DENVER (KDVR) — Denver Mayor Mike Johnston is releasing his 2026 budget proposal. The mayor said the $1.66 billion plan should get the city back on good financial footing.
The mayor said the way he has the numbers mapped out should mean no more cuts to personnel. He did have to make some cuts to programs and technology used by city workers.
“Remember, we announced first the personnel savings. Today, we will announce $77 million in savings and services, supplies, contracts. I’ll walk you through and a couple of million dollars in revenue additions,” Johnston said during his press conference unveiling the plan Monday.
Johnston said the 2026 budget proposal is the biggest economic adjustment in the city since 2011, outside of the COVID era when American Rescue Plan dollars helped ease some financial burdens. The city should be done making personnel cuts, but Denver did make some changes to subscriptions they use to keep things operating.
“We’re canceling tech contracts, we reduced a number of the apps that the city uses, that includes things like Adobe where we had an existing contract that we eliminated to find an open source version of that tool that’s available for free. And to reduce subscription, tech upgrades, product availability without compromising functionality,” the mayor said about the cuts that amount to around $10 million.
Johnston said there also will not be any cuts to core services like trash or snow removal or any changes to employee benefits and no new taxes to make up for funding.The city will, however, consolidate several offices and divisions into existing departments.
The mayor is also looking to stop spending on migrants, moving $4 million from migrant funding to boost the city reserve funding back to 11%, and will keep homeless spending flat by closing the Comfort Inn and Monroe micro community, as the city announced last week.
“There’s about $11 million in savings from closing two of the rented hotels we were using in our ‘All In’ effort. As you know, the Radisson hotel we closed this year. This budget will call to close the Comfort Inn next year. For us, this is good progress and showing that the system we have is working. Which is when we first opened these hotels, the purpose was to meet the overflow needs of getting folks off the streets and into transitional housing,” the mayor said. “In the budget book, you will see that the general fund allocation for HOST remains flat. No increase to the general fund, no cuts in the general fund. However, the reality is that meant the HOST team had to take about $33 million in reductions in the HOST budget to be able to keep that budget flat because of the growth.”
The city moved to merge the city’s rental assistance fund with a homeless prevention fund and the city lost some funding for federal and state housing vouchers to bring that total to $33 million.
The mayor is anticipating that the budget will total about $1.66 billion if the City Council does not make any drastic changes.
“Each of these locations, we have cut to the bone without affecting these core services. If there are amendments to the budget that add new cuts to any of these departments, those would directly either cut those core services or require more layoffs because there is nothing left to cut in these departments from what has currently been done,” said Johnston.
Anthony Sutton is a business strategist and writer with a passion for management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. With years of experience in the corporate world, he shares insights on business growth, strategy, and innovation through management-opleiding.org.
