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10 09 24 Denver Mayor Mike Johnston talks about The Denver Basic Income Project
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Experience stunning clarity that brings movie marathons to life like never before. With Watch3 Plus built in, enjoy free live and on-demand TV right out of the box. Plus, dream all your favorite holiday songs with the iHeartRadio app. Whether it's a gift for the family or an upgrade to your own setup, this incredible value delivers 4K brilliance without breaking your holiday budget. Get your Visio 50-inch 4K Smart TV at Target for just $239.99 today. It is Colorado's morning news. Marty Lenz, Gina Ganda. Good morning. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. Good to be running a little late. We're going to do a little flip-flop here of our schedule and have the mayor on, I believe with this what, now $8.19. Which means that we get to kick up our segment that we're going to have then next. We're going to be talking about, I affectionately call it Gabath. Yeah, it's not called that. I love that. Great American beer festival. But actually the reason why Mayor Johnston is running late as well is because it's National Walker Roll to School Day today. So you'll see a lot of kids as they're off to school, likely on their bikes or walking. So make sure you're extra careful with that. And they have a number of celebrity crossing guards is what they like to say. So Mayor Mike Johnston will be one of those taking part in it. So he is helping to get some of those kids safely to school currently. But yes. And we're going to be talking with Ann Obenshain. We're going to give live play by play here. Am I right? Well, it sounds like we have the mayor now too. So we're just bouncing back and forth from all. Great. Okay. How's crossing guard duties and crosswalk duties, Mr. Mayor? It's excellent. I just got, I got talking to a couple of parents on the way on the door. So I'm here. My fantastic, bright yellow vest walking kids into Sheldon Elementary in Northwest Denver. It's a great morning. Well, Mr. Mayor, everyone so far safely in the building. You almost got bumped for the Great American Beer Festival. So it was you or beer. Sometimes it's a toss up of who we want to interview. What's more important when it comes to this? I'm actually shocked that I won that contest. And so I might not have made the same choice as I were you. It is fun that you're doing an event like this, the walk in and roll. But it is about safety. And as somebody who lives around school zones, I see a lot of cars whipping in and out and driving away excessively fast when there's people in the crosswalk in particular kids and those trying to help them. So it's nice that you're highlighting and trying to remind people not only to have a little fun with this, but also being smart about how we go about and travel and traffic in and around schools. It really is. We know everybody's in the hurry in the morning and trying to get where they're trying to go. But obviously nothing more important to making sure kids can get it safely to and from their neighborhood schools. You know, we got some parents that are walking them, some parents are driving them, some parents that are on bikes. And so we're really grateful for all the both school staff and community volunteers who come out to just say how to get in the morning. Welcome. We'll make sure to get in safe. I know for my kids and they're always up in that face. They see the first thing in the morning whether it's a teacher at the front door or crossing guard is that says welcome to them. And so we're really grateful to folks that do that every day. Mr. Mayor, I know about a month ago now you unveiled the 2025 fiscal year budget and the proposal for that. Have you had some input and reflection from city council members? What they like? What they don't like? What could change in the weeks ahead? Yeah, we're having great ongoing conversation with them. I think we had purchased a little differently, which is, you know, we talked to the council early on in advance of putting the budget together. They gave us a list of priorities. We worked collaboratively to try to make sure we can meet all those that we could. You know, we know their sales tax returns are down this year. And so we're having to build a more fiscally responsible budget. It's the first time about 15 years that we'll both slow the growth of government and reduce the size of government, but also making sure we're prioritizing key places like public safety. We are still expanding our number of officers. We're expanding 911 call takers to make sure that we are really prioritizing public safety, but we think it's going to be a great budget that will allow us to build the city that's vibrant and affordable and safe. In close contact with city council, we think they're a lot of the shared priorities. So we think we are, we think we have a good first draft and they'll be meeting this week to give us additional thoughts on things that they want to prioritize. But I think they are clear that these are times we got to tighten the fiscal belt a little bit. And I think they're prepared to do that also. One of those tightening things that looks like you left out, the universal basic income project in that budget taken away some of that money. We've talked to the folks there. Do you feel that the project hasn't done necessarily everything that its intent was, or is this just simply? We just can't afford to do this right now. Yeah, first of all, just a lot of respect for the folks that are leading that effort marked on and others, so I knew we're great people looking to try to help solve hard problems. I think there are a number of things that that universal basic income can do. It can help you just stabilize your life and increase your mental health and wellness. We were really looking at does it help you directly get access to housing? So is it an alternative strategy versus what we would call like rapid rehousing, which is spend the $10,000 to pay a lease for you for 10 months or six months. And so we think there are some places that it really helps. We don't see yet that it has a greater impact on getting people safely into housing and effectively into housing at a lower cost than what we're doing currently. We're always open if more evidence presents itself. We feel like we got to go with what evidence shows us as the lowest cost and highest impact to get people into housing. You think right now we have some rapid rehousing strategies. We use that are better, but we're always open to learning more as they keep doing what they're doing. I'm really grateful for all that effort