Denver City Council members Stacie Gilmore, Shontel Lewis and Amanda Sawyer consistently expressed frustration during the tense 2026 budget process, saying that Mayor Mike Johnston failed to give them sufficient and timely answers to their questions about the city’s $1.7 billion spending plan.
Now those three have an idea some other cities have tried: Write spending plans for two years each, instead of just one.
In Monday’s Budget and Policy Committee, the council members argued shifting to a two-year budget would increase transparency and community engagement, giving more time for the city council to deliberate and plan strategically. It would be easier to plan big multi-year projects, they argued.
Proponents also addressed some potential drawbacks: Biennial budgets can be shaken up by economic shifts; state law requires an annual budget; and the new process would give newly elected city council members and mayors less input in the budget in their first year in office.
But Gilmore argued the pace of the current one-year process makes it easy for the mayor, who writes the budget, to work without full transparency to residents and lawmakers on council.
The idea is to keep the public more engaged in the budgeting process, Councilmember Shontel Lewis said. The public would benefit from more emphasis on strategic planning, which the current budgeting process does not have.
The mayor and his office have pushed back strongly on the idea that they aren’t transparent, noting that they answered more than 600 questions from council and made nearly $20 million of changes in response to council requests.
Not all council members saw the proposed fix as a fix.
Councilmember Kevin Flynn said he was skeptical.
“We can’t even get a one-year budget right,” Flynn said, noting two-year budgeting could be “chaotic.”
“I would like more process time to review the budget,” said Councilmember Flor Alvidrez, but she did have concerns about how much revenue, policy and legislation change in any given two-year stretch and how accurate a projected budget could be as a result.
The state of Colorado writes budgets every year.
Several council members want more power to reside with their body.
Denver is a strong-mayor system, with the mayor holding most of the power in the budgeting process. Rifts with the mayor have some council members talking about ways to rebalance power — but it’s unclear whether this budget proposal would actually do that.
City Council President Amanda Sandoval expressed concerns that a two-year budget could actually take power away from the council.
Nothing in the measure would directly challenge the strong-mayor system of government.
The mayor would still write the budget. While council could still amend the budget and override mayoral vetoes with a supermajority vote, it would still be the mayor’s final budget that passed – with or without council approval.
With 43 agencies in the city, the mayor’s office would have a lot of legwork to do to see if the proposed changes would be feasible.
“We’re open to working with Council on the budget process,” Johnston’s spokesperson Jon Ewing wrote to Denverite. “However, the changes proposed today require substantial study to determine feasibility as well as potential impacts to residents, businesses and city staff.”
The proponents of the change plan to do public outreach and return to the city council in April. Any changes would likely be brought to voters in November.
