John Suthers reflects on 8 years as Colorado Springs mayor: 'The most satisfying job I had'

Jun. 4—When John Suthers ran nearly a decade ago to become the mayor of Colorado Springs, it wasn't exactly a natural career progression, he said.

At the time, he was serving his last years of a 10-year stint as Colorado's attorney general. An attorney by trade, Suthers thought his next move would be going back into private practice; instead, he found himself campaigning to lead the city he grew up in as its 41st mayor.

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"I really decided that local government, in this age of the partisan gridlock in federal politics and now even starting to get into state politics, that local politics is really where things were happening that were impacting people's quality of life," said Suthers, 71.

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In his case, success has meant a growing city and economy, a revitalized downtown area and new revenue for roads and storm drainage, he said.

While those accomplishments didn't come without challenges for the city, including four mass shootings and a global pandemic that initially shuttered businesses, halted tourism, and took the lives of nearly 2,000 El Paso County residents — history probably will remember Suthers' tenure fondly, District 4 Councilwoman Yolanda Avila said.

He leaves office Tuesday after serving eight years.

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"I think he'll probably go down as one of the best mayors in Colorado Springs history," said Avila, who joined the council in 2017 and was reelected in 2021. "If the mayor said he was going to do something, I trusted that. I trusted him, I respected him, and I appreciated that he was a man of his word."

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Suthers' primary task after he was elected in 2015 was to ease tensions that had festered between the nine-member City Council and the previous mayor, Steve Bach.

During Bach's four-year reign, he and councilmembers clashed over stormwater, road funding, budgets and the proposed City for Champions initiative, among other issues.

Suthers drew upon his previous experience as state attorney general and as the U.S. attorney general for Colorado to "nurture" his relationship with the council, he said.

Suthers set up lunch meetings with City Council twice a month and hired a chief of staff who knew how to work with legislators and was available to councilmembers to discuss various issues, he said.

"I think it made a big difference," he said.

Former Councilman Bill Murray, who served two terms under Suthers from 2015 through this April, said he felt the outgoing mayor took a hard-line approach to his leadership.

"For the last eight years, what you've seen is the consolidation of power and the refusal to release power from the mayor's office. ... We've come a long way in eight years, but what I'm emphasizing is the importance of balance — in some cases, rebalancing responsibilities between the executive and legislative branches."

While the City Council is the legislative body that guides and determines land-use decisions, for one example, and oversees Colorado Springs' four-service utility, the mayor acts as the city's full-time chief executive. He or she has the power to enforce laws and ordinances, create a strategic plan for the city, and submit to the council an annual budget, among other responsibilities.

Suthers said he had to take immediate action after he was elected to address about $1.5 billion in overdue improvements, primarily to the city's deficient stormwater infrastructure and roads.

Among his first and biggest accomplishments as mayor, Suthers said, was "convincing the community to invest in itself."

Most voters understood roads needed to be fixed, so he didn't have trouble persuading them to support the 2C sales tax initiative that pays exclusively for road improvements, he said. Voters in 2019 authorized a five-year extension of that tax at a rate of 5.7 cents for every $10 purchase.

A more difficult task was persuading voters to improve stormwater infrastructure, which had for years been underfunded, he said.

In 2009, the city eliminated funding for its stormwater enterprise, ending a $15.5 million-a-year stream that paid for projects like new culverts and retention ponds.

In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Pueblo County and the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District sued the city over water-quality violations and shortfalls in Colorado Springs' stormwater program that they argued degraded, eroded, and widened Fountain Creek and its tributaries.

Suthers also had to negotiate a solution with Pueblo County, which threatened to block Colorado Springs from pumping water from the Pueblo Reservoir through the newly built Southern Delivery System pipeline.

He went to work educating residents about the need for a stormwater enterprise, he said.

In November 2017, voters approved reinstating a stormwater fee to provide continuing revenue to catch up on maintenance. The money will help cover $45 million in projects required by a 2021 consent decree approved in the lawsuit against the city, as well as $460 million the city is spending over 20 years in an agreement with Pueblo County to build 71 major stormwater projects designed to eliminate sedimentation, detain excessive flows, and improve water quality in Fountain Creek.

"Here we are, having to go back to the public and ask for money for a stormwater tax, because it's now a legal requirement from the courts, with an obvious impact on the Southern Delivery System," Murray said.

He criticized city leadership that failed for years to require developers to meet stormwater standards.

"I wanted developers to pay more than their fair share of the damages they did. ... You didn't see any of that," Murray said.

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City for Champions

Suthers also touts a booming local economy and a revitalized downtown among his greatest achievements as mayor.

