Hancock Rivals Eye Denver Mayor's Office Race

DENVER, CO – By Alex Burness from The Colorado Independent. Michael Hancock will seek a third term as Denver’s mayor next year. But growing misgivings about his leadership have prompted a prominent lawyer and former state lawmaker and a high-profile community activist to consider challenging him for the office.

In addition to five others who’ve already filed paperwork to run for mayor, Penfield Tate III and Lisa Calderon both say they’re very seriously eyeing bids of their own for the May 2019 election.
Tate, 62, is an attorney and a former Democratic state lawmaker who ran for mayor in 2003. His father, Penfield Tate II, was Boulder’s first and still only black mayor, serving in the 1970s.
“Over the past several weeks, I’ve received calls and emails from a pretty broad cross section of Denver citizens, a number of whom have asked me to consider running for mayor,” Tate said, adding that he’ll likely hold an event in the near future to announce whether or not he’ll run for mayor.

Calderon, 50, is a longtime educator — her subject areas include women’s studies and gender studies, and she has a doctorate in education — who’s soon to join the sociology and criminal justice faculty at Regis University. She also co-founded and for eight years ran Denver’s Community Reentry Project, which helped Denverites transition out of prison or jail back into the community.

Half black and half Latina, she also serves as executive director of the Colorado Latino Forum, a group that often has criticized Hancock. She believes he has failed in his representation of communities increasingly displaced or thinned out by the city’s rising cost of living. As she tells it, Hancock is less interested in easing some of Denver’s growing pains than in promoting what she calls “development on steroids.”

Though some voter confidence in Hancock was waning because of growth-related problems and a long string of controversies in the city’s Safety Department, his reputation took some abrupt hits over the past year.

He’s been criticized for taking expensive international trips, including a Paris junket for which he and other city officials enjoyed freebie $16,000 airline seats.

In February, news broke that Hancock had sent sexually suggestive text messages to a woman in his security detail who said his advances were unwanted. Hancock admitted to sending the texts and faced no official repercussions. The City Council declined to launch an investigation.
Calderon says it’s time for a woman to lead the city.

“We don’t need the same type of policies that in the past have not gotten us gender equity,” she said. “In the age of #MeToo, the fact that there’s not resources being put behind a woman to run for mayor I think needs to change. That’s a big reason I’m strongly considering running.”

Read more in The Colorado Independent

Photo by Alex Burness

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