Nearly two years after Denver’s auditor told city officials they needed to improve how they track expenses related to the city’s homelessness initiative, those changes still haven’t been made, according to a follow-up report released Thursday.
“The city has still not identified expenses to track related to encampment response and is still not adequately monitoring contracts or reviewing supporting documentation for invoices,” the report from Auditor Timothy O’Brien said.
That could prevent Denver officials from evaluating the effectiveness of their programs and could lead to the city paying for services that never were used, according to the report.
During a presentation of the update Thursday, O’Brien told the mayor’s office that he often hears concerns from community members about Denver’s inability to track the money spent on its response to homeless encampments.
“This question has been out there for years,” O’Brien said. “I’d like to see some progress on it myself.”
O’Brien’s office initially lodged that complaint in a 2023 audit when Michael Hancock was still mayor. But in November, the same concerns appeared in a new audit, which reviewed city procedures after Mike Johnston became mayor.
Johnston’s office has said it’s working to improve expense tracking, but that it’s difficult because the city’s homelessness program involves many contracts and outside agencies. The mayor’s office also responded to the audit by pointing to its accomplishments.
“We really have transformed the city’s response to encampments,” said Cole Chandler, Denver’s senior homelessness advisor, during the Thursday meeting. “We’ve moved more than 3,000 people indoors. We’ve permanently closed more than 400 city blocks to encampments.”
Of the 36 recommendations the auditor’s office made in its original report in 2023, the city had fully implemented only six of them by the time the updated report was completed in December, according to the update.
