Denver’s Unopened High-Tech Airport Stuck in...

It’s not funny anymore. The soaring new Denver International Airport, still gathering cobwebs on the plains east of town, has worse problems than a baggage system that eats bags. Ten independent investigations are looking into allegations of shoddy construction, influence peddling, misled bond dealers and mishandled government funds.

But beleaguered city officials are responding to the cascade of bad news by hunkering down, trying to stifle information and turn criticism back on the critics.

Mayor Wellington Webb in September invoked executive privilege to deny a request for city records from U.S. Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.), then had staffers deny he had done so.

One Denver radio station’s legal analyst says city attorneys threatened to sue him after he reported on air this summer that the mayor’s office was refusing to produce documents regarding delays at the airport.

They “said they were going after my license to practice law,” said analyst Dan Caplis, host of a talk show on KOA. “That’s serious; that’s how I make my living.”

“Nobody threatened Mr. Caplis about anything,” city airport attorney Lee Marable told the Associated Press. “Two people can see things differently.”

Marable said he and the two other attorneys met with Caplis to “try to narrow his focus on a pretty broad request for documents.”

Caplis plans to go to court for the documents.

In August, after the AP reported former inspectors’ allegations that workers cut corners on runway jobs, airport director Jim DeLong set up “listening” and “response” teams made up of city and airport employees to challenge media stories on airport problems, said Briggs Gamblin, the mayor’s spokesman.

Gamblin, along with Webb and DeLong, also works to deflect media criticism of the airport as part of the city’s so-called “truth squad.”

The three men were dubbed the truth squad by reporters when they flew to New York last February to smooth over the bond market’s concerns about the airport. Recently they’ve sent faxes to media outlets within hours of AP reports critical of the airport, some bearing such underscored alerts as “CORRECTION TO AN ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORT.”

“Often what is said is accurate, but not the whole picture,” Gamblin said. “We also felt we were not getting our answers out quickly enough.”

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Late last month, Webb, clearly irritated by the mounting bad news, seemed to indicate he thinks the complainers are more whiners than whistleblowers.

“We had more than 20,000 people working at the airport,” he said. “If you take 10% or 1% of those, you have 2,000 or 200 people who have an ax to grind.”

The city has done everything possible “to doctor, twist and filter the news” to make it appear the airport was on schedule and under budget, protested Mike Boyd, who runs Aviation Research Systems Inc., a local consulting firm that forecasts and analyzes passenger traffic for the airline industry.

“Then they form a truth squad,” he said. “One thing this airport is short on is truth.”

“This new airport is making Denver the laughingstock of the aviation world,” Boyd declared.

The whole mess “is giving us a serious black eye,” concurred City Councilman Ted Hackworth, who says he regularly fields complaints from constituents weary of embarrassing questions wherever they travel.

The latest joke, he said, is that Denver International Airport’s acronym, DIA, stands for “Doesn’t Include Airplanes.”

It was not always thus.

Federico Pena won the mayor’s office in 1987 on the enthusiasm generated by his slogan, “Imagine a Great City.” Part of his plan was a grand new airport to replace Stapleton International, whose cheek-by-jowl runways are often hostage to winter storms.

The airport, promised Pena, now U.S. transportation secretary, would pull Denver out of its economic slump and dispel forever its “cow town” image.

Ground was broken in 1989. Opening was scheduled for Oct. 31, 1993. But four opening dates have come and gone because the highly touted, British-made baggage system can’t be made to work. Members of Congress laughed when they were shown videotapes of the system chewing up and spitting out luggage.

Only City Council members remain bold enough to predict a fifth opening date--Feb. 28, 1995, a year and a half late.

Denver voters, who overwhelmingly approved the 1989 referendum that allowed the airport to go forward, have soured on the $4.2-billion project, now almost three times over budget. A recent poll showed the referendum would fail today.

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Whatever acid humor was once wrested from the baggage fiasco has long since faded under the pall of multiple investigations by federal and local agencies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is running two of the 10 investigations, examining airport bond deals for potentially misleading investor information and possible solicitation of political payoffs. A city-retained attorney says Denver could be forced to repay $3.7 billion in bonds if securities regulations were violated.

There are also charges that a contractor used too little cement mix in runway concrete, accusations of cronyism in concession jobs and reports that Denver diverted airport funds for city legal expenses.

Late last month, the AP reported allegations of improper inspections from Dean Hill, a former airport inspector.

