Happily married & Trying to Live not by Lies in Denver, Colorado. Picture of the lake and boathouse, City Park 9/2014

Denver
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Denver's 2027 Budget Hearings 🧵for video and commentary on the Department of Finance's Overview of the 2027 Proposed Budget
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GenXJen retweeted
Attention #Denver motorists and car commuters: don't look now but your pockets are about to be picked by a failing city desperate for revenue. @9NEWS reports that Denver’s 2027 budget plans to raise 51 percent more from traffic tickets and other court fines and forfeits: $6.2 million this year, $9.3 million next year. The city plans to see a $3.1 million jump in revenue generated by traffic stops, according to @9NEWS9NEWS: archive.li/viTVL. The city isn't adding officers. It will be pulling beat cops off patrol and siccing them on already besieged motorists and car commuters, in a campaign consciously aimed at replenishing depleted city coffers. The city's emphasis isn't on fighting street crime; it's on turning anyone who drives on city streets into a criminal (and cash cow). That is not a new thing. It's consistent with a prevailing pattern in the Mile High City, and another chapter in Denver’s war on cars. "Road diets" shrink the asphalt. Car lanes are subtracted, or become bike lanes. “Twenty is plenty” talk aims to slow the commute to a crawl. Each tactic makes the motorist and the car commuter more miserable, then treats the resulting conflicts (and collisions) as proof that driving is the problem. The roadway safety double standard fits the same pattern. Most cars have plates, licenses, and insurance, so they can be ticketed, filmed, and billed for a litany of potential infractions. The Lawless Swarm that has taken over the roads -- unplated minibikes, throttle “e-bikes,” ATVs, scooters, skateboards, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, you name it -- violates the rules with total impunity. Micromobility mob members need no licenses, no permits, no liability insurance, no nothing. The cops have given-up on reining them in or holding them accountable. When a crash comes, the insured driver pays, and is invariably cast as the villain. The uninsured machine and it's unlicensed and uninsured operator vanishes into thin air, or sues the skirt off the driver involved in the mishaps that predictably result from the complete chaos. "Vision Zero," in practice, means punish the motorist -- and free the micromobility mob to run wild, with zero costs or consequences. Now the mask is off. Budget shortfalls have turned drivers into cash cows. City leaders want to pick the pockets of the people who get licensed, register their vehicles, carry insurance, pay their taxes and try to play by the rules, while ignoring and enabling the scofflaws who have made Denver streets feel closer to Calcutta than anything else. Why is there a city plan to jack up motorist tickets and no plan to curb, or collect ticket revenue from, the lawless swarm? Because motorist misery and elevated risk is the policy; a revenue boost is the bonus. This isn't about improving public safety. It's about a city that cynically plans to milk and bilk the only road users it can invoice, all while incrementally raising the danger for everyone who uses a Denver street or sidewalk. #copolitics #coleg @MikeJohnstonCO @GovofCO #thewaroncars
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GenXJen retweeted
It’s a very peculiar state of affairs here in Colorado. Our leftist friends in the Democrat Party of Colorado actually run their entire campaigns on raising your taxes and regulating everything you do and own to death and they win by fairly large margins. This is primarily due to their much smarter, kinder and more enlightened base of voters who are too cool for school to notice their surroundings turning to poo.
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Denver's 2027 Budget Hearings 🧵for video and commentary on the Department of Finance's Overview of the 2027 Proposed Budget
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😳 “But those revenue generating doesn’t have to fall on Denver taxpayers, it can fall on corporations or other entities that maybe have the means to provide the additional funding.” —Councilwoman Gonzales-Gutierrez
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😳 “But those revenue generating doesn’t have to fall on Denver taxpayers, it can fall on corporations or other entities that maybe have the means to provide the additional funding.” —Councilwoman Gonzales-Gutierrez
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Insanity!
NEW: the Boulder measure slaps an excise tax of at least $4,000 annually on homes occupied 183 days or less per year. completecolorado.com/2026/09…
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If Denver police department spends $495,000 on drones to give me moving violations and speeding tickets while solving no real crime…..I am going to be pissed.
