The Denver Board of Ethics has cleared Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington of using his position for private gain when he flew himself and eight other executives to Madrid on a spring trip that cost about $18,000 per person.
But the board members said in a written decision that even if Washington technically followed city policy, they were “appalled” by the amount of money he approved spending for an aviation conference — and by his “seemingly cavalier attitude in responding to this complaint.”
The decision, issued Friday, came five months after CBS News Colorado revealed the cost of the tickets and other travel expenses after filing a request under the Colorado Open Records Act. Soon after the story came out in May, someone anonymously filed an ethics complaint about the report.
“While the Board of Ethics believes that officers, officials, and employees of the City and County of Denver should be better stewards of public funds, the Board must apply the facts to the law as it stands,” according to the ruling document.
In an interview with the board’s executive director, Washington said he wouldn’t have allowed the purchase of the airline tickets if he knew how much they would cost, according to the decision. But the board found that when Washington approved the expenses, the estimates he saw were mostly in line with the actual costs.
“Mr. Washington’s statement that he was unaware of the actual costs of the airfare is concerning,” the members wrote in the statement.
The airport’s travel policy allows employees to fly business class on flights longer than eight hours, and on this trip all nine flew business or first class. The group’s round-trip flights ranged in price from about $9,300 each for three officials to nearly $19,200 for the airport’s chief operating officer, Dave LaPorte. Washington’s flights cost about $12,000.
The board also took issue with Washington saying it was a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to attend the Passenger Terminal Expo and Conference, since it happens annually. Washington said the higher-class seats were necessary so that the executives could “hit the ground running” when they arrived, even though almost none of them had speaking engagements until one to two days after they arrived in Madrid.
The board found that Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s Chief of Staff Jenn Ridder also approved the estimated expenses but said she was compelled to do so because the costs came from the airport’s own budget, rather than the city’s general fund. The airport operates off revenue it generates, including from airlines and passengers.
Washington described the three-day conference, which began April 8, as an opportunity to learn from the “best in aviation” and a chance to bring ideas back to Denver.
The Board of Ethics is an independent agency established by the city charter that investigates ethics complaints and issues opinions on ethical responsibilities.
The office responsible for independent oversight of Denver’s law enforcement agencies is doing too much of its work in secret, a city audit found.
The Office of Independent Monitor, which provides civilian oversight for the Denver Police Department and Denver Sheriff Department, has not publicly reported its recommendations about law enforcement misconduct investigations and disciplinary actions for years, undermining the effectiveness of its oversight, city auditor Tim O’Brien found.
“Because the public doesn’t know what guidance the Monitor’s Office is giving to the police and sheriff departments, the public doesn’t know whether those departments are responding. There is no visible proof of accountability,” he said in a Thursday news release. “The lack of transparency is a disservice to law enforcement oversight.”
The independent monitor’s office is also not publicly reporting its reviews and evaluations of the two agencies’ policies and practices, and isn’t thoroughly tracking its work. The office lacks a formalized strategic plan, the audit found.
Former Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and City Council members created the office in 2004 to provide independent oversight for the police and sheriff’s departments in the wake of two controversial police shootings. The monitor’s office reviews police and sheriff disciplinary cases and makes recommendations to the agencies about those cases that are aimed at improving discipline, policies and practices.
The police and sheriff’s departments do not have to follow the monitor’s recommendations. Because the monitor’s office has not publicly reported its recommendations, it is difficult to tell what sort of changes the office has pursued and whether public safety officials accepted or ignored the monitor’s recommendations, the audit found.
Denver’s ordinances require the Office of Independent Monitor to publicly report on disciplinary investigations and policy changes in its annual report, but also limit the office’s ability to do so because the materials are subject to deliberative process privilege, which allows information to be kept from the public if disclosing it would prevent honest and frank discussion within government.
“We found legal guidance from the City Attorney’s Office is affecting what the Monitor’s Office publicly reports in terms of its oversight of the Police and Sheriff Departments,” the audit states. “A significant portion of what city ordinance tells the Monitor’s Office to publicly report is protected by the deliberative process privilege — according to the City Attorney’s Office’s interpretation.”
The audit called for those conflicting mandates to be rectified and suggested the monitor’s office could hire an outside attorney who does not work for the city. Lisabeth Pérez Castle, the independent monitor, agreed to consider potential changes to the office’s approach to public reporting by the spring of 2026, according to responses she provided the auditor’s office.
The auditors also took issue with the monitor’s practice of sending a draft of its annual report to the city attorney, the mayor’s office and public safety officials for review and feedback before the report is published, finding the practice could undermine the monitor’s independence.
