Kathi Williams
At our Club meeting on Thursday, August 21, 2025, Kathi Williams was our featured speaker. Among a long list of accomplishments, Ms. Williams served as a former Member and Majority Whip of the Colorado House of Representatives (Westminster, Federal Heights, Northglenn, Thornton). Ms. Williams shared her gripping account of how Major League Baseball came to Colorado.
During the 1980s, before Colorado had the Rockies or Coors Field, the State’s major industries, high tech and oil and gas, had gone bust. Unemployment was 9.1%. There were record numbers of foreclosures and business failures. Colorado also boasted of the lowest-priced office space in the entire world. Entire buildings in Downtown Denver sat vacant.
Colorado had been chasing organized baseball for some time. Tim Wirth, a brand-new U.S. Senator from Colorado, organized a Senatorial Task Force to look at Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption, to convince Major League Baseball to expand. At the time, the Commissioner of Baseball was Peter Ueberroth. Ueberroth had headed up the Olympic Committee in 1976, when Colorado had been awarded the Winter Olympics and then had turned the Olympics down by ballot. Predictably, Ueberroth was not a fan of bringing a Major League expansion franchise to Colorado.
Ueberroth was fired and replaced by Paul Giamatti. After that, Colorado would again be considered as a location for an expansion team. But one of the conditions for expansion was a “baseball only” stadium, something Colorado did not have. Worse yet, Colorado was in a deep recession. Construction of a “baseball only stadium” would require creation of a special taxing district and imposition of a sales tax increase at a time when getting approval of a tax increase would be challenging, to say the least.
Ms. Williams was approached about getting the special district approved, because she was considered “just enough of a contrarian that she might do it”. Ms. Williams viewed baseball as a particularly worthwhile pursuit. In her experience, baseball was more often attended as an outing for the entire family than were other major professional sports, such as football, hockey and basketball. However, Ms. Williams insisted upon conditions for her support of the project. Among them were that the new special district for baseball would have to have the same geographic boundaries as the RTD and cultural facilities districts, which had already been established. The new special district would also have to be approved by a vote of the people. If Colorado were not awarded a baseball team, there would have to be no tax as she did not want to build a stadium only to see it sit vacant, waiting for a baseball team. There also had to be a target of 50% privatization, and once the debt was paid, the tax had to go away.
Among the additional challenges Ms. Williams then faced were (1) getting the special district bill out of committee and through the Colorado political process, (2) getting Major League Baseball to approve expansion of the National League to a franchise in Colorado and (3) finding a suitable owner or ownership group for the new franchise. These were not exactly small tasks. Through persistence and creativity, all three of these challenges were successfully met. In 1991, the Colorado Rockies were awarded a National League Baseball franchise and in 1993, the Rockies began their inaugural season.