and that his pet peeves were violence and "beer boys." Hickenlooper attended Wesleyan University, where he received a B.A. in English in 1974 and a master's degree in geology in 1980. He recounted first smoking pot when he was 16 and using lithium carbonate capsules to go through with his final exam. Hickenlooper worked as a geologist in Colorado for Buckhorn Petroleum in the early 1980s. When Buckhorn was sold, Hickenlooper was laid off in 1986. He and five business partners opened the Wynkoop Brewing Company brewpub in October 1988 after raising startup funds from dozens of friends and family along with a Denver economic development office loan. The Wynkoop was one of the nation's first brewpubs. By 1996, Westword reported that Denver had more brewpubs per capita than any other city. Hickenlooper claims his restaurant was the first in Colorado to offer a designated driver program. In 1989, Hickenlooper was arrested in Denver for "driving while impaired" and did community service. Mayor of Denver In 2003, Hickenlooper ran for mayor of Denver. Campaigning on his business experience, he developed a series of creative television ads that separated him from the rest of the crowded field, including one in which he addressed unhappiness over a recent increase in parking rates by walking the streets to "feed" meters. He won the election and in July 2003 he took office as the 43rd mayor of Denver. TIME Magazine named him one of America's five best big-city mayors in 2005. On taking office, Hickenlooper inherited a "$70 million budget deficit, the worst in city history", which he was able to eliminate in his first term "without major service cuts or layoffs", according to Time. He won bipartisan support for a multibillion dollar mass public transit project, intended in part to attract investment and funded by a voter-approved sales tax increase. In 2003, Hickenlooper announced a ten-year plan to end homelessness in Denver, citing it as one of the issues that prompted him to run for mayor. 280 U.S. cities announced similar plans. The effort did not end homelessness in Denver, and in 2015 Denver's city auditor "released a scathing audit faulting the plan's implementation." The head of the agency responsible defended the program, saying it was "still housing 300-400 people a month in varying ways", while Hickenlooper argued that the point of such an ambitious target was to focus attention and resources on