"By the admission of current and former mayors, two 900-pound gorillas known as Boulder and Denver sat at the eastern face of the Rockies. Both were getting what they wanted at the expense of their neighbors and at times keeping those adjacent towns from getting what they needed, such as water.
Following a 1967 vote for a dedicated sales tax to allow the city of Boulder to buy open space in the name of preservation, the city elders began gobbling up as much open land in Boulder County as they could afford. That included acreage that fell inside the urban service areas of nearby cities to prohibit them from expanding.
By the time Will Toor was elected as the head of Boulder City Council (their equivalent of mayor) in the 1990s, demand to live near the growth-capped Boulder was increasing. As a result, the policies that led to Boulder restricting the growth and prosperity of other cities in the county had created an acidic relationship with the surrounding area.
"They were essentially being pushed around by bullies trying to control their future," Toor said about the town of Superior, a city of 100 between Boulder and Denver, when it tried to expand after landing a California-based computer company that wanted to locate near Boulder. "At times it was a fairly ugly situation."
The city of Denver was seen as a similar adversary to the cities surrounding it. By the time brewpub owner John Hickenlooper took office as mayor in 2003, the growing acrimony had boiled over so much that his predecessor, Wellington Webb, hadn't spoken to or been in the same room with the mayor of nearby Aurora and Colorado's governor in more than two years.
"In the '90s, most of the suburban mayors hated each other or certainly hated Denver. It was almost visceral, the animosity," Denver's Hickenlooper told the Commerce Lexington crowd assembled in Boulder. "You spend a bunch of time in the restaurant business, one thing you learn pretty quick is there is no margin in having enemies you don't want someone who wakes up and, for the first 15 minutes of every day, tries to figure out how to stick you in the ribs.
"For whatever reason, a lot of the people that are in politics like having enemies, and they like having someone they can debate with, diminish and win, because they feel that by putting that person down, it raises them up. That's crazy."
So during their terms as mayor of the two economic drivers in the region, Toor — now a Boulder County commissioner — and Hickenlooper decided it was time to start mending fences as they realized what's good for their neighbors is good for them.
Upon taking office, Hickenlooper instilled his ideas into the members of his administration. "The one mantra we kept giving them all was collaboration. It wasn't just between the city and the suburbs, but it was between the city and the school district. We also want the collaboration to be between the metro area and the rest of the state."
On his first day in office, Hickenlooper told the governor that if he disagreed with anything the governor was pushing, he would let him know and not make him read it in the press. After a previous state legislature mandate that Denver stop growing outward, Hickenlooper saw area residents smile at the thought of surrounding cities having to tap into a finite water supply while Denver controlled the area water infrastructure.
"It affects the value of every person's home in the entire metro region," Hickenlooper told the crowd. "It's in Denver's self interest to help our suburbs solve their water problems.
"That sense of trying to be unilateral off the bat and trying to demonstrate what you can do to help the other side, your formerly adversarial neighbor, has become a key component of the whole program we put in place," he added.
After winning his election four years ago, Hickenlooper did what he knew worked. He invited all of the local mayors, councilmen and county commissioners to his Lower Downtown loft, introduced himself and his administration to all of them, told them things were going to change and served them his beer. Since then, the area has come to terms on an eight-county tax sharing for culture and transit.
Much the same worked in Boulder, where in 1999 Toor worked out a decades-long battle over expanding traffic needs for the region.
"Over a beer, the mayor of Broomfield and I came up with the idea that maybe we could come up with a peace pact. We were sort of the perfect ones to do it, because I was considered the far left mayor of Boulder and he was considered the conservative Republican If we could come to an agreement, then we could probably sell everybody else in the corridor on it. It took about three beers and we essentially, on the back of an envelope, came up with an agreement," he said.
That agreement has led to a small highway expansion and the use of commuter rails and a bus system that is expected to be in place in the next decade.