00:00:00
Speaker 1: All right, good morning. Happy Friday. I'm Ross.
00:00:02
Speaker 2: There's Epic Gina over there with her Bronco sweater. Shannon behind the glass and joining us by Zoom today. It's usually phone, but it's Zoom today is Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver. And Mike, as I'm sure you are, you are aware because I think you proclaimed it a Denver holiday today. Anyway, today is National Candy Corn Day. And I'm just curious how you feel about candy corn. I mean, obviously you enjoy it if you gave all Denver employees the day off to celebrate National Candy Corn Day.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: I mean, it's one of the most revered holidays. We try to give it its due. I'm actually a big candy corn believer, particularly this time of year. You can binge it for a solid three or four days before you start to get sick to your stomach. So you got to get your whole year's worth of candy corn in on these three days.
00:00:49
Speaker 4: Are you just candy corn or do you have that fall mix that they do with those weird chalky fat pumpkins that they have in with it?
00:00:57
Speaker 1: You still there, man?
00:00:59
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: Can you not hear us? Can you hear Gina? Could you hear Gina? I could not hear Gina.
00:01:05
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
00:01:06
Speaker 2: Now I can.
00:01:07
Speaker 1: Now I got Gina back. Okay.
00:01:08
Speaker 4: Well, my most important question was, do you also eat the fall mix with those big, fat, chalky orange pumpkins in with the candy corn or just the candy corn?
00:01:16
Speaker 3: No, not as much a fan of those. The ratio is off of just too much. It's too much candy to corn in that ratio. Yep.
00:01:22
Speaker 1: That's the right answer. That's the right answer. All right. Let's talk about some other stuff.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: What is up with this back and forth between you and the city auditor, Tim O'Brien, who says he wants some information about how the city prepares its budget. And he's saying that you're saying that this is deliberative material and you're not going.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: To give it to him.
00:01:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really, I think, not nearly as big of a deal as you may believe. The first thing is our budget is probably the most transparent document that we have. We present it in public. We do 40 hours of public hearings. You can watch on live television. We amend it in public. We present it to the press with unlimited questions on the process. So it's an incredibly transparent process. I have 27 agency heads, we spent 1,000 hours probably working on this document.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: And so he's asking for all.
00:02:16
Speaker 3: Sorts of draft documents of, in my first conversation with an agency head nine months ago, what did we talk about? That's an impossible task to meet with products that aren't done. I think there's a lot of good ideas that you have, bad ideas you throw out. All the things we come forward with is our best plan we present publicly, and we think that's fully available and compliant with all the expectations of auditing.
00:02:38
Speaker 4: So the information of putting together the budget, is that something that's usually not given? Like you said, those meetings, that's not something that's usually considered when he's doing the audit of looking into the budget making process?
00:02:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the first time I sit down with an agency head and she says, here are four things I'm thinking about doing, but I'm not sure about these two. I want to learn more about option A versus option B, and I'll come back to you. But I'm not ready yet to make a recommendation. Then she'll come back a month later with a proposed draft. That draft gets written and then introduced and people see it. But I think that deliberation of her thinking through what the best ideas are and us giving any feedback is It's not often a document.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: It's not recorded. It's early draft conversations.
00:03:18
Speaker 3: We don't give the first draft of our idea on what our child care plan would be either. Those are all things we try to work on to make tighter and better.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: It's work product. ready for public feedback.
00:03:30
Speaker 3: We go out for public feedback and nothing gets more public feedback than the budget.
00:03:33
Speaker 1: I mean, to me, this is all very in the weeds kind of stuff.
00:03:37
Speaker 2: But to me, it's interesting in that it seems like the auditor is trying to get a handle on the budget making process, not looking to make judgments about should you have spent more or less on this thing or that thing.
00:03:49
Speaker 1: And if he has the authority to.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: Audit the budget making process, then I would think by default, he should probably get more rather than less of the stuff involved in that.
00:03:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've said when we talked about this a week ago, we're happy to give them access to all of the items around the process that we go through.
00:04:06
Speaker 1: What do we do?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: What meetings are held? What information is considered? How do we screen them? Certainly that's all easily accessible. That's different than every conversation or email or conversation in the hallway about what the changes or potential options could be for the budget. And so I think it's a matter of what's manageable on direct information and what we decided or didn't decide.
