City flubs DNC money deadline

By David Montero, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 16, 2008 at 5:15 p.m.
Updated June 16, 2008 at 5:15 p.m.

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The committee charged with raising $40.6 million in cash for the Democratic National Convention fell more than $11 million short of that figure and missed today's contractual deadline.

The Denver 2008 Host Committee released a statement saying it had deposited $29 million in cash by the 5 p.m. deadline.

"The Denver Host Committee is fully confident about completing its fundraising goals," spokesman Chris Lopez said. "It will continue to raise private donations to meet its contractual obligations over the next two months."

Not that is was a surprise to one of the fundraising point men — Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Hickenlooper was the one who let the cat out of the bag about a month ago when he said the Denver 2008 Host Committee was $15 million short, creating an avalanche of speculation about the shortfall. Shortly after that, the host committee announced it was scaling back delegation parties from more than 50 to a single event.

The mayor said on a fundraising trip to Kansas City this weekend that he knew they wouldn't meet the contractual deadline set up by the Democratic National Convention Committee.

"I've always made my peace with that. It's no different than trying to get a restaurant open. Some of the restaurants we did, we didn't get as much money as we wanted to and so you end up having to adjust the budget. So you didn't spend as much money on the lighting or you didn't spend as much on this or that," Hickenlooper said. "This thing is going to happen, but the more resources we bring to it, the more successful it will be for the city."

The host committee has missed deadlines before. Since Denver was awarded the convention, scheduled Aug. 25-28 at the Pepsi Center, it was short $2 million for the first deadline in June 2007 but then rallied in December to meet the $15 million it was supposed to raise.

However, they were $5 million short in March and missed the final deadline today.

Hickenlooper, Gov. Bill Ritter and U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter said one of the problems was the protracted primary season between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — a fact that froze up some donors until recently.

The host committee is also required to have $9.7 million of in-kind services lined up by the contract deadline. However, Lopez only said they have "secured several million dollars of in-kind support."

• June 16, 2008

  8:59 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  jacka writes:

  Call Barack, he has $30 million in new cash every month.

• June 16, 2008

  10:25 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  SteveM writes:

  Or, at least, learn from his incredibly successful online fund-raising techniques.

• June 16, 2008

  11:05 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Who_Me writes:

  Sounds like it's going to be tuna sandwiches at the Pepsi Center. What a great combo!

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