By Deborah Grigsby | Denver Gazette
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s new $800 million bond package is expected to make its way to voters this fall, but some City Council members working to whittle down the wish list of projects said the process is rushed and the bond issue could wait until next year.
“I am not okay with the process at all,” District 5 Councilmember Amanda Sawyer told members of the city’s Vibrant Denver Bond working group on Wednesday. “I want to apologize to the staff in Department of Finance, because you guys have been set up for failure and you have been asked for extraordinary work in a very limited amount of time…So I want to make it very clear: you are doing an amazing job.”
Sawyer added: “The problems that we are talking about here are not your fault. They are the mayor’s office’s fault.”
City officials said that more than 1,100 project ideas came out of weeks of public outreach and engagement with 215 making the final cut to move on to further consideration by one of five subcommittees.
Of the final 215 projects, Sawyer’s group was assigned a total of 11 projects to review and to assign a tier level of “high,” “medium” or “low.”
Earlier this month, Johnston created an executive committee charged with the review the final list of proposed projects, as recommended by five subcommittees, before the full bond package is presented to the mayor, then sent to Denver City Council for possible inclusion on the November ballot.
Only two of the five subcommittees — Connectivity, and Arts and Culture — have finished their “tiering” according to City of Denver Private Bond Manager Patrick Riley.
Riley said there was hope the remaining subcommittees would finish by Thursday in time to move to an executive committee meeting on Monday.
Sawyer, who sits on the proposed bond’s Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods committee, said that in five weeks her committee has received three projects to review.
“Five weeks that we have been in this process, now on Thursday, we are getting five massive projects, and we have one day to talk about them, and we have been told by the mayor’s office we can’t have extra time, even though we have asked for it,” Sawyer said. “That is not okay when it comes to process, and that is not what our residents — who are going to have to vote on this — expect from us.”
In 2026, Denver will be part of the larger Colorado General Election and Sawyer suggested the bond measure could benefit by waiting.