Profile: Danny Lopez (Mayor)

The television studios have suddenly realized there's a municipal election starting in 2 weeks. To prepare, Eli Stokols of Channel 2 News has offered a profile of Danny Lopez, who may well be the least-covered official candidate in the entire campaign.

Excerpts from the piece, entitled "Meet Denver's other mayoral candidate: Danny Lopez has a mullet and a mission," are quoted below:

He's a public works supervisor named Danny Lopez.

He's a youth baseball coach and a disc jockey known as "DJ Muscle."

And, he's the only person in all of Denver with the cojones, not to mention the requisite 300 petition signatures, to challenge Mayor John Hickenlooper's re-election bid.

"Voters need an alternative choice," said Lopez. "He's going to spend $500,000 to beat me. I'm going to spend nothing to beat him.

... "If I'm elected to be mayor of this city, I want to return government to the common, hard-working family man," Lopez said. "There are some neighborhoods out there that have been forgotten by this administration. The city workers have surely been forgotten."

Lopez, a supervisor for the public works department's television unit and an emergency snowplow driver during the winter's snowstorms, wants to give his co-workers a raise and the power of collective bargaining.

"Over the last four years, there's been 40 percent of the workforce that has not seen a raise," he said. "I'll govern from the heart. I'll do what I think is right."

Friday, clad in synthetic yellow alligator boots, Lopez said he thinks voters will appreciate all the miles he's walked in a working man's shoes.

"I want those people out there who think politicians spend too much money to get elected to office, I hope they identify with me and vote for me," he said. "I want those protest votes. Those people who want to send Mayor Hickenlooper a message, I want them to vote for me."