Before Gov. Bill Ritter appointed Michael Bennet to the Senate in January 2009, Bennet was superintendent of Denver Public Schools and helped sell an “exotic” financial solution that now has the school district hemorrhaging cash in interest and fees:

In the spring of 2008, the Denver public school system needed to plug a $400 million hole in its pension fund. Bankers at JPMorgan Chase offered what seemed to be a perfect solution.
The bankers said that the school system could raise $750 million in an exotic transaction that would eliminate the pension gap and save tens of millions of dollars annually in debt costs — money that could be plowed back into Denver’s classrooms, starved in recent years for funds.
To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members. […]
Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.
To avoid mounting expenses, the Denver schools are looking to renegotiate the deal. But to unwind it all, the schools would have to pay the banks $81 million in termination fees, or about 19 percent of its $420 million payroll.

Bennet, already reeling from devastating (and untrue) negative ads like “Greed,” saw his primary opponent Andrew Romanoff close the large gap in the polls in the run up to the Aug. 10 primary. Bennet has already burned $5.8 million dollars on his primary election campaign, according to the Washington Post “The Fix” blog:

Bennet, meanwhile, waited to go negative against his primary opponent. He has spent a staggering $5.8 million on the race, but his first mention of Romanoff in a TV ad came only two weeks ago; until then, Bennet’s spots were largely positive ones, including one that features his three young daughters and drives home the message that Bennet is out to “clean up Washington.”
With polls showing Romanoff now tied with Bennet — a Denver Post poll released last weekend had Romanoff at 48 percent and Bennet at 45 percent — some observers are wondering whether Bennet might have been better served by pursuing a McCain-style “scorched-earth” strategy against his upstart primary opponent.
One Democratic operative who has been following the campaign closely but is neutral in the race called the Bennet camp’s strategy “horrendous.”
“I’ve never seen anything quite this disastrous,” said the source, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about the race. “They wasted money; they wasted time. They let Andrew define this race.”
The operative added that while Romanoff is running as a crusader against PAC and lobbyist money, “the absurdity of it is that Andrew’s message is based on something that’s not accurate.”
“The only reason Andrew’s in this is frankly because of Bennet’s failures,” the operative said. [emphasis added]

The front-page, above-the-fold headline could provide Romanoff a last-minute boon, trading on the Bennet-as-Wall-Street-insider angle that Romanoff hammered in the aforementioned “Greed” ad, as Democratic primary voters start to question the senator’s judgment regarding one of the left’s sacred cows: the public school system.

Bennet’s campaign criticized the report:

A report released last week by independent auditors Cavanaugh Macdonald shows that the Denver Public Schools pension system is in significantly better financial shape than the rest of the pension system for the rest of the state’s school districts and will be fully funded years before the statewide school pension division is. You wouldn’t know that — or the fact that DPS has already saved nearly $20 million dollars through a transaction two years ago — to read a recent New York Times story concerning that transaction. In fact, in reading that story, you’d hardly end up with any of the facts at all. They simply got it wrong. [emphasis original]

As Romanoff and Bennet “race to the left,” primary ballots are being returned at near-record levels.

**Update–DPS School Board member Jill Conrad (2005-2009) responds to the NYT article on ColoradoPols.