Mayor tells Council to break rules, gets mad when Council says no

[Thanks for your patience. I don’t have thousands of people who work for me. Marketing, social media, and communications are all just me.]

TL;DR

We had one day to review a more than 70 page document that we knew had errors. In the day we had to research this resolution, I received conflicting answers from different people inside the executive branch. I received yet another perspective when speaking with the Colorado office of Emergency Management. I tried to reconcile those concerns. With just one day, we simply ran out of time.

We almost always have more than one day to review contracts. Most Council votes take a majority to pass. That’s 7 votes. When the Mayor vetoes, we need a “supermajority” to override his veto. That’s 9 votes. Last night, the Mayor told us to break the rules, a procedure that requires unanimous consent. That’s EVERY vote. You don’t have to be a political nerd to understand that what the Mayor was asking for was highly unusual.

Values

When I ran for office, I talked about values. It’s important that we have elected officials who have a system of values. It’s important they use those values to make decisions. Here are some of the values I used last night to cast my vote.

• Democracy. We need 3 functioning branches of government. The executive branch gives us lots of good legislation to consider, yet it is still important that we review all of it. You rely on us to insure it reflects your values, too.
• Transparency. We need our government to be transparent. We want to know that what we pass through Council can be reviewed and understood by the public.
• Income Inequality. (aka working families vs. executive bonuses) Even outside COVID, we have working families struggling to get by. Meanwhile, the top continue to get huge bonuses. Last week, Denver Health required furloughs from workers and, at the same time, Denver Health executives received tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses. Some tell us these furloughs now keep them from paying rent.
• Protecting workers. Our workers need equipment to protect themselves – especially with COVID. Workers should get that equipment to do their jobs before executives get big bonuses. After all, workers are putting the safety and lives of themselves and their families at risk to protect all of us.

Democracy

We Need Three Branches of Government

Many people describe Denver as a “Mayor’s town.” This city has one of the strongest executive branches of major cities in the nation, and that’s outside COVID times.

Now that the pandemic is upon us…

• Council has given given additional authority to the Mayor through our emergency declaration. (which we did)
• The Mayor has also asked us to bypass the typical bill process with numerous direct files, cutting the timing of bills from weeks to days. (we’ve done this too)
• At the same time, the Mayor has asked all of us to reduce our budget (we’re working on this now)

And of course we in City Council do our part – after all, it is better to be six feet apart than six feet under.

That said, Council still needs the time and resources to do its job.

Transparency

Legislative and Executive: David and Goliath

The Mayor has thousands of people working for him (Denver has 15,000 employees, almost all of which report to the Mayor). I have 2 staff and more than 70,000 constituents with previously scheduled meetings. Even with standard timelines, it’s sometimes difficult to get to the bills that we vote on. In a pandemic, with direct files and now this late file, we don’t have the budget, bandwidth, or opportunity to digest everything – particularly when, in this case, we received different and conflicting answers.