Last week I attended the KPMG Roundtable sponsored. The roundtable brought to mind some interesting civic memories. The title of the discussion was “Going Forward: Reform and Recovery.”

KPMG, Denver’s former outside auditors of a few years back, picked up on risk assessment issues with Mayor and Council on what the Denver Auditor’s Office should audit. And for a brief time, the Mayor’s so-called Financial Experts Committee, given the charge of suggesting how our city charter should be changed to reform our city’s audit committee, came up with some very poor ideas for reform.

It started when KPMG picked up on comments from Mayor and Council that the administrative and the legislative branches wanted more input on what audits were to be done in Denver. Remember the Auditor’s Office hosts a nesting ground for future mayors. “More input” meant limiting the independence of the auditor to select which audits should be done. They were worried about audit politics. Many a Denver Auditor has lusted to be mayor. And many an auditor running for mayor has made the life of many a mayor miserable in the pursuit of unbridled vaulting ambition. Thank you, Macbeth.

I look back with humor now, but at one point in the negotiations with Mayor and Council concerning Auditor’s Office reform which eventually made it to a charter vote, the Financial Experts Committee would have mandated that the Auditor make an appointment with Mayor and Council and bring a little tin cup and beg leave to do an audit. Most discussion centered on the membership of the city’s fledgling, motley, and not independent audit committee. At that time the Mayor made all the appointments to the audit committee, including two members of his cabinet who could cushion issues for the press where lack of internal controls were found in various departments. Thankfully, the mayor appointed the Auditor to the audit committee, good judgment on his part. I vigorously and clearly informed the mayor, council and the financial experts, that the Auditor has to be free to exercise independent judgment free from administrative or legislative influence. And we needed a fully independent audit committee, and if we did not achieve these to important principles, I would see them all in the precincts of Denver campaigning against them and these Enron-like attitudes. I am happy to report they did not want to see me in the precincts working against any charter change eating away at auditor’s and audit committee’s independence. I just kept repeating: “Does anyone here remember Enron?” And that strategy worked.

But the negotiations hinged on another important point. In my view good politics is often about good relationships. Because of a long-term collegial relationship, keeping it civil and agreeing to disagree, the mayor and I worked out the reforms for the independent auditor’s office. For the city’s audit committee, the mayor and council each make two appointments, and I make two appointments and serve as Committee Chair. The mayor gave up power, appointing all the committee members and the auditor’s office gave up payroll and accounting, which we should never have had in the first place. But in 1906, who knew? We now audit payroll and accounting. This has worked out just fine.

On risk assessment and how the auditor’s office determines which audits to do, the charter asks the auditor to seek from Mayor and Council, for information purposes only, which areas and departments need audit help. So each year, while not mandated in charter language, Kip Memmott, the director of Internal Audit, take the extra step to reach out and get feedback. We interview each appointed department head, the mayor, and council to get input and feedback of risks which might be raising their heads across the city. This enables us to get firsthand feedback as to problems in the departments. Mayor and council can suggest audits, but cannot dictate which audits should be done. The auditor’s office is totally independent of administrative and legislative influence as to audits in the lineup. This is working out just fine.

The 2010 Audit plan can be see on our website. I hope you will look at it and let us know what you would like to see audited for next year.

WILL AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS SURVIVE THE FINANCIAL CRISIS?

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Over the past generation, signs of middle-class distress have continued to grow, in good times and bad, in recession and in boom. Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the bank bailouts points out in a recent column that, “Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street. “

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

Policies to strengthen the weakened middle class will certainly include the creation of jobs, helping families to build assets and reduce debt, making higher education more accessible and affordable, and addressing the healthcare crisis.
America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once solid foundation of our nation has certainly been shaken.

Wrestling With Moses

Wrestling with Moses, Anthony Flint's book does not discuss the
Israelites crossing the desert from Egypt.

Wrestling with Moses tells the gripping story of how Jane Jacobs took on
New York's Robert Moses and changed the American city forever. It is
more the story of David fighting Goliath, the humble and lowly neighbors
locked in combat against their own arrogant politicians and city
planners. Jane got her start by leading the fight against the Lower
Manhattan Expressway expansion into her neighborhood: Washington Square
and Greenwich Village.

