[Editor's Note: This news coverage has been underwritten by Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR). FAIR has been formed and organized in Aspen, Colorado, as a nonprofit corporation to conduct investigative journalism in the public interest, and to provide accurate, meaningful, and non-biased news coverage based on correct factual information.]
ASPEN, COLORADO (Post Time News)—Because it kept important details from the public, the City of Aspen’s attempts at transparency in the Burlingame Ranch affordable housing brochure brouhaha exacerbated a bad situation and made it worse in the realm of public perception.
No one disputes the Burlingame brochure misled voters in 2005 when it appeared before the election with an inaccurate “total” cost figure of $74 million for all three phases, a number approved by voters but one that left out infrastructure costs in a snafu uncovered in April 2008 by the Citizens Budget Task Force appointed by Aspen City Council. But in its aggressive and even admirable efforts at transparency after the problem became public, Aspen City Staff failed to disclose basic details describing who was responsible for how the brochure discrepancy had come about. The gap in the City’s official explanation gave critics ammunition as they assumed the worst—a problem that persists to this day.
“The city took the blame for the mistakes that were made,” Citizens Budget Task Force member Don Davidson, a certified public accountant (CPA), told Post Time News, “but they did not single out any one person for messing things up.”
Despite Burlingame reports by an auditor and a consulting firm, the basic facts of the Burlingame brochure controversy—that Ben Gagnon, then an outside contractor and now in the Aspen Community Development Department, left out infrastructure costs based on numbers from Shaw Construction provided to him by former Assistant City Manager Ed Sadler—did not come to widespread public attention until more than four months later, on September 2, 2008, in a front-page story by Curtis Wackerle in the Aspen Daily News that identified Gagnon as the author of the offending document.
Gagnon told Post Time News he immediately went to Crook and explained his role as soon as the Citizens Budget Task Force member Marilyn Marks went public with the error. Crook, like many others in local government, attributes the mistakes to Sadler, former head of the Asset Management Department, and the driving force within City Hall when it came to the Burlingame project. Repeated attempts to reach Sadler by Post Time News were once again unsuccessful.
“The only mistake the City made was not putting the right numbers in the brochure,” Crook told Post Time News. “The minute we realized we had made a mistake we addressed the issue…. We were quick to address the brochure issue and to make sure that the citizens got the right information.”
In public statements and appearances after the brochure controversy came to light, Aspen City Manager Steve Barwick preached transparency as he carefully avoided pointing the finger at any individual.
“The city can detail how we’ve gotten to where we are and where we are headed, but this editorial [sic] isn’t long enough to fully delve into such a complex subject,” Barwick wrote in a mea culpa letter to the editor published in local newspapers in spring 2008. “In the coming weeks, the City of Aspen will host a public meeting about Burlingame and will be providing information through our website, e-newsletters, local media and CGTV. We hope that you will attend the meeting, so stay tuned for more information on the where and when.”
But the meeting never happened, and Barwick’s “I’ll bring the pizza” pledge to meet with anyone and everyone all but petered out after an open house at City Hall in a barrage of vitriolic criticism about Burlingame and the management of affordable housing in the City. (Barwick himself wore a coat with arrows dangling from the back at the open house.) In meantime, calls by television talk show host Andrew Kole and others for details about “who signed off on this” were met by Mayor Mick Ireland with exhortations to “move forward” and calls by Ireland and others not to fix the blame on former Aspen City Council Members. City Council Member Jack Johnson also took to print in summer 2008 to underline the Council’s commitment to transparency in all things.
“Over 12 months ago your City Council took ‘increased transparency’ as one of our operating principles,” he wrote in a guest column August 12, 2008. “To that end your Mayor proposed a budget task force of local citizens knowledgeable about finance to review all the city’s practices and make recommendations about how we might make changes to better serve you. All methods and practices were examined. We threw open the books and made city staff completely available to the task force. Completely available.”
Members of the Citizen Budget Task Force told Post Time News of a very different dynamic, whereby many of their requests for data were met with delays, leaving the impression that the numbers were either not readily available or did not exist at all. When the City did produce numbers it frequently raised new questions. A newspaper advertising campaign about Burlingame, paid for by the City, was riddled with errors and discontinued. A town meeting organized by Marks and Elizabeth Milias at Paepcke Auditorium was attended by Crook and Community Relations Director Sally Spaulding, but Dwayne Romero, wearing a black “Police” flak jacket, was the only Council Member to participate. Within days, given the overwhelming criticism of the affordable housing program, Aspen City Council cancelled plans to go to voters for a bond issue of $49 million in November 2008 that would have helped to finance the completion of remaining two phases of Burlingame Ranch.
Ironically, a report three years earlier, in The Aspen Times of February 16, 2005, quoted Ben Gagnon as taking a “just-the-facts” approach to the production of the Burlingame brochure without political leanings one way or another. Even so the basic facts describing who did what in the brochure controversy remained a mystery to the public for months in 2008 despite the City’s frenetic efforts at transparency—an oversight that led critics like Marks and Milias to believe the City had something to hide.
City Manager Barwick, in contrast, told Post Time News he believes the City acted with the best intentions throughout.