As Mayor Michael Hancock's third term comes to an end, we're taking stock of his time in office. We have a big, qualitative story that looks at Hancock's legacy through the people around him over the last 12 years. As an appendix, and for the curious minds out there, we present a roundup of data that shows how things changed in a more quantitative way.
For instance, the story of Hancock's tenure begins with ongoing disruption from the 2008 financial crisis and ends with the fallout from COVID. Our unemployment rate is one way to look at the economic waves Denver crested with him at the helm.
Up first: Budgets, Hancock's roadmap for Denver.
Denver is a "strong-mayor" city, meaning its chief executive gets to set the agenda in annual budgets, then passes them to City Council for approval.
Our city budgets are enormous and complicated, but there's one piece of the document that's relatively straightforward: the General Fund. City departments can spend money from external sources, like federal programs and grants, but each year, the mayor gets to set priorities and divvy up this billion-dollar pot.
As Denver budget manager Rachel Bardin put it, how the General Fund is spent is "directly a decision point of the mayor," where other funding sources might be less directly related to his priorities.
Let's start with the total. Money allocated for the General Fund grew by 77% during Hancock's tenure, from $900 million to $1.6 billion.
That growth was not distributed evenly across departments, and changes over time echo the pressures Hancock told us he needed to address while in office.
For example, Hancock said he was caught off guard by the way Denver's sudden growth led to affordability issues. His General Fund budgets show the creation of the Department of Housing Stability (HOST) in 2019, as a response. Also, the money he set aside for Community Planning and Development (CPD), the department that helps "guide the city's growth," grew by a whopping 164% during his tenure, from $15 million to $41 million.
For some context, projected General Fund spending for Denver's public works department grew by 54% between 2012 and 2023. Money set aside for Parks and Rec ticked up 92%. The Department of Safety, made up of police, fire and sheriff's departments and is always the biggest slice of the General Fund pie, increased by 46%, from $419 million to $611 million.
A few interesting tidbits:
Money set aside for Hancock's office and staff grew by 55%, from $1.4 million to $2.2 million between 2012 and the present.
Money set aside for snow removal actually dropped by 46%, from $4.5 million to $2.4 million. This one's interesting because subsequent budgets show that the city was actually only spending about $2.5 million each year on plowing and de-icing, regardless of what Hancock initially set aside.
Next: All of the existential stuff.
What follows is a broad look at metrics related to Denver on a wide range of topics. It's worth asking if Hancock can take credit or be blamed for any of this stuff in the first place.
Carrie Makarewicz, chair of the University of Colorado, Denver's department of urban and regional planning, has been studying the city's changing priorities, through "community engagement and constituent services," under Hancock. While a mayor can line up money and resources to influence change, she said their power can only go so far.
"Of course, just like the U.S. president shouldn't be blamed for the economy, the mayor doesn't have control over that either, or natural population growth and migration," she wrote us. "Crime and traffic aren't immediately controllable by the mayor either, especially since we operate within a region, state, and national global economy, and both are affected more by the economy than by actions a mayor can take or control."
But Makarewicz added that her ongoing research reveals how mayors do try to curb existential pressures, seen particularly in their changing budgets and strategic plans. HOST's appearance in the 2021 budget is one such data point.
"The mayor has sway over many things," she said. "The mayor has direct control over setting priorities and budget frameworks, and that then determines what else happens."
Dean Saitta, director of the University of Denver's urban studies program, told us mayors - and Hancock - definitely deserve responsibility for problems that seem beyond their scopes of power. He said a city executive should be able to influence the hardest problems, like gun violence, by using their bully pulpit to set the right tone with constituents.
Siatta studies cities in Central and South America, where he said "visionary" mayors (most who are academics, like him) have made significant progress on hard issues with not a lot of resources. If a problem persisted throughout Hancock's time in office, he said, the mayor deserves some credit for letting it continue.
For example, he said it mattered how Denverites perceived Hancock's priorities on housing costs.
"They still see this as a developer-run city, and I don't think Hancock has done anything to dissuade them from that notion," he told us. "I think Hancock deserves his share of blame for things that haven't gone right."
This might be a good place to show you this income bracket data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which suggests households bringing in less than $50,000 have lost share of the population during Hancock's administration. Meanwhile, wealthier households, particularly those bringing in over $200,000 a year, have grown in their share of the population.
Another example of an unmitigated problem might be the number of annual traffic deaths in Denver. That number has risen since Hancock announced the city would try to end tragedies like these. We have a whole in-depth story on that, if you want to go deep on what effort has (or hasn't) gone into addressing the problem.
One more persistent problem: mortality related to homelessness.
Cathy Alderman, spokesperson for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said rising deaths on city streets means the city hasn't done enough to protect people.
"Some death is obviously not preventable, but it is a policy choice and a an issue of political will to do everything in your power, use every tool at your disposal to prevent harm and death to those individuals that are made more vulnerable to it because they are unhoused," she wrote us.
"I want to acknowledge that Mayor Hancock evolved significantly on addressing homelessness over the years - he prioritized housing first, supportive housing, and he supported larger investments in housing and homelessness support than any mayor to date. Of course, he could have done more and frankly, all of us and our entire community should do more."
Environmentally adjacent topics saw more heartening trends.
Park area, which falls squarely in Hancock's wheelhouse, grew by 20% during his tenure. The city's tree canopy grew by one whole percent, according to Denver Parks and Rec.
Parking lot surface area decreased by about 8%, also according to LIDAR data generated in 2014 and 2020.
Between 2015 and 2021, Denver's carbon emissions also dropped by 30%.
A lot of our carbon output, measured in "metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent," has to do with transportation and Xcel Energy's supply chains. Still, Denver climate office spokesperson Emily Gedeon said Denver does try to influence output by signing onto regulatory proposals and setting limits on emissions from buildings.
Data Source: Denver Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency
One last random thing:
According to the U.S. Treasury department, the Denver Mint has held exactly 43,853,707.279 "fine troy ounces" of gold in its downtown vault for the entirety of Hancock's administration, valued at $1.8 billion. Guess he can't have sway over everything.
Editor's note: This article has been updated with the correct year HOST was created, the correct unit for the gold in the downtown U.S. Mint vault and to clarify Carrie Makarewicz's opinion that mayors do have impact and responsibility over things that seem outside of their control.
