As Denver is about to take the first step in selecting whom will take Michael Hancock’s place in the large, third-floor, executive office in City Hall, today I want to focus on the person who has occupied the smaller, adjacent office for the past six years.

For those who do not know Alan Salazar, that is your loss. As capable as he is in his job, he is an even better person. He marries skill to decency; conviction to practicality.

His has been the life of a political staffer – most often in the background, but making things happen and getting things done. When it goes right, the boss gets the credit. When there are stumbles and fumbles, the staff person is often sent out to take the arrows.

Salazar’s resume reads like a multi-decade history of Colorado politics, at least the Democratic side of it. He started briefly with Dick Lamm before moving onto roles with Gary Hart and Tim Wirth. He then took on increasingly senior positions with Roy Romer, Mark Udall and John Hickenlooper. All of which led to his appointment as Hancock’s chief of staff for the final half of that 12-year tenure.

Interspersed in there were campaign stints with both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

Salazar is a partisan, for sure. But he understands that partisanship has its limits and does not make it all-consuming. While serving as deputy chief of staff during Hickenlooper’s state Capitol years, Salazar would jest that the more centrist Hick was “his favorite Republican governor.”

That must have come as news to Bill Owens, Colorado’s only Republican governor in, well, forever, with whom Salazar also enjoys a close friendship.

On my end, I have been anything but reticent in my criticism of Hancock on a number of scores. More than once, Salazar has pushed back as one would expect of a loyal staffer. But in the end, he understands that columnists have their job to do. The same for reporters and even political opponents.

Unlike some these days, he is able to maturely separate the political from the personal. Such a trait used to be commonplace, but has grown rare as tribal affiliation became all too definitional for many.

I toyed with titling this piece, “A crisis manager for a city in crisis.” Or, “The reeducation of a lifelong Democrat.” Whatever the headline, it has been Salazar’s lot to counsel the mayor and manage the “complicated, messy” mechanisms of city government during a time of challenge and even decline.

Wherever you assign causal responsibility for Denver’s multiple ailments, and a few folks in Wuhan have some explaining to do, there is no doubt that it has been a tough few years.

Salazar is not one to complain. In his words: “I have never had a job as interesting and personally fulfilling, even with all of the stress.”

Still, the Alan Salazar who will walk away from City Hall a few months from now is hardly the same person who showed up for duty in late 2016. Crisis has a way of putting issues in vivid relief and forcing a certain amount of rethinking.

At the city level, response to crime, homelessness, a drug epidemic and economic dislocation is far less theoretical than in the senate or even the governor’s chambers. The work is grittier. Fingernails occasionally get dirty.

Again, per Salazar: “These last couple of years awakened in me a deep understanding of how difficult these issues are that people think can be so easily solved.”

Indicative of his hands-on approach, Salazar has walked the length of the 16th Street Mall almost every day for the past few years. “It forces me to see things.”

His takeaways are multiple and considered. In some ways, they reflect a certain hardening that is a function of experience. Though in others, they reveal the same hopeful, person-centered, government-as-ally perspective that has long been his political underpinning.

On the softer side, Salazar contends, rightly, that one must see the homeless not as faceless numbers, but as individuals who are on the streets due to some trauma. He speaks of how most of the visible homeless have been removed from family for one reason or another, and of how some even find remnants of family connection in a tent.

On the harder side, he believes strongly that Denver needs more cops. He thinks it a mistake that Denver Public Schools got rid of its school resource officers in a fit of political correctness.

He quipped, “I sometimes feel like I am Rudy Guiliani,” before quickly clarifying that he meant the old broken-windows New York City mayor, not the more recent election-denying mess.

Salazar views “effective intervention” as the most important element in dealing with homeless persons. He worries that Denver could go the way of Portland and San Francisco which he characterizes as having been unwilling to force tough interventions. Those interventions, in his mind, need to sometimes be involuntary in the case of individuals deep into psychosis or drug addiction.

He argues that “housing first,” the approach favored by many advocates, is insufficient if not paired with services to treat underlying issues of addiction or mental illness.

“Tough love” and “tough compassion” are words Salazar employs. He means both parts of those formulas – “love” and “compassion,” but also “tough.” He submits that additional funding will be needed to address issues of both housing and homelessness. But he knows there will never be enough dollars and doesn’t view money as the sole variable.

“If you conceive of ‘homelessness’ as a mix of poverty, economic disparity, behavioral trauma, addiction and human despair, the entire city budget could be consumed addressing the problem,” he commented.

When asked how this work over recent years had changed him, Salazar noted that he has become “more tolerant of people’s mistakes.” Before then adding, “I am now more thick-skinned and not so sensitive.”

He pays tribute to his boss, Mayor Hancock, de rigueur in his subordinate post, but clearly sincere. As to what comes next, Salazar doesn’t know. He is not ready to hang up his spurs, but envisions a less demanding gig without being the first phone call at all hours of the night when there is any kind of incident.

A good man has been on the receiving end of far too many such calls during troubled times in our fair city.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for Colorado Politics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann