Former Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO)
U.S. Conference of Mayors
Washington, DC
January 24, 2019

It is good to be back home with mayors.  I want to thank Mayor Benjamin not just for the warm introduction but also for all the work he's done with this organization; also Brian Barnett; second president, vice president, Greg Fischer, who I know from Louisville; and always past president Elizabeth Kautz, who was, kind of helped mentor me along when I was a young mayor myself;
and always Tom Cochran, who has really helped put so much of his life into this place.

I'm going to try and leave you with three things in my brief time here.

One is, well, probably the most important thing is make sure you realize that making sure you have a great successor is crucial to your success.  So, I realize that there are a lot of great mayors in this room, but I like to think that first among equals is Michael Hancock, so let me leave you with that.

The three other things I want to make sure you have, you recognize, is that in my lifetime things have never been worse in this country.  I'm not going to go down the list; you know what it is.  When, when truth becomes distorted, when immigrants at the border have their children ripped from their arms and actually adopted away from them—I could go down the list.  In my office, we have, we don't say the word Donald Trump because you, you will end up wasting too much time. It's never a five minute discussion, it's always a 45 minute discussion.

I will tell you the second thing is that the solution is unity and finding ways to work together and collaborate.  You know I'm not, I'm not quite to that point of announcing I'm going to run for president of this country, but I do think that being, having been a mayor provides wonderful training and experience of finding ways to bring people together and achieving progressive goals and accomplishments through that unity.

Then the third thing I'm going to leave you with is that you all are the solution, and never has there been more distrust of government in my lifetime.  And yet [at] the same time you see all over the country, people are stepping up and looking at where do they trust government, and it is always at the local level.  The distrust for federal government is out of control.  The state governments, lot of questioning, local government has true belief.

The quick, those of you who are new to this world, you know, I came out to Colorado almost 40 years ago from Philadelphia.  My mother had been widowed twice before she was 40.  She raised four kids by herself.  She always told us you can't control what comes but you can control how you react, whether makes you better or worse, stronger or weaker.

When I came out to Colorado as a geologist attracted by that notion of freedom and independence. But what I found was a world that had been successfully settled, because of collaboration.  People talk about all the shootouts on Main Street.  There were only about a half dozen in recorded history, but there were tens of thousands of barn raising, and the West was really settled by wagon trains, where people worked together; everyone had a fixed, a fixed role.

I came as a geologist, as I said.  The commodities prices tanked in the '80s.  I got laid off.  There were in that six year period, there were 25,000 geologists lost their jobs.  So like a lot of people in the '80s and '90s I lost not just my job but I lost my profession.  I ended up opening a brew pub in 1988 in a forgotten part of lower downtown called, back then it was just being to be called LoDo. Rent was a dollar a square foot per year just to give you a frame of how rough it was, but we went out and worked with the other mayors. The other mayors—other restauranteurs.  There's so much commonality between a mayor and a restauranteur, let me just tell you.

And we've got the other five restauranteurs to collaborate, take ads out together, really create a sense of place.  And we built LoDo into what is really one of the national models for urban revitalization.  And that collaborative approach when I got talked into running for mayor in 2003, I'd never run for student council in my life.

And it was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  In the restaurant business I learned that, you know, when you're in the weeds, when there's a big rush, it doesn't matter whether you're tall or short, straight or gay, black or white, everybody's the same family.  And you also learned that there's no margin in having enemies, no profit.  No matter how unreasonable that customer is, you need to maintain that relationship.  And you also learn that building a team and surrounding yourself with talent is the single most important thing you can do.

And we got those, those lessons into our head.  You know I got elected in 2003, and as Michael Hancock can tell you, Denver is a great mayor form of government.  City Council—there are 13 city council members; to change one line item of your budget, they need nine out of 13 votes.  It's just a great system.  [laughter in audience]

We took on a bunch of challenges right away.  First off, I went and worked with the suburban mayors and I talked about unity, and the importance of bringing people together.  We got all 34 mayors in metropolitan Denver in 2004 to unanimously support a significant tax increase to build 122 miles of new light rail track.  That unity allowed us to build what they call fast tracks, and that investment not only attracted millennials to our city, who are entrepreneurs and job creators, but it also allowed the community to begin to work together.  And all the metro mayors created a pact that they wouldn't offer incentives or any kind of cash incentive reward to poach businesses from one municipality to the other.  If you watched what happened with Amazon, you realize how kind of ridiculous that is sometimes.  Richard Florida was kind of our mentor; I know he was here yesterday.

