Denver’s Mayoral Bike Committee Grinding Gears to Meet With Mike Johnston

At the most recent meeting of the Denver Mayor’s Bike Advisory Committee, the top priority was clear: end a six-year drought of mayoral contact.

“We are just not getting the mayor to come out to our meetings,” said Joe Sak, the vice chair of the Mayor’s Bike Advisory Committee, during a meeting on Thursday, October 2. “We’re kind of just looking for a chance to talk to him.”

With only a handful of members present at the most recent meeting and a laidback vibe in the small Carla Madison Recreation Center room where the group gathers, the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee (MBAC) might seem a bit sleepy and informal. It’s one of more than 130 Denver boards or commissions whose responsibilities include policy recommendations and speaking up on local issues via letters, emails and meetings. But MBAC member June Churchill, who was once named Denver’s “Bike Mayor” by a local lobbying group, tells Westword that the city isn’t leaning on the bike committee as much as she’d like.

“Obviously, if you’re on an advisory committee, you want to do your job, which is being an advisory committee. If they’re not actively seeking feedback from us, you have to say, ‘We’re here. You should talk to us,'” Churchill says. “I think it’d be helpful if there was more communication between the city and this committee.”

Bike committee members are volunteers who signed up after hearing about the MBAC on Facebook, from friends or at races. Like most city advisory boardmembers, they squeeze time into their normal lives to meet during the evenings (once per month during their three-year terms). In fact, the MBAC is currently taking applications for new members until December 15, but it’s struggling to attract enough applicants.

Still, the committee, created during the Federico Peña administration, is more than three decades old. It has 25 members from all parts of Denver, and was meant to bring together residents who love bicycling in Denver to discuss the city’s infrastructure and regularly make recommendations to department heads, city council members and, principally, the mayor.

“We’re the people with experience out on the roadways. We know how to get around. We know what’s working and what’s not working. We’re supposed to be a resource for the mayor,” Churchill says. “We’re called the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, and yet the mayor hasn’t presented to us, and hasn’t directly sought feedback from us. I think that’s where the irony is.”

According to Sak, the MBAC’s interactions with Johnston since he took office in July 2023 have been mostly limited to budget letters, which various agencies send every year to suggest priorities for the city’s upcoming budget. Most of the MBAC’s communication with the Johnston administration in general has been through the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI), committee members note.

According to Jon Ewing, the mayor’s spokesperson, Johnston met with MBAC members during a public event in August.

“We regularly have advisors and city staff attend meetings of this sort,” Ewing says. “The mayor actually met with members of the cycling community back in August to hear their ideas and feedback, and that meeting included folks from the Bike Advisory Committee. He’s looking forward to sitting down with the committee soon.”

Sak says that while “it’s correct that some members of our committee did happen to be at that meeting, acting as advocates for biking in general in their personal time…what we’re asking for is an intentional engagement with all of MBAC at one of our formally scheduled meetings.”

Bike advocates may get a chance to work the mayor’s ear soon, however.

Road Safety, Communication Among Main Concerns

As far as any of the MBAC members could remember on Thursday, the last meeting the committee had with a Denver mayor was a three-block bike ride through Capitol Hill with a spandex-clad Michael Hancock. That ride with former mayor Hancock was in 2019. The following year, the MBAC stopped hosting in-person meetings amid COVID-19 shutdowns and didn’t return to in-person meetings until 2025.

“Having him at a meeting is the primary goal,” Sak said on Thursday. “Where we have his attention, where we have his ear, where it’s not some other event where he talks for five minutes.”

Churchill suggested pitching the meeting to Johnston as a half-hour “listening session” where they ask the mayor to “tell us what you want to do with biking in Denver. Let us give you feedback on it…make it collaborative.”

Churchill wants Johnston to consider the road maintenance that eats up a chunk of Denver’s property tax revenue and how getting more people on bikes can save money. Committee member Ari Snow tells Westword he wants to know how the mayor is protecting cyclists in light of recent data showing that Denver pedestrian deaths are up 50 percent from last year. Erik Douds, who’s been on the MBAC for two years, says he was hit by a pickup truck on his way to the Thursday meeting, which made him realize how the experiences of MBAC members can help the city.

“This group is literally trying to address this problem [of road safety], and it’s a citizen’s group,” Douds says. “You want to know there’s that through line of ‘Oh, my city is doing everything, even if it’s not all perfect.'”

The MBAC has an appointed liaison from DOTI, who presents plans and seeks feedback from them, but there are no liaisons from the mayor’s office. Churchill is a member of the DOTI advisory board, which she says is more “formalized” and gets more interactions with the city than MBAC.

Has Anyone Seen Our Mayor?

Sak tells Westword that during the first two years of Johnston’s administration, the MBAC “felt like things were building or continuing from the momentum of the previous [Hancock] administration, and notable gains had been achieved in bike infrastructure and policy,” so the committee didn’t feel like it needed to meet with Johnston.

“More recently, things seem to have taken a turn and become regressive,” Sak says. “We’re seeing downscaling of priorities, and even removal of infrastructure, which has prompted us to become more active and vocal in our desire to meet with the mayor directly.”

According to the MBAC, they first asked for a meeting with the mayor in a letter opposing changes made this year on Market Street, where the city removed flex posts protecting bike lanes, sent on June 11. While they heard back from DOTI Director Amy Ford, they didn’t hear back about their meeting with the mayor.

The MBAC claims they kept trying after that. The group reached out to Tim Hoffman, Johnston’s director of policy, on July 7 to ask for a meeting, but got nothing. They invited Johnston to an August 21 meeting about a pedestrian bridge on Jewell Street, but he didn’t show. They reached out to him during his Reddit Ask Me Anything on August 27, and were told to go through a scheduler, which they said they did that same day. Committee members were met with a delayed response telling them to contact a lead scheduler, which they said was done on September 3 and 19.

Like a scene from a crime drama where cops plot how to intercept a high-value target, MBAC members were sharing ideas during the Thursday meeting about when and where Johnston will be in the coming weeks for a chance to schedule a meeting with him directly: Will he be out for Walk and Roll to School day on October 8? Maybe he’ll be out campaigning for the Vibrant Denver bond? Perhaps an appearance at the Broadway Halloween Parade?

“We also know he won’t be up for election for a couple years,” Sak said. “So we don’t have that leverage or pressure.”

Johnston tours neighborhoods to push policy ideas like his Affordable Denver tax to build housing and the Vibrant Denver bond to fund infrastructure improvements — but very few bike projects, as bike advocates have noted.

“Part of me feels like we should be an extension of the mayor, year to year, as policies are getting rolled out,” Douds says. “Kind of like, ‘who’s the eyes and ears? Who’s actually using this thing?’ The mayor should be hearing back from us.”

In a couple of months, the bicycle committee will get its chancer. After reaching out to the mayor’s office again on Friday, October 3, Sak says that the MBAC has successfully scheduled a meeting with the mayor in December.