A drafted contract for Axon police drones sits less than $4,000 below the $500,000 mark that would require a City Council vote. 9news.com/article/news/local…
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Your friendly reminder that Communists do not want to shut prisons down. They want to shut prisons that serve in a capitalist system down. They will replace them with Communist prisons, which they like very much. This is in line with Communist theory, practice, and history.
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Replying to @Eamon_USA
The problem isn't that Identity is primary, because it never is. The problem is that Politics is primary, and Identity is just the red dress it wears.
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GenXJen retweeted
Has anyone been to the circus lately? Of course not. The reason why is because it isn’t the least bit fun or amazing. No one in their right mind would choose to go watch tiny dogs do sad tricks for two hours while safety clowns take care not to fake-hurt each other. First, they got rid of the elephants. Then it was the tigers. Then it was the acrobats on horses. Then it was the clowns doing anything that could be interpreted by a five year old as dangerous. Then it was anything with a remote tinge of cultural difference. From a 19th century style enactment of the thrills and dangers of the great wide world, the circus became a study in safety-ism, ie not fun. Very soon, there will be no more circuses. And why did they get rid of the elephants again? Well, because some third rate circuses abused these magnificent animals in the 1970s, and were duly shamed and shut down and prosecuted. Meanwhile, “elephants are being abused” became a meme. No matter what reputable circuses did, insane protesters targeted them. Now there are no more circuses, and no work for circus elephants — who are extremely intelligent animals who enjoy performing and working with people. Children don’t care about elephants anymore, because they’ve never seen them. Good luck to future conservationists. Did the world become a safer, kinder place? It did not. It became much more dangerous. To deal with that world, we raised a generation of children who are incapable of dealing with even the slightest implication of pain or discomfort and have no links to the past, or to the realities of other places and cultures, and who are therefore incapable of understanding the world or making it a better place. Having never seen elephants march up Broadway, they lack any sense that the world can be a source of wonder and amazement. Instead, they watch porn on their phones. No one benefitted from any of this, especially not children or elephants.
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Good news! Councilwoman Lewis is withdrawing her labor (slavery) acknowledgment…not because she doesn’t still want it, but because her stakeholders said “nah” to broadening the scope as desired by other Councilmembers. (See Stakeholder feedback and proposals from Flynn and RC).
It is rare that I see something on Denver’s City Council agenda that makes me sick to my stomach. I often have policy disagreements, I often think we’re moving in the wrong direction. The proposal to read this Labor Acknowledgement before every City Council meeting is a wholesale rejection of the metaphysics of the United States of America, just like the Land Acknowledgement adopted several years ago. If Council adopts this, they are taking a revolutionary stance against and are rejecting the founding ideas of the U.S.A. and our constitutional republic. Just what do I mean? The ontology (roughly, a view of the nature of being) of the Declaration boldly states that we are all created equal, that our rights are unalienable—they exist by virtue of our creation (and/or natural law). They are not granted by identity group, past historical wrongs, nor the majority (or collective). Our government was constituted to protect those unalienable individual rights to life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, freedom of religion. Our government’s just power rests on the consent of the governed (not a monarchy’s bloodline, or anything else). We have individual agency and responsibility; we do not bear collective nor historical guilt. The Constitution is written to codify this precious, moral, and radical ontology and is designed to provide checks and balances on power. We have equal protection under the law, the Bill of Rights. Why is the Labor (and Land) Acknowledgment a Rejection of the Founding and our constitutional republic? Because it asserts a fundamentally different metaphysics. It claims that every citizen of Denver, our country, today and since the founding is irreparably and collectively stained, who we are, what we have built, all of our history through this moment is reducible to the ill-gotten fruits of slavery and racial discrimination. In this claim, it rejects the Founding ontology. That people were enslaved when the Declaration was written does not make the those self-evident truths false. Rather, the existence of slavery and the inability to abolish it outright was a moral failing of the people of the day that was rectified through bloodshed and sacrifice in the Civil War. The Labor (and Land) Acknowledgement advances a theology of racial guilt and collective, inherited sin that requires weekly confession and atonement by our elected representatives before they conduct their official duties! It embeds the notion that the past is ever-present and must be repaired (@Ne_pas_couvrir )! Denver City Council must reject this proposal and repeal the Land Acknowledgement and affirm the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. Enough of this subversion. Enough.