A big part of that, that uniting of the suburban mayors, was, it was not partisan.  And you mayors understand more than anyone that it's about, it's once the election's over about getting everyone together.  It's about finding the right, the right plans and the right challenges to get business and nonprofits, and government to act united.

We did fast tracks.  Mayor Hancock has taken that to the next level with his work around the airport.  Again, it always helps to have a mayor that does big things after you.  These are all job creators and they're all things that brought Republicans and Democrats together.

Affordable housing is a huge issue in many communities now.  The cost of construction has been up 25% just in the last four years, especially workforce housing is in short supply almost everywhere. I think the federal government could obviously play a role in that, but it's going to have to delegate power to the mayors and to the regions to get it done.  Maybe there's a possibility to create a pool of funds whereby the money is loaned out to fill the gap, and make it worthwhile for developers to build workforce housing.

Training.  You know there's gonna be lots of jobs coming, but 70% of our kids—and this has been true for 30 years—are never going to get that four year degree, no matter how hard we work at it. We've got to transform how we give kids skills so that throughout their whole life they're acquiring those skills and preparing themselves for the job market that's going to be continually changing.

We got a $26 million grant a year and a half ago from Microsoft to create a tech platform that will eventually allow kids to create a profile of skills throughout their whole life, but at the same time, when they need to change their profession, they're going to be able to go click on this thing and see what job, what skills they have that are applicable, but what skills are going to need and where they can get them.

Climate change is a classic challenge.  It's going to affect all of us one way or the other.  We need to be unified around it, and we need to bring the warring factions together.  In Colorado, we were able to get the oil and gas industry to sit down with the environmental community, and actually create methane regulations.  Methane is 40 times worse in terms of climate change, than CO2. And we got the, the industry, and this took 14 months of negotiation; it was like having the Hatfields and the McCoys.  And in every case it was just getting people to listen harder.  You know, I've never persuaded anybody of anything by telling them why I was right, they were wrong.  The only way you persuade anyone of anything is to listen to them harder.  And we got the oil and gas guys and environmental community to agree that, the oil and guys agreed to step up and put up $60 million a year to inspect every connection, and every tank and every pump; and it's the equivalent of removing 320,000 automobiles from the roads.

I think the situation we're facing now, as I said, is the worst in my lifetime.  But it's also filled with opportunity, and especially for mayors.  Tom Paine after the defeat after the Battle of Trenton, he was writing on a drum head.  He said without great struggle there can be no glorious triumph.  And this is an opportunity for, for heroes to step up and for, for extraordinary actions and extraordinary deeds from sometimes ordinary people.

A lot of people told me well it's a, you talk about bringing people together and you know you got doctors and Republicans and Democrats to, to come together and provide long acting reversible contraception to every 15 to 25 year old young woman in Colorado who wanted it.  We've reduced teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion by 60% in the last eight years. Ah, that's impossible, you can't do that on a national level.  That is nonsense.  We absolutely can.  I'm not saying the hill isn't steep.

When I first ran for mayor and, you know, as I said, I've never run for student council.  I didn't hang out with the people that did.  I'm not trying to insult anybody in this room.

But when I started, and I had, I didn't go anywhere in the polls.  I was at 3 or 4%.  And I carried this clipping around to fire up my young, my young volunteers.  And was about the professor of public speaking at the University of Wyoming and talking about the importance of using opposites.  You talk about the worst of times; talk about the best of times.  You talk about the agony; talk about the ecstasy.  She asked her class what's the opposite of despair.  A kid raised their hand, goes joy? She goes exactly; you want people to feel despair, use joy in the same sentence.  And then she looked around one more time and she said what's the, what's the opposite of woe.  And a kid way in the goes, giddy up!  [laughter]

And the bottom line is, and I think at this moment in our history is the time to recognize it and repeat it, is that the opposite of woe is working harder, right, and the opposite of woe for this country is to giddy up.  Thank you all.