Updated 3:38 p.m.
Nearly 200 Denver government employees are set to lose their jobs starting Monday as the city makes sweeping layoffs to close a major budget deficit.
The city announced 171 workers would be laid off. In addition, 665 open positions will be eliminated and nearly 100 other jobs will be transferred to other funding sources. The layoffs and job closures represent 7.6 percent of the workforce budgeted in the general fund.
City workers have been bracing for layoffs since May, when Mayor Mike Johnston announced the city faced a $250 million budget deficit for 2025 and 2026. The city will notify the affected employees by the end of Tuesday, and no further reductions are anticipated this year.
“This has been the hardest leadership task I probably ever had to undertake … how do you find a way to take amazing work the city's doing and make it operate on fewer dollars?” Johnston told Denver City Council members last week. “I just say at every turn, what we've done is tried to avoid, in every situation, having an impact on city residents and on our city employees
The scale of the layoffs is smaller than some anticipated. Union leaders speculated that up to 4,000 workers could be laid off. But the smaller-than-expected number didn’t comfort Michael Wallin, the president of AFSCME Local Union 158 and an employee of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.
“It's disappointing that the city had to go to layoffs this early in the budget process,” he said Monday. “They just have not dealt in good faith.”
The layoffs have already affected one high-profile city employee, Scott Gilmore.
Gilmore is the husband of Councilmember Stacie Gilmore and has worked at the parks department for more than a decade. He was a deputy executive director and recently became deputy executive director of mountain parks and special projects, multiple outlets reported.
If you’re a city worker impacted by layoffs, email us at [email protected].
City predicts $100 million in savings.
The city administration is preparing its proposed budget for next year and will present it in September.
It isn’t immediately clear how the layoffs will be distributed among city departments. The layoffs are targeted at the roughly 11,000 employees whose salaries are paid by the general fund — which includes sanitation workers, police, firefighters, parks workers, city planners, technology staff and others.
The city’s budget has been struggling amid an economic slowdown with its slowest revenue growth in more than a decade. Sales and use taxes have not grown this year — and that revenue represents more than half of the general fund budget. At the same time, salary costs are stacking up, and the city has spent heavily on housing and immigration responses.
Mayor Mike Johnston's administration budgeted for slower revenue growth, but didn't expect such a dramatic change, the mayor said in a recent interview with CPR News and Denverite.
"We predicted half of this slowdown, not the other half. So we already started taking corrections a year ago to say, we think the costs of the city are growing and we think the revenues of the city are shrinking," he said. The city froze hiring several months ago and reduced spending gin 2025. It has been reviewing vacant positions for savings since 2023.
The city also ordered most employees to take unpaid furlough days, and departments will have to find additional ways to cut costs.
“We'll make hard cuts to make sure we have government that works better but costs less,” Johnston said earlier.
The city expects to save about $100 million per year with the changes, covering about half of next year's budget gap. About 70 percent of the general fund is spent on personnel, making it difficult to reduce spending without cutting jobs or benefits.
For comparison, in 2021, the city budgeted savings of about $39 million by holding open 400 jobs. But the city hasn't laid off workers since the Great Recession, with former Mayor John Hickenlooper cutting close to 200 jobs in 2009.
The city expects to announce more details of the layoffs, including a department-level breakdown, later this week.
The layoffs generally are not expected to affect employees at independent agencies like Denver International Airport, which have their own freestanding budgets, although some may. The city has also ordered some of those independent agency employees to take furlough days in solidarity.
How the layoffs will work:
Affected employees will stop work on the same day they get the layoff notice. Notices will be sent out Monday and Tuesday.
The city used a formula to determine layoffs, with decisions based on an employee’s years of service, skills, abilities and performance. Department leaders had some flexibility to change how each of those factors were weighted for their teams.
All affected workers will be given 30 days of pay and benefits after they are notified. They will receive medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sept. 30.
Employees will also get severance packages based on years of service, ranging from two weeks to eight weeks. Employees with more than 15 years of service would get the maximum severance.
Employees within 90 days of retirement eligibility will be permitted to retire with benefits if they are laid off. They’ll also get a six-month subscription to LinkedIn’s premium service to help them find new jobs.
“I've spent hundreds of hours with the heads of agencies who are trying to balance this budget every day, and for whom they are losing sleep and they are in tears,” Johnston said at a meeting last week.
“This is a decision they never wanted to make, never signed up to make, never asked to make,” the mayor said of city agency leaders. “They have to make it, and that's the challenge of leadership.”
Who was laid off?
City else employees are coming forward after being laid off.
Carlon Manual was the director of the Assessment, Intake, and Diversion (AID) Center. Within minutes of learning his position was eliminated on Monday, he was cut off from his city email.
The AID Center has acted as a resource hub for people dealing with addiction and homelessness since it opened in 2023. In June, the city said it would close the center, citing the budget crisis, but postponed its closure while it determined a “sustainable, long-term vision both for the space itself and for the resources it offers.”
Manual was one of two staff working at the center. He said his termination appears to be the end of the AID Center and criticized the city for its decision.
“I don't know if they're really about trying to work on saving lives,” Manual told Denverite. “I think for them it's more about the optics.”
City officials said closing the AID Center would save almost $600,000.
The threat of layoffs has galvanized city workers.
Some city workers have lawyered up, with law firms offering to represent laid off employees in potential lawsuits.
Unhappy employees also pushed back against the city’s Career Service Board’s decision to reduce protections for senior employees. During public meetings, lawyers with the City Attorney’s Office warned city officials that mass layoffs could end up costing the city heavily in legal fees.
The layoffs have also drawn the ire of Denver City Council members Sarah Parady and Shontel Lewis. In a press release and a letter to Lewis’ constituents, they criticized the city’s lack of transparency about layoffs and challenged the mayor to find alternative solutions before resorting to layoffs.
Denverite reporter Kyle Harris contributed to this report.
Editor's note: This article was updated with new information throughout.