“The Monitor’s Office could greatly improve its functional and perceived independence by working to eliminate or minimize the influence of other city agencies in its public reporting,” the audit reads.
Pérez Castle agreed with all of the auditors’ recommendations — including that the office should create a formalized strategic plan — and committed to making changes over the next year. She did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.
And that of the Broncos’ last 15 postseason games in Denver, eight of them — per Pro-Football-Reference.com — were played in temperatures 37 degrees or warmer? The last five Empower Field playoff temps: 43, 46, 40, 41, 63.
Snow down, Broncomaniacs.
Denver won’t just be playing in Super Bowls over the next decade.
We’ll be hosting them.
“The Broncos have been, since Day 1 of the franchise, an important fabric and part of the community in Denver,” Broncos CEO Greg Penner told The Denver Post’s Parker Gabriel in an exclusive interview. “Finding a site of that size that we could weave into the downtown area and all that just was incredibly unique, combined with the historic nature of the site. …
“We have the bones of the old railyard and a couple of buildings and a unique site that we think enables us to create something unique and special, both with the stadium and the mixed-use development around it.”
The Walton-Penner Group just raised the roof without raising taxes. Despite overtures from Lone Tree and Aurora, they’re keeping the Broncos in Denver. Where they belong.
In other words, Penner and his wife Carrie Walton-Penner read the room the way Peyton Manning read defenses at the line of scrimmage.
“We’re really thrilled that they came with that partnership mentality and not, like we’ve seen in other cities, ‘You give us a bunch of money or we’ll leave,’” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told The Post. “I think the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group is deeply committed to Denver and deeply committed to the community.”
Not anymore. You want a venue with 60,000-plus seats that can host Taylor Swift in March or April? Check. You want a venue where football fans can still feel the elements on an autumn gameday? Got that, too. Open that bad boy up and let the Colorado sunshine in.
We don’t need the cool kids on the coasts to tell us Denver is the best darn sports city in America. But building a multi-purpose stadium at Burnham Yard gives the Front Range many more chances to prove it — and on the largest stages imaginable.
New Orleans officials recently estimated that Super Bowl LIX was worth more than $1.25 billion in economic impact to the Crescent City. San Antonio boasted an economic bump of $440 million from hosting the Men’s Basketball Final Four this past April.
You wouldn’t want a piece of that?
The Penners do. And thank goodness.
“The goal is to create something that is active on gameday,” Penner stressed to The Post, “but also (for) the rest of the year.”
There’s nothing wrong with Empower Field, which opened in 2001. There’s nothing all that right about it, either, at least from a real estate purview. Even the best ideas, like the best concrete, get weathered by time.
Pro sports owners are playing a different level of Monopoly than they were three decades ago. It’s not just about owning Tennessee Avenue anymore. It’s about gobbling up St. James Place and New York Avenue next door, then making sure a row of strip malls, restaurants and hotels get built on top of them. Collect the rent, funnel some of that money to Bo Nix and Nik Bonitto, pass GO, collect $200. Rinse. Repeat.
Stadiums are so expensive to build that a single-use facility, especially one available for 12-20 dates a year instead of 50-60, isn’t cost-effective. The land around Empower Field is owned by the Metropolitan Football Stadium District. Whatever’s built at Burnham Yard will be owned by the Walton-Penner Group and designed with a neighborhood in mind, not just the stadium itself.
Oh, there will be bumps. That’s inevitable. The city’s slated to foot the bill for public improvements related to connectivity to the stadium — exit ramps, roads, RTD, etc. And Tuesday’s announcements didn’t mention Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) — a one-time fee paid by fans for the “right” to buy a seat.
If there’s a cloud rolling in behind all those rainbows, it’s that. PSLs seem inevitable here, too — a survey the Broncos sent to fans in 2023 included that very subject.
Would a Super Bowl be worth that? Everyone who let hosting a World Cup slip away from soccer-mad Denver in 2026 should land a red card for life. With this new district, hopefully, it won’t happen again.
Five years down the line, who knows? In 2020, as a franchise, the Broncos looked listless and lost — a sleeping giant resting on the laurels of orange-and-blue bloods everywhere.
The Walton-Penner ownership group woke everybody up. The beast is taking names now. It’s buying up land. It’s drawing castles in the sky.
For what it’s worth, Penner sounds as if he wants to keep the lid off as much as possible. And for as many Broncos games as feasible. He gets it. All of it.
