OUR VIEW: Mayor Rivera hits home run on TV (grade Rivera)

After a year that could go down as a case study in bad municipal public relations, Colorado Springs finally received a fair shake in the national press. For this, we can thank Mayor Lionel Rivera.

Five days after another anti-Springs, tourist-scaring propaganda hit piece in the New York Times, Rivera appeared on the nationally televised Bloomberg news on Thursday.

The show began with a co-anchor explaining that Colorado Springs has cut bus service and turned off one-third of its streetlights in response to economic recession. Co-host Matt Miller described the Springs as “super progressive, as far as cutting down the size of government.”

(Click here to see Mayor Rivera's national TV appearance)

“You hear stories all the time about Colorado Springs citizens sort of staving the beast, so to speak,” Miller said. Later Miller explained, in commentary disguised as a question, that the real story of Colorado Springs may be one of economic success. The facts say he’s correct.

Rivera detailed brilliantly how the city’s conservative policies have paid off. He explained that sales tax revenues are significantly better than city officials projected for 2010. That’s due, in part, to the fact city officials reduced spending and voters held the line on taxes. Those decisions enabled the public to keep money and buy goods and services.

Rivera explained that city employees were reduced by 300 during the past two years. The result?

“We’ve become much more productive and efficient in all of our departments and that’s going to allow us to start returning services with a lot less overhead, so we’re not going to need as big a recovery in sales tax revenue to keep the services or restore some that we had cut back on,” Rivera said.

The mayor explained that some services have been turned over to the private sector with great success. He told of a community center, due to close because of budget cuts, that was taken over by a faith-based organization. The center is run under contract at no cost to the city, freeing up tax money to keep three other centers open. At those centers, the city has privatized personnel and taken other measures to cut overhead by 42 percent.

“A lot of the operations we had in our parks and recreation department that needed a city subsidy, now run at a surplus and put money back into the general fund,” Rivera said. “Three of our pools have been turned over to the private sector and they are doing just great; they will return some money to the general fund. So we’ve changed the way we do local city government and it’s a change for the better.”

Despite a barrage of negative international anti-Springs, anti-conservative press, Rivera said the real story is one of a community that has worked through recession in a creative and innovative manner to avoid economic crisis.

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Co-host Carol Massar asked Rivera about $26 billion in new congressional debt spending, signed into law Tuesday, to help states. She asked if it was necessary, from the perspective of a mayor whose city has lived within its means.

“Cities across the country should try to be a lot more efficient in their operations so they don’t need help from the federal government,” Rivera said. “I don’t think continuing to pile on debt on top of debt is good for our country in the long run, and I think we just have to live within our means.”

As other big cities wallow in economic despair (we won’t be so rude as to mention Denver’s $100 million deficit), Mayor Rivera may emerge as the symbol of a smart city that showed how to do things right. He was a natural at projecting that image to the nation on Thursday.

— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook