Letters To The Editor July 2023
Wins We Can Build On
While the results in my race are not what I hoped for, the goal in this election was to bring more progressive candidates to the table. And this has already happened, with Sarah Parady’s at-large win in April and with Shontel Lewis’s District 8 win.
This was never about “Candi” — this was about building power for community, to shift the way that our city moves. More people are paying attention and getting involved across districts, and those are wins we can build on.
I see our work in this election cycle as very consequential. We had a net gain in our two progressive votes on council, we defeated a disastrous proposal to develop our last track of open space in already extremely gentrifying and green space-deprived communities, and we brought a community candidate within less than 2 percentage points of being in a mayoral runoff.
I’m so grateful for our community, for everyone who poured their hearts and souls into this movement. I’m proud of what my team and I have accomplished over the last four years: We have been building the best world possible with what resources we have, and we have been fighting for what everybody deserves. Our wins happen daily, and no election will ever determine our worth or work ethic. We were serving District 9 before coming into office, and we will continue that work far beyond elected office.
Our real opponents, the faceless Denver power brokers and big-money interests, spent an unprecedented amount of money to buy back this city council seat — over $888,000, most of it from dark money independent expenditures spreading disinformation and weaponizing misogyny and racism. They’ll be expecting a big return on that investment. While the overpowering misinformation and anonymity worked to confuse an exhausted electorate this time, we must be more vigilant than ever and demand transparency and openness from your newly elected officials now that the fox is guarding the henhouse.
I will not stop fighting along my community for a city that truly cares for all of its people, because District 9 and Denver are my heart, always.
Candi CdeBaca, Elyria/Swansea
Editor’s note: The author is currently the City Council representative for District 9, which as of this year includes parts of South and North Park Hill. She was defeated in the June 6 runoff election by Darrell Watson.
Do We Need To Save Downtown?
Downtown office buildings are half full. There are discussions of turning them into apartment houses. Estimates seem to suggest that conversion to residential will be prohibitively costly. Maybe newly-elected Mayor Mike Johnston can move some tiny houses in.
It would appear that the concept of putting all the offices downtown and building freeways wide enough to move hundreds of thousands of commuters to work is a recurring failure. When the freeways are full, forcing people to ride light rail, bus, taxi, bicycles, scooters to get downtown has failed. It doesn’t work. People can work at home. Information can be distributed via the web. It would be appear to be the human preference for their lives.
But, then again, we have the mantra of the real estate world, “location, location, location” to demand that we find a way to preserve downtown exactly as it was. Mayor-in-waiting Johnston has pledged to make the renewal of downtown the top of his concerns.
It’s not as if downtown has survived on its own. While many projects have been built and subsidized by your tax dollars, it should be a bit harder to spend money on a dysfunctional plan.
The Skyline Urban Renewal project required the destruction of a wide swath of downtown itself. The Skyline project was a mammoth failure, causing the widening of every highway in the metro area so the commuters could fill the vacant lots where premature demolition and fanciful plans had created a vast asphalt prairie. (Including bridges over downtown streets so Denverites could enjoy the same protection from our frigid winters and summer heat as Minneapolis had produced with its new bridges.) When slow development finally abolished the cheap parking lots, every building tried to include multi-story parking garages below the office- and street-level tourist shops.
The highways remained stuffed to the gills. Commuters rejected the mass transit. The pandemic showed people they could work from home.
Suddenly, time passed downtown. The only reason workers are required to return to the office is to keep the pre-leased real estate occupied. People found that they could find work options, which preferred people to work from home substantially to cut the cost of headquarters.
So, do we want to build a third convention center to lure tourists into the empty spaces in the neighborhood? Or should we tear down upper downtown to build the new football stadium? Or should we spend the money making our neighborhoods self-supporting and walkable and let downtown’s captains of the economy fend for themselves?
Or, is it our obligation to subsidize the heart of Colorado business with our money so we can be like other cities? While the people who can afford to purchase the policies say downtown is essential to the city’s survival, we might counter with the fact that neither Paris nor London seem to have our versions of downtown with cheek-by-jowl high-rises,18-lane freeways and the homeless.
Just askin’?
Tom Morris, Cheesman Park
We love your letters, and give preference to those that address an issue that has been covered in the newspaper, or a topic that is Park Hill or Denver-specific. Send letters to editor@greaterparkhill.org, and include your full name, and the neighborhood in which you live. Deadlines are the 15th of each month, for the following month’s issue.