During his eight-year tenure, Colorado Springs grew by 50,000 people, the city added 47,000 jobs, and saw its annual gross domestic product grow from $30 billion to $40 billion, he reported in September during his final State of the City address. It is also among the fastest-growing millennial-age populations in the country.

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"In 2015, I had a lot of residents saying, 'Oh, my kids don't want to stay here.' Now, I get a lot of people saying the place is being overrun by young people," Suthers said.

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The city's downtown area now boasts 3,000 new residential housing units and three of the City for Champions projects, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum, Ed Robson Arena and Weidner Field.

"There's a lot of folks that, because of their lifestyle, don't like coming downtown, but there's a ton of people now coming to restaurants, the Pikes Peak Performing Arts Center, soccer games and all that. I think to be a great city, you need to have a vibrant downtown," he said.

Avila noted how Suthers "quickly moved forward" the City for Champions projects and used special tools to get the venues underway.

For example, the City Council designated as blighted the green space on the city's northwest side, where the new U.S. Air Force Academy visitor center is being built. The designation allows an increased portion of sales and property tax revenues generated from various taxing entities to be spent on the visitor center and infrastructure for surrounding commercial development.

Avila and Murray were two of three councilmembers who voted against the designation at the time, saying the land didn't fit criteria to be declared an urban-renewal area.

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When to move quickly

Avila said she would have liked to see more of the same enthusiasm for projects that could be built in her district on the southeast side of the city.

For decades, the southeast side has experienced higher rates of poverty, unemployment and commercial vacancies than other parts of Colorado Springs, as well as lower property values and household incomes.

"When that (land) was made an urban-renewal area designation, the southeast part of town didn't have one of the 17 URA designations at the time," Avila said.

Currently, there are two urban-renewal area projects in southeast Colorado Springs, Hancock Commons and Panorama Heights.

"It's like I have to constantly bring it up. We fit the very definition of ... blight, so when the (Air Force Academy) visitor center got the designation it was like, wow. ... When the powers that be have the will to do it, it gets done and there are no excuses," she said.

Bringing some City for Champions projects to the southeast area, such as Weidner Field, also could have spurred economic development there, Avila said.

The city's rapid growth has posed other challenges, such as a shortage in housing and police officers and concern about future water resources.

Murray said he was concerned that developers in Colorado Springs have too much influence. The question played out in the city's regular election this spring, spurred by a controversial water rule requiring Colorado Springs Utilities to have 128% of the water needed to serve existing city demand and the projected demand from new properties.

Norwood Development Group, the most powerful developer in the city, who benefits heavily from the water rule, told Suthers last year it planned to ask voters to approve an even more stringent water rule that could have blocked new annexations for decades. The city's adopted standard is similar but less strict.

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'Wakeup call for everybody'

Suthers defended his support of the water rule, saying a proposed annexation of 3,200 acres east of Fountain made Utilities look closer at how many people it could serve.

Based on previous statements from Utilities, Suthers said he believed it could serve 800,000 people when the Southern Delivery System was complete. Then, Utilities told him it could serve closer to 670,000 people now.

"It was a wakeup call for everybody. That caught a lot of people off-guard," he said.

The city should study its water resources and how that fits into the water rule, he said.

"While it's studied, it's important to just not make major, major annexations that we may not be able to develop."

Under Suthers' administration, the city also reduced the amount of parkland developers are required to dedicate to the city when it builds new homes, and big projects like the Scheels All Sports retailer on Colorado Springs' north side are getting breaks on property taxes and fees as well as millions in sales tax rebates, Murray said.

"Why would we give a tax incentive for these guys to come into the fastest-growing areas of town? That tracks back to developers' interests problematically being part of our equation. ... If you keep giving away more tax incentives ... show me how our tax base is growing to support police and fire resources," Murray said.

Suthers said Mayor-elect Yemi Mobolade, who will be sworn in Tuesday, needs to focus on municipal government essentials such as public safety, public works, transportation and outdoor amenities like parks.

"The cities that are doing the best in the United States today are those that are focused on what cities ought to do," Suthers said.

Next week, Suthers will join Denver-based lobbying and law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck as a shareholder, focusing on government relations and state attorneys general managers.

He also promised his wife, Janet Suthers, two international trips a year, he said.

As he looks back on his time as mayor, Suthers hails it "the most satisfying job" he's ever had.

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"It required political leadership, and I really do feel like we accomplished some things that weren't easy to accomplish," he said.

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As he leaves office, Suthers will miss the people he worked with most of all.

"You remember some of the issues and some of the tough decisions you've had to make, some of the things you felt like you made a difference, but most of all, (you remember) the people," he said. "I think that's going to be the case with (my job as) mayor of Colorado Springs as well."