Full Transcript for 11-13-26 *INTERVIEW* Denver Mayor Mike Johnston Joins For His Weekly Chat

I will pass it on to my team. That'll make their week. 00:02:25 Speaker 2: No, thank you. Thank you. 00:02:27 Speaker 1: He was telling me earlier how a while back they had a licensing thing that was very difficult and took too long. 00:02:33 Speaker 2: And then lately he's noticed a significant improvement. So I thought you'd like to hear that. 00:02:38 Speaker 3: That is great news. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: All right, well, and here's the other thing, Mike. 00:02:40 Speaker 1: If you go to my blog at rosskaminsky.com and you can find a list of all their restaurants, if you go to one of their restaurants by the end of the month, tell them you heard them on KOA and they'll give you a free dessert for your table. Good. 00:02:55 Speaker 3: Ross, will you text me his number, too, so I can call him when I'm coming over? 00:02:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, I will. 00:02:59 Speaker 4: I will. 00:03:00 Speaker 1: There's five locations, so you'll have to manage to meet them at one. All right, Gina, do you have a less important question? Oh, sure. 00:03:06 Speaker 3: Why not? 00:03:07 Speaker 2: Happy almost birthday, by the way, Mr. Mayor. 00:03:09 Speaker 4: And then we obviously have to talk about the streets of Bomar, as you've jokingly called it. called it because now denver and littleton suing the town of bomar asking the judge to stop these gates that we see that the town's trying to put up blocking the streets to the public any update of when a decision could be made or is there also the policy the the possibility if i always say like the gate for a gate eye for an eye gate for a gate situation where you might be able to put up your own gates in the denver area because of this back and forth with littleton and with. 00:03:39 Speaker 3: Bomar I mean, we really want to have this signed a resolution, and I know I've made light of it in the past, but public streets are for the public. If someone was proposing closing down Speer Boulevard to public access so the Denver Country Club could have a closed street, people would find it equally preposterous. And so we have neighbors that use that street to get access to Denver addresses. If they have concerns about safety on those streets, we solve that in every neighborhood. We talk about traffic calming measures. We can do stop signs. We can do hawk signals. And so there are reasonable ways to work out any concerns about safety. But just to say we don't want any riffraff in Denver coming down Sheridan, I think it's not a reasonable solution. So we are always happy to work to find a resolution, but we're not going to. shut off our residents from access to a major public street. They need to get in and out of their homes every day. 00:04:28 Speaker 1: Why don't you pass a city ordinance that bans riffraff from living in Denver, and then we will know that anybody who is coming from Denver is not riffraff. 00:04:41 Speaker 3: I tend to believe we're all not riffraff. I'm pretty proud of our Denver folks, but I guess not everyone agrees. 00:04:45 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:04:46 Speaker 1: Denver Post headline, CDOT applies the brakes to Colorado Boulevard bus rapid transit project. This is a very interesting story, especially in the context of Colfax and how that went and how we're still figuring out how it's going. So what do you want to tell us about this project? And are you happy or unhappy or kind of neutral about the decision? 00:05:07 Speaker 2: And maybe tell us just what the decision is. 00:05:10 Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I'm happy, and I communicated directly to CDOT that we would not support a center-running bus rapid transit on Colorado Boulevard. And so they knew that. They know that they need us for the permits, and so we're grateful they agreed. I just think that, you know, there are ways to do bus rapid transit in places where they make a lot of sense. I think a center-running bus rapid transit is what we have in Colfax, where you build those giant islands in the middle of the road and it takes major construction costs, time, impact on businesses. I think that is not the right solution for Colorado Boulevard. And so we don't think that's the way to go. And I don't think that the density of commuting up and down Colorado that we have on Colfax for folks to do live in City Park and go to work downtown. And so I think that just wasn't the right design would be too disruptive for business and for the neighbors. There are, you know, on federal, we're looking at a bus rapid transit. There will also not be center running. The bus just goes in the right lane, doesn't require massive disruption. We don't have a lot of street side parking on federal. And so it's not as many folks trying to get in and out of businesses in a way that's disruptive. So there are places where it can work, but we think definitely not a center running on Colorado would not make sense. 00:06:13 Speaker 2: Do you guys have a restaurant on federal? That's what I was going to say. That's exactly what I was going to say. 00:06:18 Speaker 4: I saw their ears perk up. 00:06:20 Speaker 2: Okay, wait, construction on federal. What's going to be going on here? 00:06:23 Speaker 3: Mr. 00:06:24 Speaker 4: Mayor, I do want to ask about the budget. It looks like city council passed it earlier this week, about $ 1. 7 billion. But a lot of council members were a little concerned, saying that it fell short on housing assistance, on mental health responses. I know in the end, not everyone can be happy, but do you think there are some things in there that could have been added that could have pleased the city council a little bit more? What do you think is a takeaway that could hurt the city a little bit more in this budget? 00:06:49 Speaker 3: No, I mean, we feel like this was a great budget, actually, and a great process. I mean, I think we had maybe nine or ten votes on the city council in favor of the budget, and we accepted the amendments that they made, and so it was a good collaborative process where we wrote a budget that we thought met the real core services Denver needs to make sure we're focusing on core services. We heard them on amendments. We got to an agreement. I didn't have to veto any amendments. So I think this was actually a great collaboration to get to a good outcome. Obviously, everyone always has a list of things that they might prefer, and we can't all get all of them all the time. We'd love to have more money in the budget to spend, but we have to make the hard decisions on what to spend what we have. And I think this really prioritizes core services. 00:07:26 Speaker 2: Mike, I think we got time for one more. 00:07:28 Speaker 1: And I want to talk about just briefly what you did this past week. Tell us a little bit about this DEN AI Summit. 00:07:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, this was just– it's a convening we do to try to figure out, you know, how can we as public entities, cities and states, work on ways that we can use AI to help solve social problems? How do we use it to make services better and faster for residents? And what are the right guardrails to put in place to make sure– We're not risking any negative outcomes. And so we focus on bringing cities together and bringing people with solutions together with really sometimes unsexy things, but they help us. One big example actually to the example I'm permitting today is when you were going to file a permit to build apartments in the city, It used to take you 28 days for us just to confirm that we received your application, because it's like submitting a 500-page document with 74 exhibits. It takes some poor human 28 days to go through that. We now have an AI tool that can do that in about half a second. Just to tell you, yes, we got the application that's submitted. And now our humans can do what only humans can do is spend the time to actually read through the substance of your application to make sure it's right and catch any flags. And so this makes permitting much faster for residents. It makes the workload much easier for our employees. So we're looking for win-wins like that that will provide better services to the city. And that's what this week was focused on. 00:08:50 Speaker 1: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, thanks for your time. Have a wonderful weekend despite the lack of a Broncos game. 00:08:56 Speaker 2: And we'll talk to you next week. 00:08:58 Speaker 3: Nothing to be nervous about. Exactly. 00:09:01 Speaker 2: Exactly. A weekend without high blood pressure. 00:09:04 Speaker 3: Thanks, Mike. 00:09:04 Speaker 2: Appreciate it. 00:09:06 Speaker 3: All right. 00:09:07 Speaker 1: All right. 00:09:07 Speaker 2: That's Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.