A Tale of Two Mayors

[vicupstate]

Next week, John Hickenlooper, two-term Mayor of Denver, will become Colorado's new Governor.  Eight years ago, Hickenlooper was a microbrewer that had never held or run for public office.  He leaves the Mayor's office with 75% approval.  

This article from the New York Times Magazine is linked here:

[url][http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/magazine/09Hickenlooper-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1294405298-yixK7OZbV2 k47jxLNQdCQ&pagewanted=all/url]

Here are some relevant and interesting quotes from the same.

Hickenlooper’s style has not only been fun-loving and freewheeling but also largely nonpartisan, and it has served him well. He decisively won election as mayor of Denver in July 2003, at the age of 51, despite no previous bids for elective office or experience in government. And he has had a remarkably successful administration, streamlining government, persuading voters to go along with a range of tax increases for projects like regional light rail and a new city jail and shepherding many homeless people off the streets and into newly built affordable housing. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the five best big-city mayors in the country; in 2007 he won re-election with 87 percent of the vote. The pollster working on his 2010 gubernatorial campaign found that in the Denver metropolitan area roughly three of every four voters had a favorable impression of him. What Hickenlooper has enjoyed over the last seven and a half years isn’t so much a sustained political honeymoon as a round-the-world Love Boat cruise â€" with complimentary piña coladas nightly on the Lido Deck.

He ran as a pro-business, antiwaste populist and outsider. Using the same political ad makers who worked for the former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, he did one TV commercial in which he tried on various footwear, hats and suits, dressing as a cowboy in one scene and Uncle Sam in another, while his voice-over explained: “Everybody says I need better clothes. They want me to look more mayoral. Fact is, I’m not a professional politician.”

Then he got to work. He recruited an unusually high number of high-powered businesspeople to serve in his administration, but he pruned the overall government work force, a necessity given legal prohibitions against deficit spending. He got tough on police brutality, cut water use, installed a fleet of hundreds of pay-as-you-go public bicycles and exuberantly promoted Denver and Colorado as optimal destinations for corporations and tourists both. During his tenure, the city’s convention business boomed. Democrats gathered in Denver in 2008 to formally nominate Obama, an event that also gave Hickenlooper national exposure

Two aspects of his administration stand out in particular. To obtain financial wiggle room for teacher salaries, transportation projects and other matters, he repeatedly went to voters and got their consent, as Colorado law requires of mayors and the governor, for sales- and property-tax increases and for taking on limited debt. “He has tax-increase pixie dust,” says Jon Caldara, the president of the Independence Institute, a free-market advocacy group in Colorado. “No politician that I’ve ever worked against has been so successful in selling tax and debt increases as John Hickenlooper.”

His method, in part, was to be humble rather than highhanded. He would spend months and months publicly laying out the economics of the situation, soliciting citizens’ thoughts and pinpointing where the money would go. “Americans â€" Coloradans â€" are generous,” he says. “What they hate is waste.”

And he worked hard in each case to figure out the best pitch. He approached the challenge as a salesman. “When he wanted to do the jail campaign” â€" which meant $378 million for new jail cells and courtrooms â€" “most of his senior advisers, me included, told him not to do it,” says David Kenney, a Democratic political consultant in Colorado. “It had failed twice before.” Hickenlooper pressed ahead, talking of medieval conditions that undercut Denver’s aspirations to be a world-class city and casting jail crowding as a threat to the safety of corrections officers.

Compare this to the experience with Peyton, who seems unwilling to spend political capital.  Thoughts to consider as a new mayor is choosen.

[Jaxson]

Imagine that - a mayor who reaches out to the city that he serves!  Seeing that municipal government is level of government that is closest to the people, I think that it would help to have a mayor who is actually close to the people.  Most importantly, I think that some vision helps a city to have faith in its leadership.  What is the point of leading a city if the leader doesn't even know where they are going?