DENVER — Just days before his annual State of the City address, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston sat down with Denver7 Investigates and answered questions about some of the most important topics and issues impacting residents.
Wednesday marked one year since he took office and he said homelessness remains his most pressing concern.
"Obviously, we came in with a focus on homelessness, which is the city's biggest challenge that voters elected us to take on," Johnston said. "I think we've taken courageous action and delivered historic results there."
The city also inherited a crisis with new immigrants coming in by the thousands. That number hovers around 30,000 since he took office, Johnston said.
"That required a separate set of responses to get us through that and feel like we have ended in the place where now people are connected to services and are at work and we've closed down our shelter system and people are successfully integrating in the community, and that feels like a win-win," he said.
Johnston, who will deliver his State of the City on Monday, said he loves that the job as mayor has centered around solving problems with a nonpartisan group. People are hungry for that at the federal level, he said.
"And so I think what we see ourselves as is an outpost here in Denver where we can show that good people can come together and solve hard problems no matter what you believe and there's nothing too big to solve," he said. "People would have thought homelessness or federal immigration reform seemed like unsolvable problems. We think they're not if we focus on what we agree on and what we can do together — and for me that's a source of inspiration here."
Hear what the mayor said about important topics facing the city in his full interview with Denver7 in the video player below.
Sales tax
The Denver ballot for this November is getting longer — and taxes could be getting higher. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced two new ballot proposals in June and July — one that would increase the city’s sales tax by 0.34% to help Denver Health amid skyrocketing healthcare costs and the growing number of uninsured, and a second one that would increase the city’s sales tax by 0.5% to provide more affordable housing.
Johnston said there is strong support for both measures and Denver has a history of approving sales tax increases. But if both are approved, sales tax in Denver would increase to almost 10%.
On the Denver Health side, Johnston said it needs support from the city, and the city wants to provide that help.
"We can't provide the scale of support they'll need to fix the gap that they have and so we think this is a place where Denverites are going to say the two most important things to us are affordable housing and quality health care," Johnston said. "This will be the first time in Denver history voters have gotten to weigh in on the question of affordable housing and they tell us over and over and over again that's the single most important thing to them."
Recent reporting from the Denver Post shows that Denver Health provided millions in uncompensated care — $260 million in 2022 and more than $130 million in 2023. Many healthcare companies will have no option but to default this year, according to reporting from Healthcare Finance.
Johnston explained that he does have concerns about the financial stability of Denver Health, as do the leaders at the hospital.
"There are a number of things we can do," he explained. "Denver Health is the only real safety net hospital on the Front Range. So, that means you have people that come from other counties, other cities, that all come to Denver. We need those cities and regions in the state to help pay their fair share of those costs. We want more and more folks like me to get their health care at Denver Health because the more paying customers we have, who use their insurance and come to Denver Health, that helps support the bottom line, also. And we want to be able to have the right public support to keep it as a place where you can go in a moment of emergency."
The 0.5% sales tax increase for affordable housing would allow the city to take vacant commercial buildings and convert them into apartments that are affordable.
"We're gonna launch the most ambitious effort in Denver history to revive downtown," Johnston said. "Our plan for the Downtown Denver Authority would expand about half a billion dollars we could invest in downtown without increasing taxes. It would draw money from the local Union Station Improvement District. Those residences right around Union Station will have a chance to vote on that this November."
For Johnston, a top goal for 2024 is to keep Denver affordable for every working family.
"We know right now Denver is becoming too expensive too fast and so we want to focus on affordable housing for working families," Johnston said. "That's why we're talking about a ballot measure for this November."
City officials will also keep an eye on macro economics, he said.
"We know there's some softening in the sales tax returns regionally, and so we want to keep an eye on what the revenues are going to be, but structurally we're sound," he said. "We know what we need to spend and we know what it costs. We just have to now figure out what the revenues are that would be generated, and we think that's a key sign that we want to work on that too. The reason we care about economic recovery is the way you drive stronger revenues to a city is you have more people opening businesses and running businesses successfully, and so we want to be the city where that's easy to do that."
Public safety
Denver was 100 officers short of its authorized strength in 2022, according to a city auditor's report from June 2023. The report said continuous understaffing puts a strain on officers and makes it difficult for them to promptly respond to 911 calls, as well as non-emergency calls.
