At Move L.A.’s seventh annual Transportation Conversation, Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti talked at some length about the city’s transformation into an example of what a new American city looks like.

“We are building the first truly modern city in the world,” he said, and the build-out of L.A.’s transit system has been a powerful lever for making people think differently about Los Angeles.

With Art Leahy having retired, new Metro CEO Phil Washington, who assumed his post this week, says the same thing about Denver, the metro region he hails from.

Like Los Angeles, Denver passed a sales tax measure that is paying for the build-out of their transit system.

The eight-county Denver metro region passed the Fastracks sales tax initiative with 58 percent of the vote in 2004. Six rail lines under construction. L.A. County voters passed Measure R in 2008 with 67.22 percent of the vote (a two-thirds supermajority vote is required for local funding measures in California), and Los Angeles has five lines — including a subway — under construction.

Mr. Washington credits Denver’s Fastracks initiative as catalyzing “all the growth that is occurring in Denver,” often cited as one of the top draws for Millennials, one of the hottest real estate markets in the U.S., and a place that, in the words of a recent Denver Post story “is a far cry from the Denver of the 1980s. In those days, the city was choking on a brown cloud of pollution and struggling with a decaying downtown and a sputtering economy.”

Mayor Garcetti lobbied Mr. Washington to come to L.A. Metro because there’s “probably no one else who could be so well-suited” in his job experience:

Denver is the only other metropolitan region that has been able to largely self-finance the construction of so much transportation infrastructure — 100-plus miles of light rail, bus rapid transit and 57 stations in Denver, compared to 100-plus miles of light rail, subway and bus rapid transit and almost 100 stations in Los Angeles.

Mr. Washington seems to understand the importance of using local money to leverage federal funding, and of pressing Congress for new federal financing tools — low-interest loan and bond programs — that provide more opportunities for leveraging.

(To be continued)

Ms. Ohland of Move L.A. may be contacted at http://www.movela.org/