00:04:28
Speaker 1: It's just what is the process we go through. That's very easy to share.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: I think he hasn't really decided what it is that he needs. And so we've said, if you can tell us what you need on process, we're happy to give it.
00:04:35
Speaker 2: Let me do one very quick experiment here. I'm going to keep my microphone off and I'm going to ask Gina to say something.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: And I want to see if Mike can.
00:04:41
Speaker 2: Hear it because it seemed like he couldn't hear you when my mic was off last time. So let's try this and turn my mic off and you say something.
00:04:49
Speaker 1: Here I am. I'm saying something right now.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: Hello.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Hello. Could you hear?
00:04:53
Speaker 3: I did get you on the here I am.
00:04:54
Speaker 1: I'm saying something. Okay.
00:04:55
Speaker 2: It was delayed.
00:04:56
Speaker 1: All right.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: But I appreciated your hypothesis with the scientific method there on the experiment testing, Ross.
00:05:01
Speaker 1: Troubleshooting on live radio here.
00:05:04
Speaker 2: Mr.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: Mayor, I'm curious.
00:05:05
Speaker 4: Also in the budget, it seems like there's been some major cuts to Denver's temporary rental and utility assistance program. That offers up to six months of rental assistance. And it seemed like in the last budget, it was at $ 15.
00:05:18
Speaker 2: 1 million.
00:05:19
Speaker 4: This proposed budget looks like it's only at 4.5 million. So why such a major cut? And do you have any concerns about evictions that could be leading to more homelessness in the city?
00:05:31
Speaker 3: I mean, first, we're very focused on stopping evictions and on preventing people from entering homelessness. And we've been very successful at doing that in the last few years. What we've been doing with our rental assistance program is focusing more and more narrowly on who are the people that are at risk of eviction that really might end up homeless. We know we have a lot of folks that might be facing eviction that do have another safety net. They have a parent they can stay with or friends that they can stay with. That means they're not at most serious risk. And so we've been doing that. And we actually have Harvard doing an analysis with us on what they think the best formula is to address that. Because you do have sometimes folks who apply for rental assistance who are in high rises in Cherry Creek. We know that they might be facing the end of a lease. It does mean that they're the most at need population. And so we have a Harvard study coming out this spring that's going to lay out, I think, recommendations on where to go forward. So our response has been let's fund this for the first part of the year based on these resources, see what the comprehensive evaluation says on where we need to spend more and less, and then make adjustments in the middle of the year.
00:06:31
Speaker 2: We're talking with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: Mike, a topic that has popped up in.
00:06:36
Speaker 2: The last several months and doesn't seem to be going away, and I don't just mean in Denver, but everywhere, is data centers. And I saw a piece over at Axios about CoreSight. And one of the things that jumped out at me, and I'm sure has been in your mind as well, I'll just quote this, CoreSight operated largely under the radar, running two data centers, including one inside a historic downtown building with little public scrutiny. Which of course says to me that it's entirely possible to run some of these things without bothering the public. And that a lot of the opposition to data centers right now is either misinformed or funded by China who wants to slow us down or whatever. But now CoreSight has this thing that's been in the works for a while in Elyria Swansea.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: And maybe just give us an update on the.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Play of data centers, not just CoreSight in Denver.
00:07:29
Speaker 3: I think what has changed, Ross, you're right, is that the scale and the use of these data centers are so dramatically different now with the advent of AI.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: You're right.
00:07:37
Speaker 1: They do have one in.
00:07:38
Speaker 3: Downtown Denver in the powered electric building, which you would walk by and never know. It's essentially an adaptation of a commercial building into a data center. That's a very small scale one. The ones that are being built now often can use 250,000 gallons of water a day.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: They can uh in many ways you know have huge impacts.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: On the electric grid where you have to use so much more energy that it increases prices in the neighborhood and so these what they'll call hyper scaling data centers are a far different animal than what we've seen before um and we didn't have something in our zoning code to regulate them so i think there could be appropriate places and uses but i think what we're seeing more and more from these data center builders is an agreement Yes, we should probably bring our own energy supply if we're going to use this much energy. We should not use a quarter of a million gallons of water a day. We need a closed-loop water system. And we should not increase people's rates in the neighborhood. We should, if anything, drop their rates to show that that's a benefit. So I think there should be a core set of agreements. But some of these very, very large new hyperscaling ones, the ones you're seeing them build in New Mexico and Utah, are 1,000 acres. I mean, they're massive operations. And so I think that we're talking about a different scale now.
