There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose Denver’s nearly $1 billion bond proposal — Issues 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E on this fall’s mail ballot. But for the long story short, look no further than this week’s news about City Hall’s latest financial pratfall.

It’s a doozy — embarrassing for the city and alarming for Denver taxpayers. And it serves as an object lesson as to why Denver’s municipal government under the administration of Mayor Mike Johnston can’t be trusted to handle all that bond money responsibly.

As The Denver Gazette reported Wednesday, City Hall is owed some $2 million in back-rent for office space in a downtown building the city bought last year for a whopping $88.5 million. It’s the former Denver Post building, and the Post continued to lease space in the property even after the city acquired it. The Gazette reported that as of August, the Post — the building’s biggest tenant — ceased making its monthly payments of $649,550. The city issued a default notice and is pursuing the matter legally.

The city bought the building on Colfax near City Hall because it already had been leasing space in it for some municipal operations. As noted in The Gazette’s report, city officials hoped that existing lease payments, as well as future occupancy from city entities, such as court and legal services, would make the building profitable.

It obviously turned out to be a big miscalculation — and a reminder of why City Hall shouldn’t play landlord. 

For its part, the Post quotes its corporate counsel claiming it had stopped occupying the space “long before the city purchased it.” Maybe the city should have checked?

Only weeks ago, The Gazette editorial board looked askance at a plan by the Johnston administration to shell out $2.5 million for an old Goodyear auto shop downtown in pursuit of vague plans for affordable housing; the City Council wisely voted it down days later. As it turns out, that deal would have been chump change compared with this latest white elephant.

Ironically, the missing $2 million in rent could have covered most of the cost of the stillborn Goodyear acquisition. More to the point, it could have paid for a number of other now-axed items amid the city’s current budget crunch, as The Gazette’s news report also noted.

Meanwhile, some City Council members are angry and saying this is the first they’ve heard about any of it.

“The city knew this risk existed, and now accountability has to be front and center,” council member Flor Alvidrez, who opposed the property’s purchase last year, posted on Facebook.

All of which illustrates anew the gaping financial accountability gap between City Hall and the public. And they want voters to approve borrowing almost a billion bucks?

Fundamentally, the laundry list of the bond issue itself lacks any credible semblance of priorities. As we have noted here before, it’s a mishmash of pressing, nice-but-not-essential and patently superfluous projects. Last summer, we called for breaking down the then-pending bond proposal into more bite-sized chunks to give voters a chance to prioritize what the city wouldn’t. What followed was a breakdown into five questions — each of which continues to reflect confused priorities. Issue 2A, for example, combines essential bridge projects with more dubious expenditures on the likes of bike lanes. 2D combines a critical, first-responder and public safety training center with assorted cultural amenities. And so forth.

Underlying it all are our deep misgivings about handing the current regime so much money at once. Entrusting such a dizzying array of projects to this administration, with its record of mismanagement, amounts to blind faith. 

Vote NO on Denver Ballot Issues 2A, 2B, 2c, 2D and 2E.