Last September, Johnston set a goal to add 167 new police recruits through three cadet academies in 2024 as the city struggles with rising crime rates. That added police strength would come at an estimated cost of $8.2 million. It would be the largest number of new Denver officers in 20 years.
Johnston believes Denver is still on track to add those 167 new officers.
"The challenge is we're trying to help make our systems for recruiting and onboarding officers faster, more efficient, more equitable," he said. "We know that right now it can be five or six times longer to become an officer in Denver than it is (in) one of the neighboring jurisdictions because our system just takes too long. So we want it to be fair and equitable and streamlined, and we want to be able to get people that represent the communities that they serve."
He added that he believes the city is on the path toward a historic expansion of the police force this year.
Sources recently told Denver7 Investigates that retention rates are down and the first academy class of the year had just 37 candidates. When asked about that number, and how to make the Denver Police Department a more attractive place to work, Johnston said he wants officers to feel supported.
When he visits communities, neighbors often tell him they want to see more officers around, he said.
"And so one of the things we're launching this year is... hotspot policing, where we will have officers stop by places where we've had historically high levels of crime to help drop the rates of crime. We're also doing what we call trust patrols, which is having officers just stop a business or a park or a rec center, walk in, talk to residents, ask them what's going well, what we can do better."
The police department is working to build community trust.
"And we know that makes community members happier — it also makes officers happier," Johnston said. "They like their job when people know them, see them as a resource and reach out for help."
Revitalizing the downtown area, while keeping it safe, is another big goal for the year, Johnston said.
"Downtown is everyone's living room and we want to make sure that we get the 16th Street Mall reopened — we get our Downtown Denver Authority up and running — so we can activate and elevate the experience of downtown," he said. "And we want to continue to focus our efforts on safety to make sure we make this the safest big city in America."
That includes moving people in encampments downtown into housing and connecting them with resources.
New immigrants and helping the unhoused
The past year challenged city employees as they brainstormed ways to welcome 30,000 new immigrants to the city without a budget or the knowledge of them coming, Johnston said. He commended them for the efforts to "put the city on their backs."
"It was because city workers went above and beyond to take whatever job they were supposed to be doing, and added this whole new job where they need to help intake people or connect them to housing or connect them to services or connect them to legal support," he said. "And so we had to stand up legal clinics in the Webb (Building) atrium. Sometimes you can't plan for or know that a crisis is coming. It arrives and you have to respond to it."
He said he is proud of the way the city changed course to serve the newcomers, while acknowledging it came with budget cuts that have been tough on city workers.
"We don't want budget cuts to be a permanent function of the city," he said. "But we have to make sure when a crisis arrives on your doorstep, you can solve it."
"We closed our hotel system, which was much more expensive, moved people into apartments, shortened the length of stays, and that saved us about $90 million of what would have been budget cuts," he continued. "And so I think most of the times I talked to departments, they were very excited that the cuts we thought we might have had to make we didn't have to make because of the change in this program, because we reduced the number of folks that needed services and so that's been a real success for us. But it is for sure a taxing year."
While juggling ways to help the newcomers, the city also worked to move unhoused people into housing.
According to an All in Mile High initiative report recently published, 1,673 people experiencing homelessness in Denver were moved indoors during Johnston's first year of leadership. Of those, 583 are now in permanent housing, he told Denver7 earlier this week.
Johnston said the city made immense investments in infrastructure to set up different sites for people experiencing homelessness. Those were one-time costs with the opportunity for long-term use, the mayor said.
A late June decision by the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't change the city's strategy, Johnston said. SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places, with the majority finding that the Eighth Amendment prohibition does not extend to bans on outdoor sleeping bans, the Associated Press reported.
"Our strategy has been that enforcing a camping ban to move someone from one block to the next doesn't solve the problem — it just moves it from one person's front door to another person's front door," Johnston said in response to the ruling. "What we've done in Denver, the way you solve that problem, is you close those encampments by moving people to housing."
Denver has closed more than 16 of the city's largest encampments, he said.
"There are no major encampments left in the city now because of that," he continued. "So that strategy works for us. We will keep doing that and we think we can do that at scale successfully."
