What does Denver mayor-elect Mike Johnston want to do as soon as he is sworn in on July 17?
Fresh off his victory in Denver's mayoral runoff, Johnston laid out his priorities in an interview on CPR's Colorado Matters. They include erecting tiny homes throughout the city as an alternative to homeless encampments and ensuring people have access to wraparound services.
Johnston, a former state senator, CEO of Gary Community Ventures, principal and education advisor to then President Barack Obama, also wants to expand the city's stable of first responders, a mix of police, social workers, paramedics, EMTs and mental health professionals.
He addressed whether he would consider a position for his runoff rival Kelly Brough in his administration, how he plans to distinguish his administration from Mayor Michael Hancock's, and his stance on a proposed state policy that would lower property taxes and also reduce TABOR refunds.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Warner: In the daily lives of Denverites, what will be the first noticeable change with you as mayor?
Mike Johnston: I think the first most important one is going to be a really direct and urgent approach to supporting people that are unhoused on the streets. And you'll see people that are getting up out of encampments and off street corners and being able to move into safe and dignified housing through the micro-communities we're going to build and support. So that will be job one.
We're going to work hard to get more officers on the street and first responders out on the street to make sure the city feels safe in all of our neighborhoods. And then we're going to work to build permanent and a lot more affordable and attainable housing. That will take a little bit of time to get those up and running. But I think what you'll hopefully see immediately in our first 100 days is a real direct and high impact change to how we take on homelessness.
Warner: Let me unpack just a few of those details. So your approach to helping those who are experiencing homelessness is not to centralize them, as so many have been, in one spot in downtown Denver, but to have what you call dignified, micro-communities throughout the city. Have you identified those spots? Are the neighbors on board? How quickly do you think that we might see those up?
Johnston: You laid out exactly the right steps. I think we've done a map of all the public land and the city's identified more than 2,000 parcels of land that Denver owns around the city and county. So what we'll do is narrow those down to what we think are the right set of spaces that have the best potential opportunity. And then we will talk to neighbors and engage them and say, 'Here's what we think are the possible available sites' That'll be the first important step to make sure we get community involvement. Then we'll look to site those and get people moved as quickly as possible. But our first step will be to pick those sites, to let neighborhoods give input among the sites that are possible and have them decide which ones they think are the best ones, and then get the tiny homes up and built and get them sited and get people moved to better suitable housing with real wraparound services.
Warner: On the question of first responders, could you give us a percentage perhaps of how many new hires would be trained as mental health first responders versus ones who might be armed and who might see handcuffs as their first tool.
Johnston: Our focus has been to put 200 more first responders on the streets. That number of non-officers is somewhere around 25%. We think we need about 150 more officers, and around 50 of those would be either social workers, mental health supporters or paramedics, EMTs. And so it's not an exact number, but I think roughly it's about 25% of that new supply would be more mental health first responders than officers.
Warner: What do you think will be the biggest break from the Hancock administration which has been in power for 12 years?
Johnston: I do think the biggest one is going to be just a real laser focus on both getting people who are unhoused access to services. And really that means getting back our sidewalks and our public parks and where folks are having to live now because they have no place else to go. And I think it is going to be a revival of those neighborhoods where people feel safe again to walk through downtown and walk through Curtis Park and City Park and a lot of the central downtown neighborhoods that are carrying a lot of this weight and, as you said, be able to redistribute those services around the city so it's not a deep concentration of all that need in one neighborhood. I think that will be what we hope to make the biggest difference on in these first 100 days.
Warner: So if these things are not achieved in your first term, it sounds like you will not have succeeded?
Johnston: I always believe in setting incredibly ambitious goals and then doing everything we can to achieve them. And we always make mistakes along the way. I'll always be honest about where we're falling short, but you never give up. I don't think there's a game clock on this one where the issue is over in one year or two years or four years. What we should have is systems built where the total number of people that fall into homelessness each month equals the total number who come out of homelessness each month. And so it's not to say there won't be people who fall on hard times, we know that will always happen, but what we should have is a system that catches them, connects them to the services and tries to get them back on their feet and that would be the vision for us.
Warner: Denver Mayor-Elect Mike Johnston, you previously ran for governor and U.S. Senate. Is winning this race any sort of political consolation prize?
Johnston: No, not at all. For me, I loved the work I've done outside of politics for the last three or four years as the CEO of (Gary Community Ventures) and spent time day in and day out working on these hardest issues: homelessness, affordability, public safety, and I loved that job. I felt called back into this work because I thought this was the one place where you can make the biggest impact on the city's most significant challenges. And I love the city and want to have it be a place that still feels vibrant and affordable and safe, and I saw a real path for that to get done with the right leader and the right team. Now we've got to build that team to make sure we can actually lead 11,000 employees and a $4 billion budget to deliver those results for families. But I am really honored and really inspired by what we can get done.
Warner: You have a team to build you say, do you think Kelly Brough might have a place in it? She ran HR for the city for a time. She was chief of staff to a former mayor. Would that invitation come from your administration?
Johnston: I haven't made any decisions on any of the roles in the administration. I've said that early. I didn't make any commitments or promises to anyone, including people on our own team. And so we will start the process today to begin to build a transition, engage community members in what we think will be the most inclusive and largest transition effort that hopefully any mayor has ever run, to make sure everyone's voice is heard and that will include them helping us vet and look at candidates for each of the roles we have to fill. And so we'll look for the best candidates that we can find anywhere in the city or the country who want to transform Denver, and that'll be our criteria.
Warner: Would you reach out to Kelly Brough or would she have to submit an application?
Johnston: I think actually we haven't gotten any conversations with direct candidates, but I think we would assume that we're going to source candidates from everywhere and they can all apply. But anyone that's interested would be the ones that would be coming to us.
Warner: I want to talk about property values and specifically property taxes. In Denver, your soon-to-be constituents are looking at a median increase in assessed value of about 33% between 2020 and 2022, even higher elsewhere in the state. The legislature is trying to ease the pain with a ballot issue in November. It would lower property tax rates and reduce refunds onto the TABOR Amendment. That is proving controversial amongst some. Where do you come down on that ballot measure?
Johnston: I haven't read the entire measure yet, but I do believe that this is going to be an important step. I do think we need to ease the tax burden on Coloradans, and I do know that we have a lot of people living on fixed incomes who've owned homes for a long time and they saw that property tax bill and have no idea how they're going to pay it. So I will anticipate being supportive of that measure and pushing to make sure we can help balance the tax burden and reduce it so that people can both afford to live in Colorado and we can still fund our schools and hospitals and fire districts that we know we need to do as well.
Warner: There may be another measure on the ballot because critics of the legislature's plan propose a straight up 3% limit on property tax increases in any given year. You say that you haven't read the legislature's referred measure, but is that other approach better or worse?
Johnston: I think that what I believe the governor and the coalition, it's a quite broad coalition that came together for this measure, including business groups and teachers unions and a large cross section of public service providers. I think what they were after was something that would both give some flexibility to reduce that rate and also not lock us in into a certain system that was going to be hard to manage and years where you have big fluctuations of increases or decreases. That was what was so constrictive about the Gallagher Amendment. And so I think I tend to believe more flexibility is probably the easier strategy. So I think the flat ones are probably tougher, but I think that there's been a broad coalition behind the statewide property tax measure and I think it's the right first step.