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Correction: this update will be made to the Finance and Business Committee.
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See the full presentation that will be presented 9/29 to the Health and Safety Committee. denver.legistar.com/Legislat…
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GenXJen retweeted
This is Kim Kaufmann, CEO of @RecovExcel. She just shared that OD deaths are down in the province of Alberta by 36% but down only 9% in the rest of Canada. Alberta embraced a recovery system of care. The rest of Canada doubled down on harm reduction. Facts.
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Replying to @the_transit_guy
“Coco” would run (slowly) on existing freight lines and requires a massive sales tax increase to fund just to fund this small pilot route. Like most projects pushed by traintards, it’s a scam. ti.org/antiplanner/?p=24151
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GenXJen retweeted
“Roads are bad because everyone wants to use them. Trains are good because no one wants to use them.” See what I’m dealing with here.
Replying to @jarvis_best
This train will be too expensive instead let's just expand i25 again. Please ignore that we have spent several billion dollars over the last decade with the latest expansion being 1.5 billion. This time I swear we will fix traffic!
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By far the most honest and sober assessment of the cuckoo CoCo train I’ve read. To be honest, I’m impressed with Jarvis’s restraint. Do read the whole thing. And Vote No. Is it just me, or does the CoCo logo look like a reclining dude with a fox head in his lap?
Colorado is populated entirely by people who got here from California five minutes ago and can’t wait to turn Colorado into exactly like the place they fled, so I’m sure this will pass by double digits. The last 40 years of Denver public transit debates have been advocates promising robust and financially sound trains full of people and critics who said they were smoking crack and their financial projections were fueled almost entirely by said crack. If anything, the critics underestimated how bad things would get. Fare revenue for existing lines is $61 million against operating costs of $1.6 BILLION, which is, get this, more. Pandemic era bailout money has been spent, but ridership is still down 40% from 2019 and will never come back. Empty trains are running around the clock supported by nothing but state and federal taxes and a single masturbating bum who didn’t pay for a ticket. Somehow this is all good for the environment, we are told. Not satisfied with their success, they’re going to expand. The RTD girl boss makes a half million a year. Every single reply and QT to the post below is positive.
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This Business Confidence Index applies to Colorado.
"[Colorado] business confidence remained pessimistic headed into Q3 2026 and it only increased 1.3 points from Q2." --Denver Chief Economist Lisa Martinez-Templeton citing the Leeds Colorado Business Confidence Index
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Denver's reserves are below the 15% recommended for good fiscal stewardship. This puts the City in a difficult financial position. Reaching the 15% target does not require a "gradual, multi-year approach". To be gradual and ambiguous--no year for reaching 15% reserves is named--is a choice. It's only required if the City chooses its current course on spending and maintains the very policies that stifle economic growth and diminish quality of life.
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Denver’s sales tax revenue is growing barely above inflation.* Expectations for Q4 are “for a bit of a consumer slowdown.” A big share of the “growth” in 2026 is actually not expanded consumer spend, but an accounting shift—Stapleton’s TIF** expired, so those dollars that used to live elsewhere on the books (and go back to the developer) now stay with the City. This is why the Chief Economist notes that if she took the “new” Stapleton dollars off (like before the TIF expired) Denver’s 2025 sales tax “growth” was only 1.9%‼️ That is lower than inflation, meaning real new sales tax from spending SHRANK in 2025. Not good. *The Year-Over-Year comparisons shown include inflation. ** TIF = Tax Increment Financing
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What’s terribly sad is that this group of Denver Business Leaders cannot make the case that Denver is the best return on investment. Along these lines… I’m just starting to view the 2027 budget hearings. Denver’s Chief Economist—who is excellent, and I greatly respect—kicked off her presentation noting that our Labor Force Participation Rate is the lowest it’s been since 1976. Not good. Our YOY job growth is 0.2%. That’s it.
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