to put into it. What do you think the future of that program looks like? Do you see it adjusting in order to help with more direct access to housing or will it stay the same? I mean, this money that they rely on in the budget, obviously, like Mark mentioned, is critical in order to keep it going. I think they have a lot of philanthropic funders that they're reaching out to as well. There are different strategies of what that can do. Some people think in the purest sense that just everyone in the city should get the universal income that they can live off of. I don't think that will ever be realistic with our budget more with Tabor in the state. And the other idea is that there might be targeted populations for whom it works better. Maybe it works better for folks that are already housed and maybe have a job but don't have enough to pay the rent or people that are in different stages of life. I think when we look at people that are on the brink of trying to get access to housing, there's so much complexity involved in trying to get housing, particularly in a market like this, where there's not much affordable housing out there that now getting that is really complicated. Sometimes asking someone to do that on their own is harder than having them do it with resources, but we can help find units, make the first months down payment, get people housed and get them the support they need. And so I think there could be different sets of population for him that may be more effective, but I'm sure Mark and his team will keep working hard to figure that out. And one of the issues with housing is the capacity piece as well. And we've talked and gone back and forth about making sure that those that are in charge of codes and building and doing it responsible, but also not holding up and keeping the process down. I referenced this because I was at an event with some home builders a couple of weeks ago. They said on the one hand, they like what you're doing, but they also say, and this is not the exact verbiage, but it looks like when they put in their information about getting approvals, it sits in, I think the term was the kitty or the cue and waits 30, 45 days and delays the process. And a little frustrated with that is there's something that can be done to speed that up to help them to where they can build more affordable housing. Yeah, I totally agree with them and we are frustrated by it as well and we are working hard at it. We have one of our big city wide goals this year is to make that process go faster. It is already 30% faster this year than it was a year ago, so we're improving, but that's not fast enough. And so we need to do two things. One is we got to make sure we have resources to help these deals go forward. Right now we have thousands of affordable housing units that are stuck as they can't get financing. They don't have the resources to be able to get them built. And so this is why we're pushing this two hour ballot measure as we have thousands of units that could get unstuck. If they had financing, because you know, it costs more money to build an affordable unit than not. You can build a unit and charge someone $3,000 a month. You make a lot more than a few charge someone $1,800 a month. And so we want to make sure it's still cost effective and to build units that stay affordable and we need to help finance those so that reasonable builders can do it. So we think that we've got to do both. We've got to both make it move much faster. Our team at Community Planning Development right now is working hard on the next few months. Some getting developers and home builders and others like that together to say what we need to really totally rebuild the process of permitting to make it far easier to use. And then also make sure we have the resources to make it move fast. So we think that if we get the resources and better permitting together, we can be the best place to build and not maybe sometimes one of the most difficult places. Mayor Johnson, real quick, a story we had earlier that we're just looking to get some clarification on as well as the possibility of Remington Elementary School building being transformed into some type of emergency shelter. What's the latest on that in the proposition that we saw there? You know, we're talking to DPS about what we think the uses could be. We're delighted about their partnership. We don't have a need right now for a shelter. You know, as you know, we've closed all of our newcomer and migrant shelters. You've probably seen also in this year's budget. You know, we're reducing the total funding for newcomers by 90% in next year's budget. A great sign that we've both managed this problem effectively and have a long-term strategy that we'll be able to provide key services without impacting the budget. In fact, the savings we have from that migrant budget are what we're using to expand things like our police officer academy classes this year. So actually that budget is going to be transferred to support other key citywide services. And so I think, you know, we have a number of uses. We want to build one more childcare facilities around the state. You know, that's a real challenge here in Denver and statewide, but we need more access to childcare that's accessible and affordable. So we're talking to the city about the possibility of using it for that. So we don't have a need right now for it to be, but if we had an additional surge and capacity, we want to make sure we're ready. But we feel very good at where we are right now in terms of both the budget and ability to manage the need to exist. Denver Mayor Mike Johnson, thank you. We appreciate it. You're back. Great to see you all. If you put aside 25 cents every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee maybe, a candle, or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to WashingtonPost.com/BF24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for 25 cents a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale, so it won't last long. WashingtonPost.com/BF24. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart, all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! Make someone's holiday unforgettable with a Visio 50" 4K Smart TV, now just $2.39.99 at Target. Experience stunning clarity that brings movie marathons to life like never before. With Watch3Plus built in, enjoy free live and on-demand TV right out of the box. Plus, dream all your favorite holiday songs with the iHeartRadio app. Whether it's a gift for the family or an upgrade to your own setup, this incredible value delivers 4K brilliance without breaking your holiday budget. Get your Visio 50" 4K Smart TV at Target for just $2.39.99 today.