“We wanted something that is true to our roots here and looked at domed stadiums,” Penner told The Post. “But (we) just thought that wouldn’t enable us to take advantage of Colorado sunsets and Mile High views and playing in the elements if we choose to.”
Give the Penners an inch, they’ll take a Yard. All the way to the bank.
Colorado’s 7th Congressional District, centered on suburban Jefferson County, hasn’t had a Republican in the seat since Bob Beauprez left Congress nearly 20 years ago.
But Sergei Matveyuk, an antiques repairman from Golden and the GOP contender for the seat in the Nov. 5 election, urges voters not to count him out in his battle with incumbent Brittany Pettersen. The first-term Democratic congresswoman is seeking reelection.
“People are hurting economically,” Matveyuk, 57, told The Denver Post. “They want someone who feels the pain.”
He’s running in a once-battleground district that has turned decidedly blue in the last decade or so, with Democratic former Rep. Ed Perlmutter winning election eight times running, until his retirement announcement in 2022 ushered in an open race.
Pettersen, 42, a former state lawmaker from Lakewood, won the 2022 election by 16 percentage points over Republican Army veteran Erik Aadland. The bulk of the district’s electorate calls left-leaning Jefferson and Broomfield counties home, while redder areas in the district — such as Teller, Custer and Fremont counties — simply don’t have the populations to give Matveyuk a sizable boost.
As of Sept. 30, Pettersen had raised more than $2.2 million this cycle, compared to about $35,000 collected by Matveyuk, according to campaign finance filings. There are two minor party candidates on the ballot this time: Former state lawmaker Ron Tupa is running on the Unity Party of Colorado ticket, while Patrick Bohan is running as the Libertarian candidate.
Matveyuk, a political neophyte, said that as a small business owner, the historically high inflation of the last two years has hurt those like him who are particularly sensitive to escalating prices. But it’s his personal story that he thinks will resonate with voters in the current political climate, in which border policy has taken center stage. Matveyuk, who is of Polish descent, and his family left the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s after experiencing life under communist rule and immigrated to the United States.
“As an immigrant myself, I know how hard it is to start a new life — but it has to be legal,” he said.
Matveyuk doesn’t echo former President Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportations but says migrants who “are hurting our people and committing crimes need to be deported, for sure.”
“We need immigration reform — 40 years ago we had a regulated border and now we have a porous border,” he said.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data through August, there have been more than 8.6 million migrant “encounters” at the southern U.S. border since President Joe Biden took office in 2021. That influx has prompted many big city mayors across the country, including Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, to cut city services to pay for migrant housing and plead for help from the federal government.
Pettersen acknowledged that the U.S. asylum system is “absolutely outdated.” But many of the arriving migrants are filling jobs that businesses in the district, like nursing homes, are desperate to staff, she said.
Making people wait years before getting work permits is an unworkable policy, Pettersen said.
“We don’t have the people in the U.S. to meet our economic needs,” she said. “We need legal pathways based on economic need.”
Though Pettersen is in the minority party in the U.S. House, a bill she sponsored was recently signed into law by Biden. It directs the federal government to study and report on illicit financing associated with synthetic drug trafficking.
Last month, she introduced a bill that seeks to incentivize more states to offer substance use treatment through Medicaid, six years after she sponsored a bill in the state House requiring Colorado to provide that care. Pettersen has often spoken publicly of the struggles her mother faced battling opioid addiction.
If reelected, she said in The Denver Post’s candidate questionnaire that she would work to protect abortion rights and to address the opioid epidemic. Her top priority would be “modernizing our tax code to rebuild the middle class.”
“We need to lower costs by reinvesting in access to affordable housing, childcare, health care, and higher education,” she wrote.
DENVER — Supporters and participants of the Denver Basic Income Project rallied at the state capitol and outside Denver’s City and County Building on Wednesday, calling for more funding to continue and expand the program.
As Denver city leaders comb through Mayor Mike Johnston’s 2025 budget proposal, supporters of the project are asking city leaders for more support.
“We’re asking for $1.7 million to complete the second year,” said Maria Sierra, a community engagement manager with the Denver Basic Income Project. “And we’re also asking for money to extend the project for future cohorts so that we can replicate this on to the greater community and impact more cohorts.”
The Denver Basic Income Project provides direct cash to people experiencing homelessness with no strings attached.
The project’s founder, Denver entrepreneur, and philanthropist Mark Donovan spoke with Denver7 earlier this summer.
“I was seeing this growing wealth disparity and income disparities, and I wanted to find a way to give back,” Donovan said. “This is a group of people that are largely often overlooked, looked down upon, and not given the same opportunities.”
