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Peña’s Accomplishments as Mayor of Denver

Peña’s Accomplishments as Mayor of Denver

“Imagine a Great City”--the uplifting campaign slogan for Federico Peña’s hotly contested mayoral reelection bid in 1987—summarizes his impact on Denver politics. Despite first-term frustrations as he and his advisers mastered the bruising art of city politics, Peña offered his city, well aware of its national reputation as a cultural backwater and minor regional center, a vision of itself as a major industrial, economic, transportation, and cultural hub. Peña thought big: His megaprojects included a revitalization of Denver’s downtown and its infrastructure, at a cost of nearly $330 million; Coors Field, a state-of-the-art sports facility for the Colorado Rockies; the sprawling Colorado Convention Center, which opened in 1990 and is the tenth-largest such facility in the United States; and, most controversially, a major new international airport.

With his irrepressible optimism, his commitment to cutting-edge ecologically friendly technologies, his savvy way with potential investors, and his charismatic appeal to the city’s growing minority communities, Peña enjoyed a landmark second term. His visionary energy had its critics, most notably in the form of entrenched resistance to the new international airport, which was the centerpiece of his vision for Denver. Initially, vested interests resisted his proposal, arguing that the existing Stapleton International Airport simply needed to be expanded. Peña, however, fought hard for the project. Construction of a new airport bogged down in nearly a decade of construction delays, labor disputes, rumors of insider contracts, and cost overruns, although by then Peña was no longer serving as mayor. When the new airport opened in 1995, however, it bore out Peña’s vision. Its sweeping architecture, with a five-point white fiberglass roof made to simulate the snow-capped Rockies, dazzled visitors. The facility quickly became one of the busiest airports in the world, regularly selected by travel magazines and news outlets as one of the most efficient and traveler-friendly airports in the country. For his contributions to Denver’s growth, Peña was inducted in 2001 into the state’s Tourism Hall of Fame.


See Also

Henry G. Cisneros

Alberto Gonzales

Edward Hidalgo

Manuel Luján, Jr.

Bill Richardson

Ken Salazar

Hilda L. Solis

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Federico Peña

by Joseph Dewey

American politician

As a two-term mayor of Denver, and later as President Bill Clinton’s secretaries of transportation and energy, Peña established a national reputation for progressive, activist leadership with a broad interest in cutting-edge strategies that relied on the use of ecologically friendly technologies to enhance the urban landscape.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics

Early Life

Born in Laredo, Texas, and raised in Brownsville, an industrial hub in south Texas along the Rio Grande, Federico Fabian Pena (fehd-eh-REE-koh FAY-bee-ahn PAYN-yah) enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing as the son of a successful commodities broker in the Texas cotton industry. His parents encouraged their children to succeed through diligence and commitment. Early on, Peña excelled in school, and in 1965, he matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. Attending college at the height of nationwide campus resistance to the Vietnam War, Peña was drawn to politics and joined campus protest demonstrations and campaigned for local liberal politicians. By the time he graduated in 1969, he was committed to law as a career and was accepted at the University of Texas School of Law, completing his law degree in 1972.

Federico Peña.

324_Pena_Federico.jpg

(AP Photo)

Peña moved to Denver, Colorado, to join the law firm in which his older brother was practicing. Living in Denver was something of a cultural shock for Peña, who grew up within the Tex-Mex culture of border towns in southern Texas and now lived in a Rocky Mountain metropolis in which Hispanics accounted for less than 18 percent of the population. In his brother’s firm, Peña specialized in civil rights litigation involving Hispanics, particularly cases involving police brutality and voting irregularities. A charismatic presence, articulate and handsome, Peña made a forceful impression and quickly became one of the Denver’s leading Hispanic advocates, championing bilingual education and better funding for schools in predominantly Latino neighborhoods.

Life’s Work

Concerned by the lack of progress in these areas, Peña in 1978 ran successfully for a seat in the Colorado general assembly. Quickly establishing himself as a rising star, he was named outstanding freshman Democrat by Colorado’s Social Action Committee. Despite being reelected two years later and then selected as the party’s minority leader, Peña, frustrated by the cumbersome machinery of state politics and convinced that local politics was more effective, announced his intention in early 1983 to run for mayor of Denver. His candidacy appeared at best a long shot as Peña, a neophyte to city politics, was running against William “Mayor Bill” McNichols, an institution in Denver Democratic politics. McNichols was in his fifteenth year in office, the second-longest mayoral term in the city’s history, and a man credited with a building boom that had transformed Denver. More problematically, the Hispanic voting bloc in the city, which would presumably be Peña’s strength, had yet to be organized; only 7 percent of the city’s Hispanics were actually registered to vote.

