One person’s red tape is another’s oversight: a Denver Broncos stadium story

The Denver Post ran a big Sunday explainer yesterday on what Broncos management still needs to do to get a stadium deal done: negotiate a community benefits agreement, get the land rezoned, seek tax breaks, clean up contaminated soil. None of it is super-interesting unless you’re fascinated by environmental report minutiae (“Groundwater contaminants included additional total petroleum hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, lead, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls”), but I want to zero in on the nut graf, which comes just two sentences in:

There will be community negotiations. There will be an environmental cleanup. There will be planning and design. And there will be a whole lot of bureaucracy.

“Bureaucracy” is an interesting word. It was coined in the 18th century by French economist Vincent de Gournay as “bureaucratie,” a portmanteau word combining French and Greek terms to mean literally “government by desk.” De Gournay created the term to describe the system of professional managers installed by King Louis XIV to oversee his sprawling empire, which the economist saw as tyrannical and overbearing. (De Gournay’s main objection was that government regulations served to hamstring businesses — a position he promulgated, ironically enough, as an appointed member of the French bureaucracy.)

From the start, then, “bureaucracy” was an epithet: It’s what you call the rules when you don’t like them. When you do like them, they get different names: “oversight,” “regulation,” “management.” It’s a political term, in other words, which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be used — it describes a very real and exasperating phenomenon, as anyone who’s tried to file an insurance claim can testify — but rather that it’s important to pay careful attention to how and when it’s deployed.

In the Post’s case, by describing the stadium as facing bureaucratic “hurdles,” the story is framed as a collision between a promised future good — “a state-of-the-art stadium as well as housing and an entertainment district that would draw events and people year-round” — and the sadly necessary steps needed to get the sausages made. It’s not a bad article: It provides a useful reference for anyone who wants a laundry list of items that the Broncos need to check off their list before breaking ground on (and potentially collecting tax money for) a new stadium development. (It’s certainly preferable to the Post’s editorial last week that argued for the stadium project as “an announcement that all of Colorado can celebrate” after only talking to three people: the Broncos CEO and the Denver mayor and Colorado governor who are pushing for the deal.) But it also establishes the public image of the essential conflict here as between well-meaning sports developers and desk-bound paper pushers, as if Broncos owners Greg and Carrie Penner are just another couple of regular Joes struggling to renew their driver’s licenses.

We see this kind of framing all over these days, of course, most notably with assaults on government “inefficiency” that turn out to involve stopping research on cancer treatment. While keeping bureaucrats from bogging everything down in red tape is a noble goal, sometimes paper pushers are the best defense against letting people pursue really bad ideas, too, so it’s important to cast them as slightly more nuanced than mere obstacles to progress.

What should be the real takeaway here: The Penners are trying to build a big, complicated project that will require all kinds of environmental remediation and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars worth of discounted land and tax breaks. And at this point, the only thing that can stand in their way is a whole bunch of spiritual descendants of Louis XIV’s desk-sitters. It’s not an optimal situation, for sure, but then, you know what Churchill never said about democracy.