00:08:44
Speaker 2: Mr.
00:08:44
Speaker 4: Mayor, before we go, I'm not sure if we'll have a chance to talk to you before Tuesday's midterm election. Maybe just a little bit of the encouragement of getting out the vote. And then I'm curious if you have any endorsements on any of the ballot initiatives, the amendments, or the many, many people that are on the crowded at-large city council seat for Denver.
00:09:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not engaged in the at-large city council race. I will just encourage people both, yes, please fill out your ballot, and particularly in Colorado, stick with it, because this is one of the longest ballots we've ever had, and so it's easy to give up, you know, a third of the way through, but this is a really important job as a citizen, and these things will all have an impact on you, whether you vote or not, so we'd rather have your voice engaged. I mean, there are a ton of them to talk about. I know I don't have the full 30 minutes. I'd say one that I am engaged in supporting that. I think it's really critical for us is this front-range passenger rail. It is a chance for us to have a train that would run from Pueblo, Colorado Springs, up through Denver, up to Fort Collins or beyond. And I think the benefit is that means you could get to a Bronco game, to a Nuggets or an Az game from anywhere in the city, drop right off at Burnham Yard and walk in the door immediately.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: A lot more commerce, it means, for Denver.
00:09:53
Speaker 3: More people can get to the city to spend money here and get in without having to be stuck at I-25 in traffic.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: So that's one.
00:09:59
Speaker 3: That i think is a good infrastructure investment for the for the state um i think folks should take a careful look at denver mayor.
00:10:05
Speaker 4: Mike johnston thanks for your time as always appreciate it.
00:10:08
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me y'all have a great morning yep have a great halloween mike okay that was uh interesting Super interesting, actually, Gina, that.
00:10:15
Speaker 1: He picked that one.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: Because that's one of the ones I am most against. A massive white elephant boondoggle waste of money.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: But Mayor Johnston loves it, so you make up your own mind.
Speaker 1: All right, good morning. Happy Friday. I'm Ross.
00:00:02
Speaker 2: There's Epic Gina over there with her Bronco sweater. Shannon behind the glass and joining us by Zoom today. It's usually phone, but it's Zoom today is Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver. And Mike, as I'm sure you are, you are aware because I think you proclaimed it a Denver holiday today. Anyway, today is National Candy Corn Day. And I'm just curious how you feel about candy corn. I mean, obviously you enjoy it if you gave all Denver employees the day off to celebrate National Candy Corn Day.
00:00:36
Speaker 3: I mean, it's one of the most revered holidays. We try to give it its due. I'm actually a big candy corn believer, particularly this time of year. You can binge it for a solid three or four days before you start to get sick to your stomach. So you got to get your whole year's worth of candy corn in on these three days.
00:00:49
Speaker 4: Are you just candy corn or do you have that fall mix that they do with those weird chalky fat pumpkins that they have in with it?
00:00:57
Speaker 1: You still there, man?
00:00:59
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:00:59
Speaker 1: Can you not hear us? Can you hear Gina? Could you hear Gina? I could not hear Gina.
00:01:05
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:01:05
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
00:01:06
Speaker 2: Now I can.
00:01:07
Speaker 1: Now I got Gina back. Okay.
00:01:08
Speaker 4: Well, my most important question was, do you also eat the fall mix with those big, fat, chalky orange pumpkins in with the candy corn or just the candy corn?
00:01:16
Speaker 3: No, not as much a fan of those. The ratio is off of just too much. It's too much candy to corn in that ratio. Yep.
00:01:22
Speaker 1: That's the right answer. That's the right answer. All right. Let's talk about some other stuff.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: What is up with this back and forth between you and the city auditor, Tim O'Brien, who says he wants some information about how the city prepares its budget. And he's saying that you're saying that this is deliberative material and you're not going.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: To give it to him.
00:01:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really, I think, not nearly as big of a deal as you may believe. The first thing is our budget is probably the most transparent document that we have. We present it in public. We do 40 hours of public hearings. You can watch on live television. We amend it in public. We present it to the press with unlimited questions on the process. So it's an incredibly transparent process. I have 27 agency heads, we spent 1,000 hours probably working on this document.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: And so he's asking for all.
