VILLAGE DIN

part 2 of 2
With Poundstone out of the picture in the 1989 election, longtime Greenwood resident Rollie Barnard was elected mayor. And for a couple of years things stayed quiet.

Seeing an opening when the Poundstone group lost power, Myrna Poticha had run again for council and been re-elected. However, Barnard was bound and determined that his tenure would be more placid than his predecessor’s. Says current councilman Charlie Hazlehurst, “We didn’t air our dirty laundry in public.”

There were plenty of disagreements among the councilmembers, to be sure, but Barnard managed to keep a lid on most of them. Right up until last year. That’s when the politically resurrected Poticha again went to war, this time against councilwoman Carol Johnson.

That the two would clash was perhaps inevitable. Johnson, a bright and vivacious woman who works part-time at a local school and once served as a neighborhood association president, is a longtime fan of Poundstone’s. She represents the tract-home newcomers in the eastern district annexed by Poundstone in 1987, while Poticha serves voters in the more rural western section.

By the time her differences with Poticha came to light, however, Johnson had managed to alienate each and every one of her fellow councilmembers. She filed to run for mayor in February 1993, and, complains Barnard, began “getting her name on articles in [a local newspaper called] The Villager all the time.”

Johnson, in fact, was given a column in The Villager titled “Council Corner,” and began using the space as a forum to attack the other councilmembers.

For instance, Johnson took her colleagues to task over their handling of a request by a battered-women’s shelter called Gateway to locate a safehouse in Greenwood Village. The group didn’t want to go through the normal process for approval, says former councilman Bob Lembke, because it felt it was important that the location remain secret for reasons of security.

Normally, says Lembke, the city would publish the address of a proposed group home in the newspaper and hold a public hearing. What the council did instead was send notices to all the neighborhood association presidents in the city, inform them of Gateway’s request and invite them to attend a hearing on the matter.

Johnson, however, decided the council was trying to pull a fast one on the residents of Greenwood Village. She wrote an article for The Villager stating that the council intended to sneak through an approval for the shelter without public input. “In that regard,” says Lembke, “the woman lied. And unfortunately, that whipped up a lot of opposition.” Johnson says she stands by her comments.

The next council meeting was packed with residents concerned for their safety and their property values. The shelter ultimately decided to locate elsewhere.

By that time the council had had its fill of Carol Johnson. On February 22 the seven other members drafted a resolution “censuring” Johnson for “repeatedly misrepresenting the actions of the City Council…repeatedly misrepresenting her actions as a member of the Council…and repeatedly making false and defamatory statements concerning the city staff, commissions and council.” The document was signed and approved by every councilmember but Johnson.

Among the six complaints listed by councilmembers in the censure: that Johnson misrepresented the council’s actions regarding the safehouse; that she had falsely accused city manager Dinah Lewis of improperly providing city employees with a sizable bonus (an expenditure that Johnson herself had voted to approve); and that she had falsely accused Poticha and Lewis of improperly funding and building a sound-attenuating wall in Poticha’s district. (Johnson had repeatedly voted for that as well, though she later changed her vote.)

After the censure was read, says Johnson, Mayor Barnard reportedly came up to her in the council chambers and told her “the real meaning of the censure.” According to Johnson, Barnard told her she was not to publish any more articles in The Villager. “And he said, `The council will keep the pressure on until you learn to play the game,'” Johnson claims. Barnard says Johnson’s version of events is categorically untrue.

Johnson continued writing articles, she says now, because the council had “scapegoated me to the point that my projects weren’t going well. I decided that the only way to do it was to publish them. That way, the public would be the arbiter and the force behind getting things done.”

Johnson’s Villager columns left the impression that she was the only person on council who was willing to listen to the public and to fight for them. And her words helped play on the fears surrounding the east-side/west-side rivalry.

Poticha and councilman Jim Underhill deny that there is an east/west schism in the city or on the council, saying talk of such a split is nothing more than “campaign rhetoric.” But it’s clear that residents in those areas perceive the city’s future in different ways. “In the rural sector,” says Barnard, “they really don’t care a hoot about annexation. They don’t want more people in their city, and they don’t care anything about the commercial district. It’s not a part of their way of life. They’re busy raising animals and chickens.” That part of town also has the most open space, and residents would like to see it bought up by the city and kept that way.

“Then you get over into the eastern portion of the city, where the most recent annexations have taken place,” Barnard says. “They have quarter-acre sites and higher density. The east side says there’s too many parks and bike trails on the west.” The east is largely built out already. And if the residents want big parks and other amenities, the city will have to annex more property to get them.

The east/west split was intensified last year when Greenwood Village endured its latest political skirmish–a fight over whether to approve subsidies for a new Super K store, a larger, more upscale version of a K Mart. The Nebraska-based Noddle Development Company had put down earnest money on two properties along Arapahoe Road, hoping to build the Super K on one of them. One plot was in Greenwood, just east of I-25. The other was a bit further east, about one-half block outside the city limits. Noddle executives preferred the site within the city, but claimed that that land would be costlier to develop because of its slope. So Noddle asked the city council to approve a $1.3 million subsidy.

Seven councilmembers felt it was a good deal. Noddle projected the city would receive sales tax revenues of up to $2.5 million a year from the store, some of which could theoretically be used to help alleviate traffic along the city’s bottlenecked Arapahoe Road/I-25 traffic corridor. In addition, the store was seen as preferable to other potential land uses. The Super K will cover a whopping 200,000 square feet–but, says Poticha, the 1987 annexation engineered by Poundstone allowed for one million square feet of development on the site.

The council voted 7-1 to approve the contract and the subsidy. Johnson, as usual, was the lone dissenter. And with the help of The Villager, she turned the matter into the key campaign issue of 1993, putting together a coalition of people opposed to the subsidy and working to put the matter to a public vote.

