Mayor and council hear department plans for staff reductions and reorganization ahead of budget

Denver—onsolidated City and County leaders heard presentations from three agency directors about personnel reductions, funding shifts and organizational changes during a weekly joint meeting of the mayor and City Council.

The presentations, from the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, Denver Parks and Recreation and the city—conomic development office, outlined how each department is limiting layoffs, reallocating vacant positions and reshaping programs to reduce budget impacts while trying to preserve core services ahead of the city budget finalization.

Department of Public Health and Environment director Karen McGowan told council members the department looked first to cuts in contract services and supplies, elimination of vacant positions and shifting staff to grant or other alternate funding sources before resorting to layoffs. "We moved 20 positions to alternate funding sources. We eliminated 15 vacant positions ... and we, eventually had to lay off 16 positions," McGowan said, describing the department s having roughly 312 positions in total. She said the department aimed to avoid eliminating entire programs and instead make strategic reductions across divisions to preserve legally mandated public-health functions.

McGowan said the changes will affect some routine services: the department will prioritize higher-risk or complaint-driven restaurant inspections and expects reduced capacity to respond to lower-level animal complaints such as loose dogs. She said the department is coupling the staffing changes with a nearly completed strategic plan and may propose further structural changes once that plan is reconciled with the staffing reductions.

Joel Clark, executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation, described steps to protect front-line park and recreation services while finding administrative efficiencies. Clark said the department has deliberately kept frontline employees and combined duplicated administrative units to improve service delivery. "Central control gives us a high level of control over when we're watering," Clark said, describing an irrigation system that reduces waste and allows staff to target maintenance. He also described consolidating permit phone lines and volunteer programs so one team handles permitting across facilities and operations can better match volunteer work to operational needs.

Clark noted Parks and Recreation—mploys roughly 700 full-time staff but relies on a large on-call workforce; he said the FTE-equivalent figure can be misleading because many on-call roles (seasonal or youth positions) are counted as job titles rather than full-time staff. The department said it has been managing vacancies for more than a year to preserve mission-critical positions and reduce hiring where possible.

The city—conomic development director Adeep Khan outlined an organizational restructuring intended to reduce top-heavy management, consolidate related business-facing services and align workforce development with business assistance and attraction. Khan said the guiding principle was "minimizing the reductions to staff" and seeking outside funds and partnerships before layoffs. He described consolidating neighborhood and business-facing work to reduce fragmentation and better support priority populations and places.

Council members raised concerns about the changes. Councilmember Jamie Torres asked specifically about neighborhood-focused teams (referred to in the meeting as NEST/NES work) and whether the shift under the business umbrella would reduce services in neighborhoods that have relied on neighborhood-equity and stabilization supports. Khan replied that "our services are not changing within the NES. It's about bringing more resources to the work, and they are also have been working more across city agencies to bring a consolidation on how we work with neighborhoods." Councilmember Daryl Watson and others asked staff to detail potential impacts during upcoming budget briefings and to consider implications for recently passed or pending ordinances that could increase investigation workloads.

Officials said more detailed budget numbers and formal proposals will be available during individual briefings and the city—udget hearings. Council members were told they would receive follow-up briefings this week and next and that more detailed analyses would be part of the formal budget book due next week.

The meeting proceeded to committee and executive-session items after the presentations, with staff and councilmembers planning further, topic-specific budget discussions in committee and briefings.