00:02:16
Speaker 3: Sorts of draft documents of, in my first conversation with an agency head nine months ago, what did we talk about? That's an impossible task to meet with products that aren't done. I think there's a lot of good ideas that you have, bad ideas you throw out. All the things we come forward with is our best plan we present publicly, and we think that's fully available and compliant with all the expectations of auditing.
00:02:38
Speaker 4: So the information of putting together the budget, is that something that's usually not given? Like you said, those meetings, that's not something that's usually considered when he's doing the audit of looking into the budget making process?
00:02:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the first time I sit down with an agency head and she says, here are four things I'm thinking about doing, but I'm not sure about these two. I want to learn more about option A versus option B, and I'll come back to you. But I'm not ready yet to make a recommendation. Then she'll come back a month later with a proposed draft. That draft gets written and then introduced and people see it. But I think that deliberation of her thinking through what the best ideas are and us giving any feedback is It's not often a document.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: It's not recorded. It's early draft conversations.
00:03:18
Speaker 3: We don't give the first draft of our idea on what our child care plan would be either. Those are all things we try to work on to make tighter and better.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: It's work product. ready for public feedback.
00:03:30
Speaker 3: We go out for public feedback and nothing gets more public feedback than the budget.
00:03:33
Speaker 1: I mean, to me, this is all very in the weeds kind of stuff.
00:03:37
Speaker 2: But to me, it's interesting in that it seems like the auditor is trying to get a handle on the budget making process, not looking to make judgments about should you have spent more or less on this thing or that thing.
00:03:49
Speaker 1: And if he has the authority to.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: Audit the budget making process, then I would think by default, he should probably get more rather than less of the stuff involved in that.
00:03:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've said when we talked about this a week ago, we're happy to give them access to all of the items around the process that we go through.
00:04:06
Speaker 1: What do we do?
00:04:07
Speaker 3: What meetings are held? What information is considered? How do we screen them? Certainly that's all easily accessible. That's different than every conversation or email or conversation in the hallway about what the changes or potential options could be for the budget. And so I think it's a matter of what's manageable on direct information and what we decided or didn't decide.
00:04:28
Speaker 1: It's just what is the process we go through. That's very easy to share.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: I think he hasn't really decided what it is that he needs. And so we've said, if you can tell us what you need on process, we're happy to give it.
00:04:35
Speaker 2: Let me do one very quick experiment here. I'm going to keep my microphone off and I'm going to ask Gina to say something.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: And I want to see if Mike can.
00:04:41
Speaker 2: Hear it because it seemed like he couldn't hear you when my mic was off last time. So let's try this and turn my mic off and you say something.
00:04:49
Speaker 1: Here I am. I'm saying something right now.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: Hello.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: Hello. Could you hear?
00:04:53
Speaker 3: I did get you on the here I am.
00:04:54
Speaker 1: I'm saying something. Okay.
00:04:55
Speaker 2: It was delayed.
00:04:56
Speaker 1: All right.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: But I appreciated your hypothesis with the scientific method there on the experiment testing, Ross.
00:05:01
Speaker 1: Troubleshooting on live radio here.
00:05:04
Speaker 2: Mr.
00:05:04
Speaker 1: Mayor, I'm curious.
00:05:05
Speaker 4: Also in the budget, it seems like there's been some major cuts to Denver's temporary rental and utility assistance program. That offers up to six months of rental assistance. And it seemed like in the last budget, it was at $ 15.
00:05:18
Speaker 2: 1 million.
00:05:19
Speaker 4: This proposed budget looks like it's only at 4.5 million. So why such a major cut? And do you have any concerns about evictions that could be leading to more homelessness in the city?
00:05:31
Speaker 3: I mean, first, we're very focused on stopping evictions and on preventing people from entering homelessness. And we've been very successful at doing that in the last few years. What we've been doing with our rental assistance program is focusing more and more narrowly on who are the people that are at risk of eviction that really might end up homeless. We know we have a lot of folks that might be facing eviction that do have another safety net. They have a parent they can stay with or friends that they can stay with. That means they're not at most serious risk. And so we've been doing that. And we actually have Harvard doing an analysis with us on what they think the best formula is to address that. Because you do have sometimes folks who apply for rental assistance who are in high rises in Cherry Creek. We know that they might be facing the end of a lease. It does mean that they're the most at need population. And so we have a Harvard study coming out this spring that's going to lay out, I think, recommendations on where to go forward. So our response has been let's fund this for the first part of the year based on these resources, see what the comprehensive evaluation says on where we need to spend more and less, and then make adjustments in the middle of the year.
