Denver Lays Off 171 City Employees
The City of Denver began its layoffs of 171 workers yesterday to close a $200 million budget gap in the budget for next year, according to The Denver Post. In addition to those 171 employees, 665 vacant positions were eliminated, and 92 positions will be moved to other funding sources. The layoffs represent 1.6% of the workforce and are expected to only fill about half of that $200 million gap.
“This has been the hardest leadership task I’ve probably ever had to undertake,” Mayor Mike Johnston said last week. Johnston announced in May that the gap in next year’s budget is due declining sales tax revenue and increasing city expenses.
The Denver Post also reports that Scott Gilmore, the longtime manager of the city’s department of Parks and Recreation, was one of the unfortunate layoffs. “I got a call that basically said, ‘Thanks, but we don’t need you anymore,’ ” he told The Post. “I committed my life to this city.” Gilmore is one of eight Parks and Rec employees to be targeted by the layoffs.
According to Denverite, Gilmore’s wife, Denver City Councilmember Stacie Gilmore, was livid about her husband’s layoff and took it as a revenge move against her. “He is a 61-year-old man that only wanted to serve out the last four years of his time until he was 65,” says Councilmember Gilmore. “And because of his sassy, loudmouthed wife, he got let go.”
CBS News also reported that 10 Denver City Council members are getting ready to go on a retreat at a fancy mountain resort in Park City called Lone Rock Retreat for a whopping $26,000 total. The retreat has become such a bad look for the council that they tried to get their money back for the retreat and found that they couldn’t. For those keeping track, that’s about 37% of the average employee salary for the city. The very existence of such a retreat demonstrates that there were some other options that could have been looked into to cut the budget that didn’t involve laying off valued employees who dedicated their lives to this city.
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