Jane was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and moved to New York armed with
her high school diploma. She moved to New York City in 1934 and hoped
to break into journalism. After all she did have a few months
experience writing for her hometown newspaper, "The Scrantonian." She
wanted to progress to higher education and applied to several school but
because of her lackluster high school record, Columbia's college for
women informed her she would have to take additional courses to be
accepted. She walked away and decided to educate herself. She
researched the founders of the constitution spending hours upon hours at
Columbia Library.

She met and married a Columbia architect, Robert Hyde Jacobs, and they bought a townhouse at 555 Hudson in the Village. Every year on the
anniversary of her death, people bring flowers to the address,
unfortunately now a business of some sort.

Readers will remember her magnificent book, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, published in 1961. The Random House publishers put the
following headline on the advertisement for the book: "The City Planners
are Ravaging Our Cities!" I had just graduated from Regis and I agreed
with Jane as I watched my parents and neighbors in North Denver fight
I-70 plowing through Berkeley Park, Sunnyside, Globeville, Elyria and
Swansea and Northeasterly neighborhoods. I-70 laid waste to thousands
of homes, torn off their foundations, thousands of families disrupted
and removed from their neighborhoods. Northwest Denver is finally
beginning to recover from this disruption caused by the federal
bulldozers. But the fragile neighborhoods of Globeville and
neighborhoods east of there are still struggling.

Jane's book hit a responsive chord with me as I watched Denver Urban
Renewal tear out the heart of our city by destroying hundred of historic
structures in downtown. After reading Jane's book, we all mourned what
Paul Goldberger, architectural critic of New York Times, the "unrelieved
plainness and basic dreariness of what turned out to be nondescript, big
red boxes." Any one wonders why folks like LoDo so much. It the part
of downtown where urban renewal left off. It is not healthy when
neighbors pray for a recession to block certain excessive developments
around town. Does God hear such prayers?

Let's cut to the end of the story, Jane won. She beat back Gotham's
Goliaths that won in many cities across our nation. Jane and the
neighbors beat back the plans for expansion of the Lower Manhattan
Expressway. But her book changed city planning in America forever. I
actually saw a copy of Jane's book in the Denver Planning Office not too
long ago.

Are there still wrestling matches to be waged across the neighborhoods
of Denver? What would Jane say about our city's new zoning code? Would
Jane "ooh" and "ah" over the Union Station plans? Wrestling with Moses
inspires me to get Jane's book off my shelf and remember why Denver can
be a great city. "To your tents, Oh, Israel."

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Colorado Recession Watch published by the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute reported that the recession figure for unemployment in October dipped to 6.9%. That dip, slight blip that it was, prompted the bloggers for Governor Ritter to announce that employment in Colorado has fallen below 7%. I hope you will check the two recession sites mentioned in my first sentence. Statistics do show a trend and this recession is the longest since the great depression which my folks and grand parents fought to survive.

A recent report from the city administration marked the 2008 unemployment rate for metro area was 5.1% but for Denver it was 5.7%. And as I have said before in a previous entry, if you check the unemployment rates for Globeville, Elryia and Swansea and Northeast Denver, the rate will get up around 20%.

These statistics mean little when you have been out of work for months. A former student and now a friend, has been out of work for months, has applied for thousands of openings and is about ready to lose her home. She is desperate and has applied to work as a guard at the city buildings. She wonders out loud why she got her BA from CU.

Speaking of blips in statistics, did you read where there is actually an address to which you can send money to spend down our national debt? I will check this out to let you know if this is another fund congress can raid to add more to the deficit. The report said the fund is supported by many immigrant Americans who show how grateful there are to be living under the blessings of our constitution. That's why they donate to lower our disastrous deficit - only in America.

Sand Creek

November 29th, 2009 marked the 145th anniversary of the Massacre at Sand Creek, a day which lives in infamy in Colorado history. That “dies irae,’ that terrible day of wrath, Col. John M. Chivington led members of the Colorado Cavalry in a slaughter of mostly Arapahoe and Cheyenne elderly women, children and old men. Chief Black Kettle who originally welcomed the pale faces to the banks of Cherry Creek and the Platte, was killed in the massacre under an American flag and a white flag. I wonder what went through Black Kettle's mind as he saw the pale faced soldiers killing his people "indiscriminately" as the congressional hearing reported.

On Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 8 am at Riverside Cemetery on Brighton Boulevard on Denver's border with Adams County, I along with about 100 citizens gathered at the grave of Silas Soule to commemorate his bravery in refusing to kill women and children and in testifying before a congressional committee which broke from concerns about the civil war to investigate Chivington's actions at Sand Creek; Captain Soule, showed great courage and an ethical soul that day, that terrible day. Soule refused orders to fire upon unarmed women and children at Sand Creek. Federal troops present also refused to kill unarmed women and children. Otto, Soule's nephew from Iowa, told me the name is pronounced 'sole."

Spiritual leaders of Arapahoe and Cheyenne tribes blessed runners for their participation in the 11th Annual Sand Creek Massacre

For testifying against what he saw at Sand Creek, Soule was assassinated near 15th and Arapahoe near Skyline Park. His name is listed on the civil war monument at the State Capitol among the civil war military dead. I never noticed that before.

At the ceremony at the Capitol I was honored to speak to those who gathered to mark the day.

Many Coloradoans don't remember Sand Creek, or Ludlow, or the Columbine Mine murders. Our attention spans are about as long as a 30 second TV commercial. I know we can do better to recall important historic events in our state's history.

On Friday November 20th, the “Across the USA” section of USA Today had the following depressing notice for Colorado:

“Denver – Colorado had a record-high number of foreclosures in the third quarter, when filings hit 12,468, the state Housing Department said. The quarter ending Sept. 30 was the fourth consecutive quarter in which foreclosure filings increased. For the year, foreclosure filings are up about 18% compared with the same period in 2008.”

The number of working Coloradans fell by almost 10,000 in the month of October this year. Colorado’s unemployment rate is at 5.3% better than the national average. But I would guess that the Globeville and Northeast Neighborhoods in Denver hit closer to 20%.

I hope you are as upset as I am about these statistics. They hit home to me recently when I saw my neighbor putting boxes in her station wagon. “Are you going out of town,” I asked. “Dennis, I have been out of work for some time now and I am taking the keys to my house down to the bank. My house is in foreclosure.” My neighbor got in the car and drove away.

These statistics hit home to me because I think of my own grandparents who lost their home during the depression. My grandfather lost his job on the Moffat Railroad and the Gallagher family lost their house. “The girls went to St. Clare’s Orphanage on 26th and Osceola and I (my dad) and my brother, Louie went to St. Vincent’s Orphanage on Lowell,” my dad often said. It took my grandparents two years to get back on their financial footing. My dad said, “My brother cried himself to sleep every night for two years while at St. Vincent’s.” Despite being split up from their families, the Gallagher kids had fond memories of loving nuns who tried their best helped them through those tough homeless depression years.

It affected us all. All our family reunions retold depression and orphanage stories. The stories sounded just like McCourt’s "Angela’s Ashes", without the free food wakes, without the humor, without the songs. Homeless counts continue to grow in our city.

So it’s going to take awhile for Denver and Colorado to crawl our way out of the current ‘recession.” Depressing, isn’t it?

The Real Threat

A few weeks ago I attended the Fiscal Wake-up Call initiated by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation where former Comptroller General David M. Walker reminded us of what he considered the number one threat facing our country: our ever increasing debt. It chalks up at over $180,000 per person, 56 billion as of September of 2008. It was cosponsored by University of Denver.

I agree with Walker. And I hope you will double check the website: www.pgpf.org to get the rest of the story.

But I think there is something even worse about which we should be worried when it comes to the future of our democracy. The biggest threat to our way of life is the tremendous lack of ignorance in young and old in our country as to the concepts in our constitution and form of government.

My most recent wake-up call happened on my recent visit to Skinner Middle School to listen to students present their ideas about constitution principles after a period of study. On of my fellow listeners asked a panel of students if the constitution allowed for someone to hold an opinion which might upset someone else's feelings. A student responded that the constitution did not allow people to have opinions which might hurt another's feelings. I tried to tell the students that the constitution does not prohibit unpopular opinions even those that might hurt another's feelings. I tried to remind them that the first amendment protects unpopular opinions.

I am not sure I got through in a few minutes of discussion at 8am on a cold day.

But despite the budget, I think ignorance of the constitution and other current affairs is the greatest threat to our country. We cannot give up and we have to keep fighting and arguing, with civility of course, that people have to wake up as to what our form of government is and what rights in our Bill of Rights protect us even when we hold unpopular opinions.