The morning after Election Day, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and members of his team stepped into the sun at Civic Center Park and smiled.
Doughnuts and coffees in hand, some of them joked about seeing each other look happy for the first time in weeks.
“It’s a huge relief,” Johnston said with a laugh after being asked about voters emphatically approving the Vibrant Denver bond the night before. “And it’s a tremendous jolt of excitement.”
The celebration came at just the right time for the first-term mayor. A year ago, he suffered a major loss when Ballot Issue 2R — a Johnston-backed initiative that would have set aside an estimated $100 million per year for housing affordability efforts — narrowly failed in the election. And after weeks of negative headlines about the mayor leading up to this year’s election, a win is a shot in the arm.
From his ongoing squabbles with the City Council to recent public perceptions of a lack of transparency, the mayor’s trademark move-now, ask-questions-later approach has continued to deliver mixed results.
But Johnston sees this most recent success as a stamp of approval for that method.
“I think this shows us there’s real support and belief in the direction we’re heading,” Johnston said shortly after declaring victory on Tuesday. “It doesn’t mean you slow down, it just means you work harder.”
Now, he plans to use that momentum to propel the rest of his agenda. In the New Year, his administration is considering proposing changes to the city’s local minimum wage laws for tipped workers as restaurant owners struggle with economic difficulties. City officials will also begin an enforcement crackdown on “quality of life” crimes often committed by drug users and people suffering from mental illnesses, including the possibility of mandating treatment.
This month, Johnston will wrap up a contentious and tight budget season and battle through some of the final votes on the city’s deal to bring a women’s soccer team — and stadium — to the Baker neighborhood. All while trying to keep his at-times tense relationship with the council from fully unraveling.
Flock flak and recent misstatements
In recent weeks, Johnston has come under fire for making unilateral decisions without input from the council or the public.
One of the biggest things Johnston has gotten recent flak for is a contract with Flock. The company’s AI-powered license plate reader system has been at the center of debate as naysayers protest the technology and its network of street cameras as a violation of privacy. Johnston’s administration, which says the cameras have been a game changer for fighting crime, agreed to a no-cost extension of Flock’s contract in October, circumventing a vote from the council.
Some also called foul on Johnston withholding information about the Denver Post’s owners stopping rent payments on the downtown building it formerly called home, and which is now owned by the city. The move has cost the city more than $2 million so far as the newspaper company attempts to negotiate its way out of its long-term lease.
The mayor’s office also didn’t notify the public that it had agreed to give an additional 20 acres of city-owned land to Westside Investment Partners as it worked through the complexities of a land swap deal to acquire the former Park Hill Golf Course, now a new city park.
In recent weeks, Johnston has made unproven claims about two high-profile crimes, resulting in questions about his credibility after media outlets reported on the comments. In one instance, he said Flock’s cameras had helped solve the case of Jax Gratton, a transgender hairstylist whose death remains unsolved. He also claimed, without evidence, that it was an “anti-migrant activist” who shot a Denver Police Department captain in 2023 outside a hotel that was sheltering migrants.
Councilman Kevin Flynn, who often votes in support of initiatives from the mayor’s office, called those recent missteps “unforced errors.” But he said the win of the Vibrant Denver bond had helped the mayor regain some political capital — even if bond proposals almost always pass in Denver.
“If (Michael) Hancock were still mayor, the bonds probably would have passed. If Wellington (Webb) were mayor, if (John) Hickenlooper were mayor, the bonds probably still would have passed,” Flynn said. “I think the mayor (Johnston) rides the coattails of that.”
Only one bond proposal has failed in recent years, in 2021, when voters rejected part of a Hancock package that would have issued bonds to help build a 10,000-seat arena for the National Western Center.
Johnston’s team says it’s focused on the fact that each of the Vibrant Denver bond questions passed Tuesday with more than 60% of the vote.
“I think it’s a clear message that these have been approved without hesitancy from voters,” said Jenn Ridder, the mayor’s chief of staff.
A loss at the ballot box, especially after the failure of Ballot Issue 2R last year, may have been catastrophic for the mayor’s reelection efforts.
“If it had failed, it would have been a tough thing for the mayor,” said Paul Teske, a longtime observer of Denver politics who’s a professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the former dean of its School of Public Affairs. “Is it going to turn around his polls? I don’t know.”
Next steps for administration
With the bond election in the rearview mirror, Johnston appears poised to turn to his other key agenda items: downtown recovery, homelessness and public safety.
The city is under mounting pressure to address its minimum wage laws after the state legislature passed a bill earlier this year that gave cities greater flexibility to do so. House Bill 1208 allows cities to further reduce the regular minimum wage for a tipped worker’s paycheck, lowering their base pay since they receive gratuities.
As Denver’s minimum wage — now $18.81 per hour and going to $19.29 in 2026 — has risen, the minimum for tipped workers (about $3 less) has increased, too, prompting restaurant owners to ask for help.
Johnston’s team could face a tough battle with already-displeased council members, some of whom testified against the bill in the legislature, if it pursues changes. When he signed the legislation, Gov. Jared Polis warned that if Denver didn’t lower its tipped wage minimum, the legislature might pursue the issue “more assertively.”
If Johnston heeds that warning, the mayor will likely have to find a proposal that balances workers’ need for a living wage with the desire to attract businesses to the city core in order to find enough council support to pass the legislation.
In his State of the City speech in July, Johnston pointed to another initiative that residents can expect to see more of in 2026. The mayor plans to take a tougher approach to low-level “quality of life” crimes like theft and drug use.
That strategy will include connecting people to services and, in some cases, mandating treatment for mental illnesses and substance use. The 2026 budget, which is set to receive final approval Monday, includes the addition of a new “treatment court” in the Denver County Court, which will use two employees and a budget of about $880,000.
Johnston will make an effort to accomplish those goals, while making as much headway as possible on the Vibrant Denver bond projects, before the city votes on whether to retain him as mayor for another term in spring 2027.
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