Hill has photographs showing wooden supports left in floors about to be poured and debris left atop concrete pillars that now hold up Concourse C. When he refused to sign off on substandard jobs, knowing the decaying wood would eventually create air gaps and the debris would prevent concrete from bonding to steel support cages, other inspectors signed their names, Hill says.

Hill says he finally quit after workers poured a concourse wall and he found the wall’s steel supports lying on the wire floor grid. He photographed the wall supports, still on the support grid, being covered by wet concrete.

Webb, who faces a May election, said he was “outraged at the continuous claims of shoddy construction” and appointed a panel to investigate Hill’s claims. A few days later, construction manager Bob Storck said preliminary, X-ray type photographs of one concrete wall showed the correct amount of metal reinforcement.

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When the city has tried to stifle criticism, however, some of the efforts have backfired.

On Oct. 6, the city claimed in one of its “CORRECTION” faxes that the automated baggage system was never intended to transfer bags between concourses or airlines and that the AP “incorrectly reported that changes to the baggage system . . . would no longer allow interline transfer of baggage using the automated system.”

“That’s not true,” said Ed Trommeter, who sat in on airport baggage talks when he was DIA’s assistant aviation director. He said plans always called for automated transfer of bags and the contract with United Airlines required it.

The Rocky Mountain News, touting the system’s benefits, reported Oct. 17, 1993, that “for passengers on connecting flights, the bar or keypunch codes will tell the computer . . . those bags should ride a telecar to other gates on the concourse, or to another airline’s gates for the connecting flights.”

And on Sept. 22, an AP reporter was interviewing Bill Brack, chief of staff to Senator Brown, in his Washington, D.C., office when a news clip arrived by fax. In the Denver Post story, the mayor’s staff denied an AP report that Webb had invoked executive privilege to avoid sending Brown documents related to one SEC investigation.

Brack shuffled through papers on his desk and produced Webb’s letter of Sept. 16 in which the mayor said the requested documents were “subject to an executive or official privilege as recognized in federal case law.”

“This is Nixonian,” Brack said.

10 Investigations of Denver International Airport

The 10 investigations concerning Denver International Airport involve major federal agencies, including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation:

Finances

* The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating all DIA bond issues from 1990 to last September to determine whether Denver misrepresented its bond offerings by not adequately informing investors about the airport’s troublesome baggage system.

* Denver is included in a nationwide SEC look at whether elected officials in cities and states where large public projects are being financed have solicited political contributions from bond houses who want to handle bond sales. A city-retained attorney says Denver could be forced to repay $3.7 billion in bonds if securities regulations were violated.

* The General Accounting Office is looking into the city’s airport spending and management. The GAO investigation was requested by Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.), who says the city refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation into discrepancies in the latest DIA bond offering about how money will be paid back.

* The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating allegations that Denver diverted airport funds to city use. City officials admit spending $345,000 on legal fees to defend Denver’s minority contract program, even though a challenged paving contract did not involve the airport. The city defends the expenditures because airport contractors could be affected by the lawsuit.

* At the request of FAA Director David Hinson, the U.S. Transportation Department is also investigating how the city spent federal funds earmarked for DIA.

Construction

* A federal grand jury is investigating contractors’ allegations that the airport’s major paving contractor deliberately used too little cement in the concrete poured for two of DIA’s five runways.

* The Denver District Attorney’s office is checking allegations of shoddy work, fraud in building materials and falsified reports.

* A special panel appointed by Mayor Wellington Webb, consisting of three DIA engineers and Denver’s director of public works, Mike Musgrave, is investigating allegations that improper inspections of certain jobs in Concourse C allowed shoddy practices that could eventually cause the collapse of the roof, floors and walls.

Management

* The district attorney, at Webb’s request, is investigating allegations by former airport spokesman Richard Boulware that the city broke federal laws governing grant money by using a television camera bought with airport funds to videotape city publicity. Boulware contends Webb demoted him because he refused a request from mayoral aide Mike Dino to use Boulware’s public relations staff and camera to tape Webb’s neighborhood walks, part of a campaign to improve the mayor’s image. The city overruled him. Then, when the camera was in city hands, Boulware asserts, the FAA needed to tape test takeoffs and landings at the airport and Boulware had to rent another camera for $2,500.

* Based on testimony given at Boulware’s personnel hearing, the FBI opened a separate investigation into allegations made by Ed Trommeter, the airport’s former No. 2 man. Trommeter testified that an airport contractor threatened him after he refused to cooperate with Webb Administration efforts to steer concessions to minority friends of the mayor.

Source: Associated Press