DENVER, Colo. -- Reporter Sally Sears is in Denver along with about 100 metro Atlanta leaders looking at how the Colorado city is solving problems such as traffic, water and explosive growth.

Denver is not Atlanta.

I learned this when the directions to the first session advised looking for the building with the teepee on top. ( It’s a gorgeous new center for Native American health, and is the distance-healing headquarters for Indians around the nation.) But my taxi driver was from Ghana. The teepee clue just didn’t help. So my first lesson from Denver became the most obvious: good results require good communication, whether it is giving directions via teepees or Big Chickens.

We crowded into a new conference room under the teepee, at the Nighthorse Campbell Building on the former site of an army hospital, Fitzsimons, taken over when the military down-sized, just as Fort McPherson and Fort Gillem in Atlanta soon will be. First we heard from the Denver Chamber of Commerce a tale of two cities.

Tom Clark says just like Atlanta, Denver has no geographic reason to exist. Like Atlanta, Denver’s here because of railroads, a little bit of water, and a huge amount of boosterism. Both towns have had to get along by getting lots of people to get along with each other.

The Chambers of Commerce share something in common, too. They both sit next to beautiful green parks in the hearts of their cities. Here in Denver, the big city mayor at the turn of the last century solved two political problems at once, in the dark of night. He took a complaint-rich stretch of flophouses and bordellos and created a new park district where they stood. Workers tore the buildings down before dawn, and a new park was born. It was the launch of what Clark calls the largest park system now per capita of anywhere in the country.

Today the new chamber of commerce sits right there… on the old bordello site… and hawking itself just as aggressively. Unlike Atlanta, Denver doesn’t have a handful of big old rich companies like Delta or Coke. It does have a famous home town liquid, Coors, but its biggest companies are aerospace, with hundred thousand dollar a year average wages, and Energy. Not just coal, although there are a lot of streets and buildings with the word “mineral” in their names, but the high plains boast every other kind of alternate energy from wind to sun to switch grass except for seawater.

SERVANT LEADERSHIP… NO POACHING

The aggressive selling of Denver keeps company with maybe a dozen other nearby chambers of commerce. They keep their economic development agendas in house, and all claim to complement each other. Not here would, for example, DeKalb pitch for a company against Douglas County, or Mableton versus Covington. Instead, the head of the Chamber spoke piously of Servant Leadership. It sounded like he had the religion for real.

“We don’t believe in poaching” he told the crowd. “We sell the region first.” Clark wrote the code of ethics for the various promoting groups, and for 21 years says he’s had only a single case of one agency pitching against the others. He confessed the poacher was one of his own hires. She wrote a promotion exhorting some prospect to relocate to the western side of Denver, saying in effect come to the western side, the sun shines brighter. “That was a sell against,” Clark said, and she and her boss, the man who wrote the don’t poach rules, were punished.

TOO RICH, AND TOO THIN

They do sell, and vigorously, against Phoenix. Their Pitch: They’re rich! 8th highest per capita income, and very highly educated. So they compete for high end jobs, research and development, and use their leverage of selling successfully over time to keep enjoying statistics like these:

The tenth highest number of patents per capita, the state with the 6th lowest tax burden in the country, and my personal favorite… the skinniest state in the nation. Colorado is the lowest in obesity prevalence. He did remind the crowd that morbidly obese people are 34 percent more often absent from work than people of average weight. I noticed our crowd shifting around in our ample seats when he said that. Nobody picked up a cookie for the rest of his talk.

However, and he looked sad, Georgia ROCKS against Colorado in higher education funding, and in our roads. Georgia has billions in needed road improvements? Colorado’s roads are three times more needy than ours, he says.

Denver and the surrounding counties are changing how roads and transit works. The mayors from each town in the region meet monthly and passed a strong new tax, against the wishes of the Colorado governor, to fight congestion with an aggressive building program. The political leaders agreed on one thing Clark mentioned above all: Nothing is built one at a time… every part of the region is getting some part of the building program at once, so the taxpayers funding it can share evenly in the benefits.

HOW COOL IS THAT?

Finally, and he confessed to the pride this last statistic put in his once-nerdy heart, Denver for all its faults, is passionate about its sense of place. Even Conoco Phillips executives admit that on any list of sites, Denver is at the top when it comes to being cool.