Jamie Giellis: “I’m A Fierce (Bleeping) Fighter."

DENVER, CO – By Susan Greene for The Colorado Independent. Jamie Giellis arrived for an interview last week, chuckling with a campaign staffer about the song he played to boost her spirits on their drive over.

“It’s Disney, from ‘Frozen’,” he admitted.

They both belted it out in the café.

“LET IT GO,” they sang. “LET IT GO.”

Giellis, who is trying to unseat Denver Mayor Michael Hancock in the June 4 runoff, had barely slept for two nights as last week’s media storm about her racial awareness – or lack thereof – kept roiling in her head. In the space of a couple days, she had managed to raise eyebrows in Denver’s black, Asian and Latino communities with remarks past and present that suggested she doesn’t really know the city she wants to lead.

For someone who has built a career largely on preparation and presentation, letting it go was easier sung than done.

“I’m my own worst critic,” she said. “And I’ve been kicking myself, just kicking myself for my blind spots.”

Given the hot seat Giellis is on and the microscope she is under, the political newcomer was fully aware that singing a Disney tune, especially that Disney tune to a reporter risked reinforcing the image of ditzy, blond whiteness and high-heeled shallowness with which she knows Hancock and his supporters are eager to frame her.

And she was OK with that.

“They think they know me – Millennial Barbie,” she shrugged about one of the nicknames social media trolls have coined for her.

“But there’s a lot they don’t know,” she added, “like that I’m a fierce fucking fighter.”

Farm girl to city woman

Giellis, for the record, is not a millennial. She’s 42, which makes her a Gen-Xer.
In a mayoral race buzzing with gender and racial undercurrents, the accuracy of the Barbie label is open to interpretation.

She grew up in Leland, Iowa, population 277, where her great-great-great grandfather started the first business, her great-great grandfather built all the bridges, her great-grandfather graded the roads, and her grandfather worked on the railroad. It’s a heavily Lutheran community where casseroles are topped by Tater tots and “Everybody’s kind of overly nice to one other.”

“Nobody wants to come off as aggressive or overbearing or mean,” she said. “So they’re all kind of quiet and apologetic about things.”

Giellis’s parents grew corn and soybeans and raised cows, chickens and pigs on their farm. She had her own pigs, which she trained like dogs and taught to do tricks for chocolate. People were trickier for the girl whose shyness kept her from sleeping over at friends’ houses or going to overnight camp.

Her “Pops,” as she calls her dad, Jim Ambroson, served 13 years as Leland’s mayor, a volunteer job in which he was on call 24/7 to lend a hand to fellow townsfolk. She remembers him “getting up in the middle of the night because somebody’s sewer had backed up into their basement.
“He had no clue if it was their line or the city’s line that was the problem, but (he)…helped clean up the mess.”

Giellis says she admired his connection to a town that sustained their family for five generations. Yet, even if her own generation could still make a living in Leland – and it can’t – she gravitated toward places that are bigger and more complex.

After graduating from the University of Iowa with a journalism degree, she went to work in Cedar Rapids as a TV reporter. That job helped her overcome her shyness and buoyed her confidence in her ability to grasp a lot of information quickly. But it didn’t suit her, she says, because it didn’t let her dig deep enough into important issues, and it made her feel that she was exploiting rather than helping the people she covered. She recalls an assignment covering a young woman’s brutal murder and the TV station insisting that she stand on the woman’s parents’ front lawn until they gave a statement.

“I said, ‘No, why would you do that to people? That’s horrible. Let them grieve.’”

Giellis went on to work in public relations and then ran a downtown redevelopment organization in Cedar Rapids. At 26, she married Jim Licko, a fellow Iowan and public relations guy who had his eyes on Denver.

The couple moved in 2006 when Licko took a PR job here and Giellis – who went by the name Licko at the time – went to work for Progressive Urban Management Associates, P.U.M.A., a firm specializing in downtown revitalization projects.

Her job as a junior associate mainly involved working with neighborhoods in Denver and other cities nationally to form business improvement districts. Those are arrangements in which property owners in a defined part of a city agree to an extra property tax to pay for things like sidewalks, landscaping, or lighting to make the area more business friendly or livable.

The blowup

Giellis’s boss at the time, P.U.M.A. President Brad Segal, describes her as “very smart, very ambitious.”

He says she quit after almost four years at P.U.M.A. on the pretense that she was launching a company that would offer marketing and branding services for communities forming business improvement districts. Instead, he says, her new company, Centro Inc., went head-to-head in competition with P.U.M.A. for contracts to actually create the districts. He says Centro copied content from P.U.M.A.’s web site, claimed credit for projects that Giellis hadn’t led, and solicited clients that P.U.M.A. had been courting before she left. Among those was the government of Singapore, which ultimately gave Centro – in conjunction with a British firm called Mosaic Partnership – a contract that Segal says his company had been seeking for a year and a half.

