Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has taken chances from the start. Some of his big bets have paid off — but other times, he’s been forced to fold.
Vowing to move 1,000 homeless people from the streets into shelter in his first six months in office? Win.
Announcing the city’s acquisition of Park Hill Golf Course in a land swap, long before the details were settled? Another win.
Asking voters last November to approve a big new sales tax to pay for affordable housing? No dice.
During his first two years in office — a milestone he’ll officially hit on Thursday — Johnston has repeatedly gone “all in” on his initiatives, sometimes acting first and thinking out the details later. Those big swings have delivered mixed results.
He has managed to decrease visible homelessness, launch a redesign of the city’s permitting system, survive a tense congressional hearing without a viral embarrassment and make strides toward improving downtown’s popularity.
But he’s also announced upcoming layoffs of city workers — the first in 15 years — amid a $250 million budget gap after his administration dipped deeper into the city’s savings account than what’s recommended, exacerbating its financial challenges. He’s faced criticism that he’s not doing enough to make Denverites feel safe. And he’s strained his relationships with City Council members as he barrels forward with his agenda.
“The mayor is an ideas guy,” said Robin Kniech, a former Denver council member who’s now director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Policy at the University of Colorado Denver. “And that has inspired folks, and it has also meant leaping without partners, without data and without plans.”
Johnston’s closest observers say he’s a well-spoken, charismatic leader with strong values and ambitious plans. But learning when to hold his cards instead of playing them could make him more successful, some of them say.
“Thinking about really big ideas and planning the details out strategically … I would say that’s probably one of his weaknesses,” council President Amanda Sandoval said.
Johnston, who confirmed to The Denver Post that he plans to run for a second term in 2027, has no intention of changing his style.
“I don’t regret swinging big and moving fast,” he said in an interview last week. “We won’t be slowing down.”
Over the next two years, as he prepares for a reelection bid, Johnston will have to navigate the massive budget deficit, ongoing negotiations with the Broncos over potential options for a new stadium — which could determine whether the storied NFL franchise stays in Denver — as well as, most likely, continued tension with the Trump administration.
All of that while trying to make progress on some of his biggest and most complex campaign promises, including solving street homelessness and making housing more affordable.
Denverites weigh in on Mayor Mike Johnston’s first two years, from cheers to disappointments
A ‘failed poet’ takes office
This isn’t Johnston’s first time in politics. The 50-year-old mayor, who grew up in Vail, served in the state legislature from 2009 to 2017, unsuccessfully campaigned for Colorado governor in the 2018 Democratic primary and briefly ran for the U.S. Senate in 2020.
Before his time in office, he was a teacher and a school principal.
He has described himself as a “failed poet” who spends hours thinking about word choice and writes all his own speeches — often editing them up until the moment he starts speaking.
That semi-improvisational approach can create powerful moments with captivated crowds. At other times, it prompts him to blurt things out during interviews — like when he suggested to a Denverite reporter last fall, after President Donald Trump’s election, that he would station Denver police officers at the county line to resist mass deportations.
He later changed course, saying he would take those comments back if he could. But in that same interview with 9News, he drew the spotlight again by saying he was willing to be arrested to stand in the way of deportations he considers illegal.
Some of the words he chooses, however, are extremely calculated.
His trademark term “vibrant,” which he and his team often use to describe the future Denver they’re trying to create, wasn’t selected by a marketing firm or political consultants. He chose it himself from a list of other adjectives, he once told a Post reporter. He also adopted it for the name of the Vibrant Denver bond package that he hopes to put before voters this November.
His personable, arm-pat-with-a-handshake style landed big with voters two years ago. He defeated opponent Kelly Brough by a 10-point margin in the 2023 runoff election.
But since then, some bets haven’t gone his way.
Ballot Issue 2R, which would have added a 0.5% local sales tax to pay for affordable housing — and generated an estimated $100 million per year — failed at the ballot box last year amid criticism that there wasn’t a clear plan for the dollars.
“It was my fault that we didn’t pass it,” he said last week.
Johnston doesn’t regret the lack of a detailed plan, though. He believes he just needed clearer messaging.
“I should have done a better job of making the case of why we were doing it,” he said. “If you have a kid in a building that’s on fire, you don’t say, ‘Let’s start a blue ribbon commission to figure out how to get them out.’ You break down the door.”
In a city where voters have typically approved new taxes, including another item on the same ballot for Denver Health, they rejected Johnston’s proposal by only about 3,700 votes.
“If there had been real co-ownership and a real plan for the ballot measure funding,” Kniech said, “it would have been a totally different campaign than it just being a vague set of Mike’s promises.”
Big moves on homelessness
Johnston also went all in when he vowed to end street homelessness in the city by the end of his term, even naming his key initiative on the issue “All In Mile High.” On his first day in office two years ago, he declared a state of emergency on homelessness and began racing to open additional shelter beds, hosting 60 town halls over six months.
As a result, encampments no longer fill city sidewalks downtown.