Peña, a charismatic campaigner, took advantage of voter discontent over McNichols’s perceived mismanagement of the city’s catastrophic 1977 Christmas Eve blizzard, a monstrous snowstorm that had paralyzed Denver for almost ten days. The city’s forty-five plows proved ineffective against three-inch-per-hour snowfalls accumulating in ten-foot drifts. Moreover, McNichols had refused to pursue federal disaster relief, making the city entirely responsible for the cost of recovery operations. Peña seized on voters’ discontent and crafted a narrow victory through a coalition of minority advocacy groups, liberal think-tank visionaries, and business-savvy entrepreneurs ready to reshape Denver into an international center. In becoming the city’s first Hispanic mayor, Peña was catapulted onto the national political stage.

Peña’s first term was uneven. New to city management, he proposed far more programs than entrenched interests wanted to undertake, focusing primarily on construction of a massive new downtown convention center. Peña was stung by the rancorous criticism aimed at him over his lack of management finesse. In the months before the 1987 mayoral race, it appeared he would be soundly defeated for reelection because he was down by more than 20 percent in the polls. Drawing on his base of support in the minority communities, Peña narrowly won reelection by less than 2 percent of the vote in a June runoff after an acrimonious and often ugly campaign against Dan Bain, a corporate lawyer with no political experience.

After surviving a recall—ironically, after charges of mismanaging a snowstorm—Peña enjoyed a far more successful second term. Many of his visionary ideas for Denver’s development were approved. Although he was considered a shoo-in for a third term, Peña retired to spend time with his family. He founded an investment firm that focused on recruiting the best Hispanic talent in the country.

In late 1992, Peña’s achievements in improving Denver’s transportation system led to his being approached by President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team to serve as a cluster adviser, shaping the incoming administration’s policies on alternative energies, public transportation, environmental research, and infrastructure rebuilding. Clinton later named Peña to serve as the secretary of transportation, the first Hispanic to head this department. Peña became one of the administration’s most recognized cabinet members, spearheading activist efforts to develop overseas routes for American-based airlines, to rebuild Los Angeles’s devastated infrastructure after the 1993 earthquake, to develop urban programs that supported mass transit and biking as alternatives to choked highway systems, and to pursue often controversial government recalls to ensure safer cars and trucks.

Although Peña opted not to serve in Clinton’s second term, the president asked him to stay on as the secretary of energy. Reluctantly, Peña remained in Washington, D.C., and for a year he advocated for alternative energy policies and brokered delicate negotiations about storing nuclear waste in the West.

Peña left office on April 6, 1998, and returned to Denver. He accepted a position as managing partner at the billion-dollar international equity firm of Vestar Capital Partners. In 2007, nearly a year before the national elections, Peña publicly endorsed U.S. senator Barack Obama for president, despite Peña’s close political affiliation with Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chief rival. Later, Peña served as the Obama campaign’s national cochair. He also worked on the newly elected president’s transition team and helped advise Obama on immigration reform.

Significance

Although Peña succeeded in reshaping the physical layout of Denver and transforming the city into a major commercial center, his success, as he readily acknowledged, was a joint effort, reflecting his ability to forge a coalition of business visionaries, technology wonks, and the city’s minority leaders and voters. Peña’s ambitious and activist agenda while serving in the Clinton administration often met with stiff political opposition. Peña, however, accomplished something far more important. He was one of the first high-profile Hispanic politicians and one of the first politicians to mobilize Hispanic voters, who would become one of the most sought-after voting blocs in American politics. Given Colorado’s neglected Hispanic community in the late 1970’s, Peña’s electoral successes paved the way for the next generation of Latino candidates by demonstrating that voters were ready to accept, or reject, candidates based not on ethnicity but on their vision and their accomplishments.

Further Reading

1 

Dempsey, Paul Stephen, Andrew Goetz, and Joseph S. Szyliowicz. Denver International Airport: Lessons Learned. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. Detailed and balanced analysis of both the good and the bad aspects of the megaproject most associated with Peña’s administration.

2 

Maraniss, David. First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Among the glut of biographies available on Clinton, this book, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner, is one of the most helpful. Describes the initial logic behind the best-and-the-brightest cabinet initiative that included Peña.

3 

Salazar, Kenneth, and Cindy Browsky. Wellington Webb: The Man, the Mayor, and the Making of Modern Denver. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2007. Laudatory biography of Peña’s immediate successor. Defines the magnitude of Peña’s vision and his accomplishments, many of them long-term and not completed until after he left office.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dewey, Joseph. "Federico Peña." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240046601001.
APA 7th
Dewey, J. (2012). Federico Peña. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dewey, Joseph. "Federico Peña." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.