00:06:31
Speaker 2: We're talking with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: Mike, a topic that has popped up in.
00:06:36
Speaker 2: The last several months and doesn't seem to be going away, and I don't just mean in Denver, but everywhere, is data centers. And I saw a piece over at Axios about CoreSight. And one of the things that jumped out at me, and I'm sure has been in your mind as well, I'll just quote this, CoreSight operated largely under the radar, running two data centers, including one inside a historic downtown building with little public scrutiny. Which of course says to me that it's entirely possible to run some of these things without bothering the public. And that a lot of the opposition to data centers right now is either misinformed or funded by China who wants to slow us down or whatever. But now CoreSight has this thing that's been in the works for a while in Elyria Swansea.
00:07:22
Speaker 1: And maybe just give us an update on the.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Play of data centers, not just CoreSight in Denver.
00:07:29
Speaker 3: I think what has changed, Ross, you're right, is that the scale and the use of these data centers are so dramatically different now with the advent of AI.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: You're right.
00:07:37
Speaker 1: They do have one in.
00:07:38
Speaker 3: Downtown Denver in the powered electric building, which you would walk by and never know. It's essentially an adaptation of a commercial building into a data center. That's a very small scale one. The ones that are being built now often can use 250,000 gallons of water a day.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: They can uh in many ways you know have huge impacts.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: On the electric grid where you have to use so much more energy that it increases prices in the neighborhood and so these what they'll call hyper scaling data centers are a far different animal than what we've seen before um and we didn't have something in our zoning code to regulate them so i think there could be appropriate places and uses but i think what we're seeing more and more from these data center builders is an agreement Yes, we should probably bring our own energy supply if we're going to use this much energy. We should not use a quarter of a million gallons of water a day. We need a closed-loop water system. And we should not increase people's rates in the neighborhood. We should, if anything, drop their rates to show that that's a benefit. So I think there should be a core set of agreements. But some of these very, very large new hyperscaling ones, the ones you're seeing them build in New Mexico and Utah, are 1,000 acres. I mean, they're massive operations. And so I think that we're talking about a different scale now.
00:08:44
Speaker 2: Mr.
00:08:44
Speaker 4: Mayor, before we go, I'm not sure if we'll have a chance to talk to you before Tuesday's midterm election. Maybe just a little bit of the encouragement of getting out the vote. And then I'm curious if you have any endorsements on any of the ballot initiatives, the amendments, or the many, many people that are on the crowded at-large city council seat for Denver.
00:09:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not engaged in the at-large city council race. I will just encourage people both, yes, please fill out your ballot, and particularly in Colorado, stick with it, because this is one of the longest ballots we've ever had, and so it's easy to give up, you know, a third of the way through, but this is a really important job as a citizen, and these things will all have an impact on you, whether you vote or not, so we'd rather have your voice engaged. I mean, there are a ton of them to talk about. I know I don't have the full 30 minutes. I'd say one that I am engaged in supporting that. I think it's really critical for us is this front-range passenger rail. It is a chance for us to have a train that would run from Pueblo, Colorado Springs, up through Denver, up to Fort Collins or beyond. And I think the benefit is that means you could get to a Bronco game, to a Nuggets or an Az game from anywhere in the city, drop right off at Burnham Yard and walk in the door immediately.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: A lot more commerce, it means, for Denver.
00:09:53
Speaker 3: More people can get to the city to spend money here and get in without having to be stuck at I-25 in traffic.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: So that's one.
00:09:59
Speaker 3: That i think is a good infrastructure investment for the for the state um i think folks should take a careful look at denver mayor.
00:10:05
Speaker 4: Mike johnston thanks for your time as always appreciate it.
00:10:08
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me y'all have a great morning yep have a great halloween mike okay that was uh interesting Super interesting, actually, Gina, that.
00:10:15
Speaker 1: He picked that one.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: Because that's one of the ones I am most against. A massive white elephant boondoggle waste of money.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: But Mayor Johnston loves it, so you make up your own mind.