“She misled us about her intentions. It put us through a lot of turmoil,” Segal said, noting that since her departure, he requires all new employees to sign what he calls “the Jamie Licko non-compete clause.”

Giellis says she and Licko were divorcing at the time (he now is endorsing Hancock) and she launched the business to earn more money so she could afford to keep her house. She says she was upfront with Segal about the work Centro would do, and that she never stole his clients.

She and Segal have vastly different takes on a blow-up they had in 2008 over a plan she wrote for the Downtown San Mateo Association in California. Segal says she put more time into the plan than necessary, given what P.U.M.A. was being paid. Giellis says Segal had put her in charge of the project and that she was learning from it and wanted to please the client. She describes him as a controlling and sometimes abusive boss who “literally scribbled all over the report in red pen” and “berated me rather than talking it through constructively.”

The upshot, according to Segal, whose company has a contract with the city: “Her reaction was to go into her office and hysterically cry and heave for 45 minutes. She is manipulative. And she’s manipulating the whole fucking city of Denver right now.”

The upshot, according to Giellis: “I took the plan and threw it on the ground. I didn’t throw it at him, though I wanted to. I was certainly pissed off, but I’m not a wilting flower who curled up in the corner and bawled, if that is how he (is) positioning it.”

“If he was unhappy with me and I was manipulative, why didn’t he fire me? And why did he continue contracting with me even after I left?” she asked. “He’s pissed because I beat him, over and over, fair and square for work. I beat him for Chicago work. I beat him for Singapore work. And I beat him for the contract for RiNo. That’s why he’s mad now, 10 years later, because I proved myself and my ability to succeed.”

There is a resolve on Giellis’s face when she talks about that point in her career, or points in her campaign when she has been underestimated. These are moments when her “Iowa nice” gives way to a mettle that is missing at her rallies and forums. She reveals the scrapper who will not apologize for having outgrown a mentor, strived and stretched in her career, and tried like hell to hold on to her house during a recession.

“I worked my ass off,” she said. “But I did it.”

“Urban therapist”

Centro is a consulting firm that has ranged in size from one employee, Giellis, to three.
It bills itself as “an internationally sought-after resource for best-practices and proven-processes in developing high-quality spaces and enhancing quality of life across communities.”

What that means, in practice, is that cities or neighborhood groups hire her to be what she calls an “urban therapist” to bring residents, small businesses, big businesses and developers together – often for the first time – to reach a shared vision for a specific urban space and a common understanding of whom it serves and what, as a community, it values. Once that vision is honed, she helps the community finance improvements by creating special taxing agreements and public-private partnerships, and she sometimes brands and markets the project.

Giellis says the process empowers communities to “create their own destinies” rather than being dwarfed by or pushed out by development.

Despite Hancock’s attempts to label her a developer, she isn’t, and notes that she has “never worked for a developer.”

“I’ve worked with developers, not for them. And it’s often the case that I’m pushing back against what they want to do,” she said.

For five years after leaving P.U.M.A., she travelled between Denver, other U.S. cities, the United Kingdom where, among other projects, she helped businesses near the London Bridge come up with a redevelopment plan, and Singapore, where she created a plan to revitalize the city’s riverfront.

Mo Answat, founder and director of the U.K.-based Mosaic Partnerships in the U.K, partnered with Giellis on projects for four years, including the one in Singapore. He describes her as a shrewed businesswoman who, “when focused, can be a very, very formidable opponent.” He also says that, unlike many Americans, she’s a listener who doesn’t inject her ego into her work and is “adept working in a wide variety of cultures that are different to her own.”

“In Singapore, we were in a place we didn’t know, in an environment that was unfamiliar to us. We had to learn about Singaporean culture and understand how their politics operate, all in a very short space in time,” said the Englishman of Indian descent. “I know there’s a bit of a thing going on in Denver about her inexperience with other cultures. But in all my time with Jamie, she always treated all of those elements with sensitivity.”

In 2014, while splitting her time in the U.K. and Denver, she met Chris Giellis, owner of Mile High Wine and Spirits in Belmar, on eHarmony. She since has cut back on work requiring heavy travel so she could center her life with him and his son Jackson, who’s now 9. She married Giellis in June 2018.

“I recognized at a certain point how desperately I needed roots. I wanted a family, and we planned on having a baby,” she says. “Chris and Jackson have been an extraordinarily calming influence on my life. Here was this incredible man saying, ‘Babe, I’m not here to do anything but support you and let you shine.’ It was, well, it was just a refreshing thing.”

READ MORE at The Colorado Independent.