Critics of programs like this say they discourage people from working and make them more dependent on the government.
Michael Neil says he, too, was skeptical — until he saw the data.
“I’m a data guy,” Neil said. “Looking at the qualitative data, who was helped, how many were helped, and how many are now in stable housing, whatever that may look like for them is, I think, tells the story.”
Neil volunteers with the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, one of several groups that make up the Denver Guaranteed Income Now! Coalition.
The Denver Basic Income Project says 45% of participants found housing.
They also say participants reported fewer emergency room visits and hospital and jail stays.
They say the project saved taxpayers $590,000.
They say the results will improve if the city provides additional funding.
“Our results speak for themselves,” said Sierra. “We don’t understand why they’re not seeing that.”
Last year, the city provided $2 million for the program.
However, the program is not included in the mayor’s 2025 budget proposal.
Denver7 contacted the mayor’s office to ask why but did not hear back Wednesday.
The mayor’s budget proposal will likely undergo changes as the city council reviews it.
Last week, Johnston said next year’s budget will be tighter than in recent years as pandemic-era funding runs out and sales tax revenue softens.
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A new nonstop Turkish Airlines flight from Denver International Airport will carry travelers 6,152 miles between Denver and Istanbul — the longest flight from DIA.
The recruitment of Turkish Airlines brings the number of airlines at DIA to 26. Flight searches on Google on Thursday morning showed round-trip flights available starting June 11 for around $1,329 roundtrip.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and DIA chief executive Phil Washington planned to announce the flight Thursday morning. The new service is expected to bring a $54 million annual economic impact in Colorado and support the creation of about 350 new jobs around the state. The flight will take about 13 hours, longer than the 12-hour direct flight between Denver and Tokyo.
DIA officials in recent years have prioritized “expanding our global connections” as part of their strategic plan for serving 100 million passengers a year by 2027 and more than 120 million by 2045, the airport’s 50th anniversary. A primary goal is to “expand the air networks to the continent of Africa and other disconnected destinations.”
A 21-person delegation of airport, city government, and business officials from Denver visited Ethiopia in February 2023 on a trade mission to build relationships. They offered economic incentives as part of their efforts to persuade Ethiopian Airlines and, eventually, Egypt Air to commit to starting service to Denver with several flights a week. Another delegation visited Turkey in October 2022 to explore possibilities for starting a Turkish Airlines flight between Denver and Istanbul.
The new flight announced Thursday “does not diminish in any way our desire” to line up a flight to other cities, said Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce president J.J. Ament, who joined both delegations.
“A flight to Istanbul opens up India, and it also opens up Africa for us,” Ament said.
“The imperative is that we continue to increase Denver’s global reach and the reach of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West with DIA as the gateway airport,” he said. “Being able to reach new parts of the world, growing parts of the world, is what is going to keep Colorado globally relevant.”
DIA is the largest airport in the United States by size, covering 53 square miles of land. It also ranks among the busiest airports in the world. A record 77 million passengers went through DIA in 2023, up from 69 million in 2019.
The airport offers flights to 217 destinations, predominantly domestic. But international air travel, including air cargo operations, has grown steadily and in 2023 brought more than 4 million travelers, up 21% since 2022.
Earlier this year, airport officials announced new nonstop flights from DIA on Aer Lingus to Dublin, Ireland, starting on May 17. Other cities that DIA travelers can reach nonstop include London, Paris, Zurich, Reykjavik, Iceland, Munich, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and a dozen cities in Mexico and Central America.
Thomas Wolf isn’t rated as one of the top-tier candidates in the wide-open race for Denver mayor, but one of his suggestions made us sit up and take notice: An old city jail that now stores confiscated marijuana could be used to shelter humans instead.
Wolf has argued on behalf of closing homeless encampments and providing immediate, temporary shelter — not affordable or permanent housing — for individuals without homes. That’s a departure from the position of many competitors, and his stance has made some homeless advocates view him as “big, bad Wolf,” admits the candidate.
But during the Fair Elections Fund February 9 debate and again at the February 20 forum on homelessness, Wolf cited the jail as an example of misused city resources. Why house marijuana when you could shelter people? He points to the old downtown jail, currently being used by the Denver Police Department to store confiscated marijuana, as a waste of a city facility.
“When we have people freezing on the corner in 20-degree weather,” Wolf says, “I just really can’t see in a city where we have surplus housing, why we aren’t using it. It’s a specific example of surplus real estate we own as a community that should be brought to bear on this problem.”