The initiative, which now costs the city about $58 million per year, opened micro-communities and hotels as non-congregate shelters, helping the mayor reach his initial goal of bringing 1,000 people off the streets by the end of 2023. The city has sheltered about 1,700 more since then as part of the “All In Mile High” initiative, contributing to what the mayor’s office has declared as the largest multiyear decrease in street homelessness in any American city in history.
Overall homelessness is still increasing, however. Now, Johnston will have to find a way to address more of its root causes, like costly housing and substance use, to get people off the streets permanently — including moving residents of those temporary shelters to more stable housing.
In comments to The Post in recent weeks, dozens of residents who responded to a call-out for views on the mayor’s performance said they had seen a significant difference in homelessness in the city.
“I think he was charged with getting homeless people off the streets. I think for the most part he’s been successful,” said David Powell, a Northfield resident. “I don’t think people realize what a complex problem getting unhoused people off the street is.”
Some respondents expressed the opposite view. Daniel Lampert, a southeast Denver resident who lives near one of the hotel shelters, called the efforts “political theater.”
“The so-called ‘All In Mile High’ initiative is not only fiscally irresponsible — it’s an insult to working-class Denverites. It is draining our city’s budget and pushing our public servants to the brink, all while achieving no measurable improvement in public safety or housing outcomes,” he said.
Advocates for homeless people and some council members also have voiced concerns about how the shelters operate. The council rejected a contract with The Salvation Army earlier this year after several violent incidents occurred at one of the hotel shelters it operates.
The council has continued to push back on the facilities, commenting that they feel Johnston’s administration is rushing the contracts.
“That’s been very troubling and frustrating,” Sandoval said of that process.
An increasingly irritated council
Council members have repeatedly said they feel out of the loop on Johnston’s initiatives.
“Sometimes City Council — and I have mentioned this to the mayor — feels like we’re not in the planning processes,” said Sandoval, the council president.
Sandoval notes that in general, she feels Johnston has been a collaborative, thoughtful partner who listens intently when she brings him concerns.
But when he announced in March that a women’s soccer stadium would be constructed in Baker as part of a deal to bring a National Women’s Soccer League expansion team to Denver, he didn’t say how much the city’s contribution would cost. While he implied it was virtually a done deal, council members emphasized that the proposal still needed their approval.
The not-yet-named team would pay to build the 14,500-seat stadium on part of the former site of the Gates Rubber Company, and the city would purchase the land and pay for necessary infrastructure improvements. At the time, an excited Johnston said the stadium would be “a transformational addition to southwest Denver.”
The council was skeptical of the proposal, but it gave preliminary approval for the $70 million capital investment in May. Multiple members implied they might rescind their support if the city’s budget situation worsened before the deal was finalized this fall.
A week after the council voted on the stadium deal, Johnston held a press conference announcing the city’s budget was in a crisis.
Signaling the bleak outlook, he said then: “We are going to try in every way we can to avoid services being impacted. I don’t know that it will be possible.”
The projected $250 million budget gap accounts for an anticipated $50 million shortfall in expected tax revenue this year compared to expenses, plus a $200 million gap expected next year. The city’s costs have grown for years, while its main source of revenue — sales taxes — hasn’t kept up.
Johnston’s team contributed to the situation by choosing to cut into the city’s savings account. The city typically keeps 15% of its expenditures as a rainy day fund. Over the past two years, it has gone below that level. It’s now at about 11%.
The budget announcement was another example of the council feeling left behind. Its members went on their annual budget retreat before Johnston’s news conference, meaning they didn’t have necessary information when they discussed their financial priorities.
Choices like that could make it harder for Johnston to pass his initiatives in the future, said Councilwoman Jamie Torres.
“We continue to be an afterthought to the mayor. He needs to think about us as 13 key partners, or he’s going to continue to hit a brick wall,” she said.
Torres said that despite her irritations, she does believe Johnston’s policy priorities are the right ones.
“I think he is, philosophically, the mayor we need right now,” she said. “It is a relief to me that I’ve got a mayor that I don’t have to convince to support immigrants or innovative recovery options for our unhoused, (or) to find creative ways to get people shelter.”
In the coming weeks, the city is expected to begin layoffs to address the budget shortfall. City officials haven’t said how many there will be, but the Career Service Board recently voted to allow merit to be considered in the decisions, rather than just seniority.
In yet another sign of the council being out of step with the mayor: 11 of the 13 members signed a letter opposing that change, which has rankled many longtime city employees.
New Trump tensions
When Johnston came into office, he inherited an expensive and hotly debated issue: the migrant crisis.
In late 2022, tens of thousands of migrants who had crossed the border began arriving in Denver on buses, many of them Venezuelans seeking asylum. Surges continued through early 2024, especially as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office chartered buses to cities like Denver that were considered to have “sanctuary” policies for immigrants.
The Mile High City chose to provide shelter and services to the people who arrived, costing about $95 million between 2022 and 2024.
When Johnston entered office in mid-2023, he continued the efforts of his predecessor, Michael Hancock, and stood behind the city’s and Colorado’s already-existing policies not to allow local law enforcement to coordinate with immigration enforcement.
Those choices, and the viral comments about his willingness to go to jail, put Johnston in the crosshairs of Trump when the president was inaugurated in January.
Johnston also was thrust onto the national stage when he was called before a congressional committee in March, alongside three other mayors, to testify about Denver’s immigration policies. Johnston stayed level-headed while members of Congress threatened to have him arrested and grilled him over the city’s immigrant-friendly policies.
Since then, the federal government has rescinded certain grants, citing those policies, and the Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Denver and Colorado. The city is involved in several other court cases with the Trump administration over its policies and the grants.
That conflict with Trump has proven to be somewhat popular among Denverites, thousands of whom participated in anti-Trump “No Kings” protests last month.
“I respect his stance on immigration,” Caroline Daley, a Capitol Hill resident, said of Johnston. “Denver feels relatively strong and humane in that area, and I appreciate that he’s publicly opposed Trump. That matters.”
The tension with Trump is an issue that could either help or hurt Johnston’s political future, said Paul Teske, the dean of CU Denver’s School of Public Affairs and a longtime observer of Denver politics.
Despite wide opposition to Trump locally, there’s a risk: “That’s not necessarily a winning hand when they could just cut funding,” he said of the Trump administration.
Partners beyond city hall
Johnston is balancing the Washington, D.C., tension with another urgent issue closer to home: housing affordability.
As Johnston seeks to ease costs for Denverites, developers are keeping a close eye as this mayor — like many before him — takes on the city’s cumbersome construction permitting process. Developers have complained for years that the city’s reviews take far too long, which makes their projects more expensive to build and therefore more costly for the eventual residents.
In April, Johnston signed his first executive order, creating the Denver Permitting Office and setting a goal of processing all construction permits within 180 days, or roughly six months. If the new one-stop shop fails to do so, the city says it will refund up to $10,000 in applicants’ fees.
The first round of deadlines under that new promise won’t happen until mid-November. As of Thursday, the dashboard tracking wait times for permits shows that lately, it’s taken an average of about 276 days to process permits for new multifamily residential buildings.
Carl Koelbel, with the real estate development firm Koelbel and Company, said he’s cautiously optimistic about the direction of the planning department.
“I think the new office that they’ve created is the right move,” he said, “but I think it’s going to take, unsurprisingly, another couple of years before we find out if it had the desired effect on permit timelines.”
Supporters of multimodal transportation are also watching Johnston closely. Jill Locantore with the Denver Streets Partnership said she doesn’t believe improving the city’s bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure has turned out to be a priority for Johnston.
“He hasn’t necessarily stopped any initiatives that were moving forward, but we haven’t seen much leadership from him on what’s next,” she said.
In June, the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure announced it had completed its long-awaited update to the Denver Moves: Bikes plan, which outlines future projects for bike lane expansions.
Several Denverites referenced a lack of emphasis on multimodal transportation in their comments to The Post about Johnston’s performance so far.
“His full 180 on multimodal transit has been a huge blow to my view of him,” said John Reilly, a Sloan’s Lake resident. “Complaining about not having funds to improve bike infrastructure and then literally paying to tear up and worsen existing bike infrastructure destroyed any remaining iota of trust in him.”
Denver recently spent $200,000 to remove vertical safety barriers from some protected bike lanes downtown for replacement with sturdier but less protective alternatives, according to CBS News Colorado. The department had also been hearing complaints from neighbors of some of the new protected bike lanes about “visual clutter.”
In the past year, the transportation department has scaled back plans for some prominent bike corridors in response to local pressure, including one on West 29th Avenue near Sloan’s Lake.
One group that has supported Johnston strongly is opponents of the development of Park Hill Golf Course.
In January, Johnston announced the land would open to the public as a large park after city officials negotiated to acquire the land through a land swap with the owners, Westside Investment Partners. The deal he referenced took several months to finalize, but the council approved it in May.
A required due diligence period is still underway before the park can open this summer, said Stephanie Figueroa, a spokesperson for Denver Parks and Recreation. The city plans phased improvements as it adds amenities to the new park.
The luck of the draw
How successful Johnston will be in his first term — and the likelihood of him serving a second — will all break on how the next two years take shape.
The impending layoffs, the budget shortfall, the unresolved Broncos stadium question, downtown’s recovery following the reopening of the 16th Street mall and the national political landscape will all help determine the strength of his position when Election Day rolls around in April 2027.
So far, said Teske, the CU Denver analyst, Johnston’s progress has been slowed by problems largely outside his control, including the migrant crisis, a slowing national economy and Trump’s scrutiny.
“He has had a lot of bad luck,” he said. “You have to expect that and be ready for that, but it does seem like it’s been a lot at different levels.”
But if initiatives like the women’s soccer stadium and efforts to improve downtown do help Denver recover, voters could view him favorably in 2027.
“It’s likely Denver will be turning in a more positive direction,” Teske said. “He might be able to take credit for that.”
Kniech said she sees a trend of Johnston sometimes overpromising and later inflating his wins.
“Time will tell whether this catches up with him with the electorate,” she said.
One thing is for certain: Johnston plans to continue betting big on whatever hand he’s dealt.
“We have three big values in the city: listen, dare and deliver. So a core value for us is ‘dare,’ ” he said. “But the key is, you also have to deliver.”
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