Bentley Henderson Leaves Burlingate Behind

August 5th, 2008 at 06:52am Michael Conniff 2

Assistant City Manager Bentley Henderson is not exactly a casualty of the Burlingate affordable housing brouhaha. He just got a better job in his hometown of Basalt.

That's the story emanating from Aspen City Hall and there's no reason not to believe it. Many of Burlingame's headaches preceded Henderson's tenure as head of the asset management department, and so he was not personally on the hook for Burlingate's sordid unaffordable history. Compared to months of agita to come in Aspen, no wonder he chose the relative anonymity of the Basalt Public Works department.

Even so, it's impossible not to see his departure through the lens of Burlingate--to see everything happening at City Hall in the context of a City with no systems in place to control spending. Even The Aspen Times, which published a whitewash story last week based on a press release describing two city studies--a press realease the City subsequently corrected--managed to finally admit not everything was hunky-dory at Galena and Hopkins. Buried at the end of the Henderson story on the bottom of Page 2, Carolyn Sackariason wrote:

"The performance review, conducted by Alvarez & Marsal, recommended several policy changes, including establishing a separate department that handles the development of large, multimillion-dollar capital improvements. The firm noted that the city didn’t have the resource capacity to manage a large-scale project like Burlingame.

"The firm also suggested that current policies, procedures and reporting capabilities were not designed to meet the needs of large-scale development projects. To address that, the firm recommended that a separate development department be staffed with asset managers experienced in architecture and construction."

In other words, even in Sackariason's soporific newspeak, the City has no way to manage a project like Burlingate. And it shows. That's one thing Bentley Henderson won't have to worry about any more.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, Affordable Housing, Aspen City Council