Ballot Up!

Timing is everything.

Imagine that you're the mayor of a big city with some big, expensive ballot issues coming up -- an alphabet soup of nine proposals that would fund assorted infrastructure repairs around town to the tune of well over $500 million.

What day would you want those big, fat mail-in ballots to arrive? Maybe the day it was decided that your city is going to the World Series?

Timing is everything, and odds are good that the good citizens of Denver will be feeling generous (and overwhelmed) as they look at those ballots that arrived in their mailboxes early this week, right as the Colorado Rockies trounced the Arizona Diamondbacks for the fourth time. Never will they be more likely to invest in Denver's future by voting yes.

Even without trying to make sense of those red letters that Jon Hickenlooper has been leading around town.

Even the dicey 1G and 1H, which would throw major bucks at the reconstruction of Boettcher Concert Hall, are looking better; at the same time they're celebrating sports, voters might be more inclined to throw a bone -- or a ball -- to the highbrow arts.

Too bad there's no New World Series of symphonies. -- Patricia Calhoun