All too often, local politics in America is parochial, narrow-minded, and faction-ridden – if not crudely partisan. This is too bad, because the issues confronting local government in America are usually regional in scope and require far-reaching coalitions of unlikely allies. That's why John Parr was one of my heroes.

Parr knew how to get parochial local politicians – and parochial neighborhood activists and profit-driven business leaders – focused on the big picture and working together for the regional good. And as Curtis Johnson, president of the Citistates Group, wrote the other day, "he knew how to do it without raising his voice." (John and I were both affiliated with the Citistates Group, a watering hole of regional thinkers founded by columnist Neal Peirce.)

Tragically, just before Christmas Parr was killed – along with his wife, journalist Sandra Widener, and one of their two teenaged daughters – in an auto accident on an icy Wyoming freeway. He was only 59. It's telling that shortly after the accident an impromptu crowd of some 500 people held a vigil in a Denver park near their house. The accident occurred only two months after one of California's prominent regionalists, Nick Bollman, died a similarly untimely death in Florida.

Most obituaries referred to Parr as a "Democratic political consultant". I guess this is true, in the same way that calling Yogi Berra a baseball player is true. Yogi was a baseball player, but describing him that way kinda misses the point.

In the '70s Parr was among the young reformers who worked for Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm. Later he was a key policy advisor to Denver Mayors Federico Pena and John Hickenlooper. In between he ran the National Civic League and helped found the Alliance for Regional Stewardship. One was a venerable organization and the other was new; but both are dedicated to the idea that the government has to work together with business and nonprofit institutions in order to tackle big regional problems.

Though he spent almost his whole career in Denver, while I've been a thousand miles away, I feel his influence every day in the regional civic organizations we have here in California – as well as the regional "blueprints" that are emerging from the regional planning agencies around the state.

Nick Bollman, who worked at The Irvine Foundation and founded the California Center for Regional Leadership, was the midwife of all this stuff in California; he laid the foundation for these efforts and directly funded a lot of them.

But the concept of creating a nonprofit entity devoted to the well-being of a region – like Joint Venture Silicon Valley or the Great Valley Center -- was more or less a John Parr idea. That's why he took on the task of starting the Alliance for Regional Stewardship, an organization made up of these entities, so they could trade information and learn from each other. He wasn't afraid of NIMBYs, or developers, or greedy corporate types, or even provincial politicians. He was a big-tent guy, who believed that if you got them all in the same room and got them talking to each other – facilitated, perhaps, by somebody like himself, who could do it with a lot of grace and humor and no meanness at all – the regional good would emerge.

The Parr legacy will stretch far and wide, but I like to think that the greatest accomplishments are just coming to fruition in Denver. That's largely because of Parr's old friend, brewpub owner John Hickenlooper, who was elected mayor of Denver in 2003 – not least because Parr leaned on him to run for the office. In Hickenlooper, Parr seemed to find an elected official who embodied what Parr believed: smile a lot, keep talking to everybody, find common ground, park your ego when necessary to get things done. Using these qualities, Hickenlooper – among many others, including Parr – helped pass a regional sales tax to fund a $5 billion transit system.

When I saw Hickenlooper give a talk a few months ago, I wrote a blog saying that Denver's mayor was the master of "brewpub regionalism" – a style focused on personal interaction and helping others. As with regionalism in California and Nick Bollman, Hickenlooper was the midwife of brewpub regionalism – but John Parr was its godfather.

So hoist one for John Parr the next time you're in Denver.

-- Bill Fulton