People to Watch in 2025: Can Bill Mosher Bring Back Downtown?

Bill Mosher may have the most critical, challenging job in the metro area in 2025 — and he didn't even see it coming. "I didn't have a clue," admits Mosher, who led the Downtown Denver Partnership for almost twenty years, then spent nearly another twenty with Trammell Crow Company, overseeing development and investment activities in Colorado before moving on to his own consulting company. "I didn't leave to retire," says the 73-year-old Denver native, "but I was looking to kind of be doing my own thing more than working for corporate real estate."

But doing his own thing will soon become doing something for the entire city. Right around Thanksgiving, a call came from Mayor Mike Johnston, who wanted to talk to Mosher about a role as the city's Chief Projects Officer, replacing Josh Laipply, who'd left for another gig. And after a series of discussions with Johnston, Chief of Staff Jen Ridder and others about all the major projects ahead for the city — particularly the launch of the expanded Downtown Denver Development Authority, approved by voters in November — Mosher agreed to take on the challenge on a contract basis.

He didn't need job security, didn't need the retirement benefits of an employee, didn't need a line on his resume that what land him a lucrative job when he was done with Denver. What he needed was to feel he'd done everything he could to "help this city and help this mayor," after already working with every Denver mayor from Federico Peña through Michael Hancock.

But above all, he wants to help bring back downtown, which is still suffering from the ramifications of the pandemic and remote work emptying office buildings. "We'll see if I can make a difference," Mosher says. "It's not what it was, but the vibrancy is still there, still viable."

Mosher has been through bust and boom and bust and boom and bust with Denver, and now he sees downtown just bumping along. But he can also see its future, a future for all successful downtowns, as "a mixed-use place where all kinds of people cross paths, a blending of humanity in an urban context." Now he just needs to get the people back there.

"Bill has been at the forefront of many endeavors close to the hearts of Denverites, such as developing mixed-use projects, including housing, renovating the 16th Street Mall and reviving Union Station," Johnston said in announcing Mosher's new position at the end of December. "He is a visionary and diligent leader with a known track record of incorporating inclusivity and belonging within projects that are vital to the city."

But Mosher knows he can't rest on his record. (BTW, that record happens to include a false but amusing accusation that he was bribing me to cover up his work at Union Station in 2010 — I'm still waiting for the cash — as well as a far more serious Convention Center scandal that saw a longtime partner resigning but Mosher retaining his post as CEO of the Denver Convention Center Hotel Authority.) Bringing downtown back will take a lot of work, smarts...and some luck.

"We have huge reinvestment challenges," Mosher acknowledges. "We need a stronger sense of neighborhood downtown." And then there are all those empty buildings...

He knows he won't be working alone, though. "There are lots of good people, good organizations," he says. "Denver is the same place it has been through most of my career...a city that pulls together. We're pretty unique."

As is Mosher.

When he was working for Trammell Crow, he led the effort to create a new landmark building on the edge of Civic Center Park that would serve as the headquarters for two daily newspapers that had just entered into a joint operating agreement. Today the Rocky Mountain News is dead, and a sadly shrunken Denver Post has moved to its printing plant out on Fox Street. The city bought the building this year for its own offices.

The electronic ticker-tape display that faces Broadway is dark, but Denver would be smart to get it going again with these words from Mosher: "Let's be thoughtful and strategic, Denver."

And let's get it done.