Letter From District 10 Councilman Chris Hinds

Happy Fall!
It’s been three months since I took office in Denver’s Perfect District 10. We’ve been busy getting oriented and meeting with a lot of you. I organized our office with three Aides helping to cover three distinct District 10 areas to cover a lot of District 10 territory. Our response time has been getting faster and faster. To date, our office has handled just shy of 200 constituent cases!
Here are just a handful of items you could find on the District 10 calendar:
• City Agency Speed Dating: We got a 10-minute intro to 35 different Denver departments and agencies where we met leadership, learned about organizational structure, were told about funding needs and issues, and who to reach out to when our constituents need help.
• 5280 Trail: This is a project I’m proud to champion. It’s great for District 10. More coming soon.
• City Contracts 101: Though City Council has a strong bully pulpit, the real authority of Council is over two areas of the City – approving contracts and passing legislation. While Mayor Hancock has our ear, City operations fall under the Mayor’s purview.
• Lobbyists: Whaaa? We met with several paid and unpaid lobbyists on various issues such the implementation of 5G cell towers and scooter safety, enforcement, and rules and regulations respectively. Both cell towers and scooters proved to be two of our first incredibly contentious issues.
• Developers: Whooo? It’s no news to you all that there is a lot of development happening across Denver, and quite a bit is in the Cherry Creek area. These meetings are important because we can help the community stay up to date on the latest information, and can reiterate issues around development that are important to all of you. Two priorities I make sure developers know that I’ll be looking out for are 1) the important relationship between land use and transit infrastructure and how development will address it, and 2) that development shouldn’t happen TO neighborhoods, it should happen FOR Perfect 10 neighborhoods.
• Transit Demand Management systems will be vital in helping Denver address the potential for hundreds of thousands of cars arriving with the new Denverites over the next 20 years. I’m supportive of alternatives that make it easy to forgo the automobile.
• Staff meetings: Each week we have two staff meetings that are an hour and a half long. It takes at least one hour to go over all our scheduling requests and event invitations. The rest of staff time is to talk through District office projects and trickier constituent issues….like those that might require mediation.
• Mediation: Sometimes constituents can be so passionate about multiple sides of an issue that we call in Denver’s mediator to help facilitate a productive conversation.
There is so much more I’d love to share with you and I look forward to doing that during your annual meeting. Teresa St Peter in our office has just started working with CCHN on several traffic calming concerns in Country Club so we’ll have an update on those when we see you next. In the meantime, please drive safe and watch out for our kids, who are back in school and going to be out and about on Halloween.
Sincerely, Chris