As she arrived—right on time—Denver Mayoral candidate Kelly Brough wearing her signature green, took a seat on one of the picnic tables outside the FlyteCo Tavern, one of the suddenly chic joints that dot the old Elitch Gardens neighborhood. If you didn’t know she was the person everyone had come to see, you’d have thought she was just part of the meet-and-greet.
Brough has that quality that, despite a platinum resume, is more ‘regular’ and ‘face in the crowd,’ than ‘blue blood.’ She certainly does not come across as a straight-from-central-casting politician. Perhaps it’s a reflection of her small-town Montana roots.
After a few minutes of chatting with the assembled crowd, she jumps right into her reason for being there. With less than a week before the Mayoral election, she’s there to introduce herself and secure their vote. And, with the clock ticking, every vote in the June 6th election is crucial.
Brough and Mike Johnston are the last candidates standing, having outlasted a field of 15 other hopefuls. While it’s always important for a candidate to tout their latest polls, Brough candidly admits, “We don’t have the money to do polling.” But what she’s lacking in that category, she more than makes up for with an oozing confidence and affability that says, ‘I’m one of you’.
Her ever-present aides bring along their own sound equipment for stops like this, a modest but portable system with a single speaker and microphone. It may be bare bones, but it gets the job done.
It’s also more than enough today because it muffles the 38th Street traffic and works perfectly for reaching the 30 or so people who’ve come to meet the candidate.
Her presentation today is probably not much different than the ones earlier in the day or the week or the past months. People, she knows, want to hear how she’s going to address crime, homelessness, high housing costs, and a myriad of other things that would make their lives and the city’s better.
But before she gets into the nuts-and-bolts of policy, Brough explains the whole reason for deciding to commit to the task of running a 24-7 campaign for the highest office in Denver. Her decision was pretty much made a year before in Montana where she had gone to be one of her dying father’s caretakers.
“It was my Dad who said to me, ‘Your life has prepared you for this moment, your experience has prepared you for this office. If you don’t run, I’ll never forgive you.’” Of course, she added with a bit of snark and a very forgivable expletive, “That was my Dad.”
The appreciative crowd joined her with a friendly chuckle. Then it was down to business—policy—something Brough has learned with the fine detail that can only be learned by being squarely in the crucible.
Over the course of the campaign and the many ‘live fire’ debates, Brough has answered every question, confidently, seamlessly, thrown her way. She has a plan for home ownership for younger people, a challenge both her own grown daughters have dealt with. “I do believe the Mayor has the capacity to recreate ‘the promise of Denver,’ and I think I can help.’
Brough doesn’t make her argument through the lens of rose-colored glasses. “I don’t mean to make it sound easy… but I think my experience will allow me to have an impact.”
While Brough has worked in some high-powered jobs, she also lived in a reality that plays out every day for thousands of Denver families. She has lived with a partner who battled both depression and addiction. He later died of suicide. As a young girl, violence claimed the life of her father. He was murdered. She attended school and had a lunch ticket the other kids knew was for the ‘free lunches’ poor kids got. She has walked in the shoes that, she says, too many in Denver walk in each day.
Brough has climbed the ladder to reach the rung she now occupies. Armed with a college degree and new in Denver, she began working for the city of Denver. But determined to use her degree, her skills and imagination, she rose to top rungs in city government and, later, in the private sector. She served as former Denver Mayor Hickenlooper’s Chief of Staff and later headed the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce. The first women to do so. She’s also owned her own business as a mediator and spent time in higher education, at Metropolitan State University-Denver.
Her television commercial showing her driving a snowplow is not hype. She actually did it. She was also one of the architects in the modernization of the city’s 3-1-1 system. Along the way, she’s worked seamlessly with everyone from the clerks who keep the city running to the movers and shakers who brought the 2008 Democratic convention to Denver. Brough was Denver’s point of the spear for the convention that nominated Barack Obama for president.
In her afternoon appearance on 38th, Brough tried to stress to the crowd that the issues they’re most concerned with are the ones Denver needs to address to move into the 21st century. A city with the world’s third busiest airport cannot, she said, be world class unless it can solve its homeless/ unhoused challenges. It cannot compete internationally if it can’t figure out how to revitalize center city where vacancies abound and a number of once thought of immovable tenants have been unable to meet their rents.
And while Brough has not made gender a solitary element in her campaign, the issue is important to a lot of voters. As one older woman at Saturday’s meet-and-greet told her, “I’ve just moved into Denver from Littleton,” where she was a city planner. “I’ve got three reasons I’m voting for you,” she said. “First, I want to get this homeless problem solved. I also want to see if you can help my daughter and her husband get into their own home. And third, I’m voting for you because you‘re a woman. It’s time.”
Glass ceilings aren’t new to Brough. She’s already shattered her share. Her priority, she says, is simple: a new and bold leadership for the city that “has given me everything I have.”