Getting the issue on the ballot wasn’t easy. The city clerk deemed the first round of petitions inadequate. So Johnson and her backers hurriedly collected more. Then, a local resident who said he’d signed the petition only because a circulator misrepresented its intent, sued the city to have the petition thrown out. Johnson and others believe that Poticha urged the man to sue. Depositions show that Poticha and the man did discuss his displeasure with the petition and that he was contacted by Noddle attorneys before he filed the suit. However, says Poticha, those same attorneys contacted almost everyone who had signed the petition.

The suit challenging the petitions was later withdrawn, but the damage had been done. Many residents apparently believed Johnson’s claim that they were being manipulated into handing out $1.3 million to a developer who would build in the city even without the subsidy. In fact, the company broke ground on the city site six weeks before the election.

Johnson earned her second censure at about the same time she was launching her anti-subsidy fight. This time, the council rebuked her for reportedly threatening city clerk Dave Manzanares and city manager Lewis. The threats, the council wrote on July 26, “are found by this council to be outrageous and beyond the bounds of decency.” According to the official censure, Johnson had threatened to bring Lewis “up on charges” for interfering with her attempt to send a fax to Washington, D.C.

Johnson denies making threats and derides the censure as nothing more than a move to embarrass her for taking a stand against the Super K subsidy.

By late summer Poticha was still the only announced candidate for mayor–Johnson had still not committed herself, despite having filed for the office months earlier. But then Dave Hull threw his hat in the ring. Hull, the owner of a small construction company, had joined the council in the summer of 1993, replacing a councilman who’d moved out of the city. He was encouraged to run for mayor by, among others, Freda Poundstone. “I thought that if the election was between Myrna and Carol,” Hull says, “that it would be a donnybrook.”

But after Hull decided to run, Johnson pulled out, choosing instead to run for re-election to council.

Barnard supported Poticha for mayor in large part because she was experienced and Hull was not. But there was another negative with Hull’s campaign in his eyes, Barnard admits. “One problem with Dave’s candidacy…was that Mrs. Poundstone got back into things and strongly endorsed Dave Hull and ultimately endorsed people who were ultimately elected to council,” Barnard says.

The Villager was solidly behind Hull, too. That, suggest Poundstone’s foes, is because Poundstone is dear friends with the paper’s publisher, Bob Sweeney. Sweeney, in fact, is something of a business partner of Poundstone’s. He introduced the prospective owners of a Black Hawk casino to Poundstone, figuring she could help get the project off the ground. And she did, by bringing more investors into the enterprise. Sweeney was given twenty shares of the project simply for bringing Poundstone into the deal (“Place Your Bets,” October 28, 1992).

Sweeney laughs when asked if he and his paper are in Poundstone’s pocket. “Freda is an interesting character,” he says. “I know her well. I like her a lot. She’s a very good friend and a very bad enemy. She’s someone who does not read newspapers. She does what she feels is right and lets the chips fall where they may.” And, no, he says, she does not make editorial policy.

But if Poundstone did read The Villager before the last election, she would have been pleased. Sweeney wrote what he called “a resounding endorsement” for Hull’s candidacy. And his paper skewered Poticha and her supporters at every available opportunity. Sweeney also printed and delivered two free pre-election issues of his paper to every home in Greenwood Village.

Of the councilmembers who ran for re-election, only Johnson, Underhill and Tim McManus made the cut. Five new members came on board. Hull was elected mayor. And the Super K subsidy was soundly defeated. It was a clear victory for Carol Johnson–and, indirectly, for Poundstone.

The suspicion that Poundstone was the force behind the election was solidified for city staffers by a comment Poundstone allegedly made in council chambers the same night the new council was sworn in, says Hull. Poundstone, according to Hull and others, none of whom actually heard the remark firsthand, reportedly said to city staffers, “See what I’ve done for you? I got you a new council and mayor.”

The rumor, says Hull, resulted in havoc for him at his first meeting with the city staff. “They said, `We were told that Freda Poundstone suggests strongly what you do, and we’re all concerned about that,'” he says. Hull says he assured them that he was his own man.

But the lingering ghost of Freda Poundstone isn’t the only political specter the beleaguered mayor has had to deal with. He and the city received another round of bad publicity just last week, when city manager Dinah Lewis resigned. “All I will say on the record,” Lewis says, “is that I and the city agreed that I was leaving to pursue other business interests.” Her resignation, which is effective February 1, could end up costing the city as much as $60,000 in severance pay and search fees.

Sources close to city hall say Lewis resigned after being told that six councilmembers who’d attended a “get-together” the Sunday after the election at new councilman Charlie Hazlehurst’s home had taken a straw poll, and that they intended to vote her out–or, at the very least, to make her life difficult.

“[Lewis] was asked to tender her resignation,” says the wife of a former councilman. “She’s part of the old guard. She wants to preserve open spaces. I think the powers that be have a different agenda for the city, so she’s got to go.” Johnson is rumored to have engineered Lewis’s departure, a charge she denies despite her past problems with Lewis. “I kept as far away from that as possible,” says Johnson. “I really was not a part of that dialogue at all.”
Hull suggests Lewis left to get out of the political fray. “I think that Dinah wanted to get away from all this,” he says. “The council did not take a vote to unload her.”

And the mayor says he doubts rumors that the new council wanted Lewis to leave because they saw her as an impediment to secret plans for massive, future annexations. “Maybe I’m too naive,” says the town’s new chief executive, who adds that despite the rampant paranoia that surrounds him in city hall, he is not convinced that his office is equipped with listening devices. “But I don’t think there’s any hidden agendas right now.”

end of part 2