By Randy Wyrick DENVER — Gov. John Hickenlooper and his staff started counting their days in the statehouse at 4:45, not for celebration or sadness, but to make sure they got everything done.
Hickenlooper invited housing specialists from around Colorado to the Governor’s Mansion for a thank-you lunch. He worked the room — smiling, greeting people, remembering names — like the politician he has become, but did not start as.
Standing in front of a massive Christmas tree, the governor looked around the room and saw several people old enough to remember Colorado in the 1980s, in the wake of that decade’s oil industry bust. Hickenlooper was a geologist when he migrated to Colorado as the bust hit. He was out of work for two years, he said.
“There were no jobs for geologists. So I had to make beer,” Hickenlooper said smiling, as the room erupted in laughter. Hickenlooper launched the Wynkoop Brewery in Denver.
He has high praise for governor-elect Jared Polis, his successor, who is also a successful entrepreneur.
“I can’t think of another state that has had two successive governors who were entrepreneurs, who built a business from scratch and who signed both sides of a paycheck,” Hickenlooper said.
Looking back, moving forward
Hickenlooper did not allude to what might be next for him, but regaled the crowd with tales of his unlikely win in that first Denver mayoral race.
“When I first ran for Denver mayor in 2003, no one took me seriously. People kept telling me they wanted to back a winner, ‘and that’s not you,'” Hickenlooper said he was told. “No one gave me a snowball’s chance … until the Denver Board of Realtors endorsed me. I will remember that for the rest of my life.” Hickenlooper said.
Denver and the suburbs are in this together, Hickenlooper kept saying during that mayoral campaign.
“The historic animosity between Denver and the suburbs was a tremendous waste of energy and resources,” Hickenlooper said. “People are fed up with partisan fighting over every little thing, to try to make political points.”
Get past the politics to create progress, he said.
“There’s more appetite for that now than there ever has been,” he said.
During his mayoral campaigns, he pledged that Denver would not poach businesses from the suburbs. He was told that it was a non-starter for two reasons.
“First, you’re never gonna win, and second, even if you win and do half of what you’re talking about, you’ll never get re-elected,” Hickenlooper said he was told.
He won that first mayoral run, and won re-election with 87 percent of the vote.
Listing what went right
During that thank-you lunch, the governor rattled off a list of accomplishments, including the affordable housing tax credit, affordable housing for creative workers, cleaning up the state’s draconian construction defects law, public/private partnerships in transitional housing, government transparency, increased health insurance coverage, reducing teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion by 60 percent in the last eight years — the list grows as his administration wanes.
“Every one of these ideas started out in the community. People and organizations stepped up and said, …read more
Via:: Vail Daily