything you all said was said 20 years ago,” said Anne Warhover, chief executive of the Colorado Health Foundation.
But the city continues to struggle with unhealthy and uneducated children, she said.
Red tape and bureaucracy continue to remain problems, others said, despite repeated efforts of previous administrations to make things more customer-friendly.
Denver can pull off big projects well, but “heaven forbid” if someone needs to pull a permit for a fence, lamented Pat Hamill, CEO at Oakwood Homes.
“Aurora has some tighter (permitting) standards, but they execute in their process,” Hamill told Hancock.
More than one business leader described difficulty in finding local workers with adequate training.
“I have to import people from other states,” said Richard Lewis, CEO of RTL Networks, adding that represents a heavy cost for a small business.
Lewis suggested creating some type of incentive program to keep more kids in school.
Especially irksome is a city interpretation that applies a use tax on Internet-based applications hosted on servers in other cities, said Walter Isenberg, CEO of Sage Hospitality, the host of the round table downtown, and Kate Paul, CEO of Delta Dental of Colorado.
The extra tax costs them more than $100,000 a year that they wouldn’t face if they were located in a municipality that treated the Internet-based programs as a service.
But Denver officials won’t budge, Isenberg said.
Among the topics Hancock threw out for discussion were the location of a Gaylord resort and the possible relocation of the National Western Stock Show to Aurora.
But participants didn’t bite, although John Ikard, CEO of FirstBank Holding Co., came close.
He urged Hancock to be the senior partner in a long-running partnership among area cities.
“We want to see cooperation,” he said. “We don’t want to see squabbling.”
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com
