Mayor Denver Mike Johnston gave a state speech

Mayor Mike Johnston urged Denver people to embrace “educated hopes” as an antidote to the challenges faced by the largest city in Colorado in the midst of a chaotic national political environment during his annual speech in the city of Monday night.

“That is our dream of the city of Queen who is an adult prematurely, where we do not believe in ‘we can’t.’ We don’t believe in ‘impossible,’ “said the mayor. “The place where we turn to each other, and not each other. The place where we believe in working to build something bigger than us, including all of us and last longer than all of us.”

He threw an expression full of hope as the opposite dynamics of the “helplessness learned,” or fear that whatever someone did, it would not make a difference.

Johnston, which last Thursday, marked two years since it was inaugurated to the office, touching homeless, immigration, the revival of the center of Denver City – with an empty office space of 7 million square feet – and the role of the city in overcoming climate change. Also, to find out the nod in the audience: The future of Broncos in Denver.

“Yes, we will get a long -term agreement to keep Denver Broncos here in Denver,” the 50 -year -old mayor to several hundred people gathered for a 40 -minute speech at the Seawell Ballroom in the Denver Performing Art Complex. Unlike the last years, the usual day speech delivered at the evening event.

Johnston has scored success in his first two years. The homeless streets have declined in the visibility under his term of office, the result of a large -magnitude protection effort. On Monday, the Mayor said that the data point had fallen 45% since 2023 in Denver – “The largest multi -year decline in unprotected by any city in American history.” (However, homelessness as a whole has increased.)

“We have closed every big camp in the city, and reopen the sidewalk for pedestrians and business,” Johnston said. “We have moved 7,000 people from the streets and moved 5,000 people to permanent housing.”

But there is a layoff of city workers in the near future – the first in 15 years – amid the lack of a budget of $ 250 million anticipated. Johnston talked about several other fields of challenges for the city during his speech, said that the efforts so far have not been “quite good.”

“We still have business owners in Broadway who do not feel safe to have staff members near the store and walk to their cars after work, and that is not good enough,” Johnston said. “We still have teachers who leave school and our nurses leave our hospital to move home to Midwest, because they are unable to live in this city anymore, and it’s not good enough.”

The mayor said the city was on the right track when it came to public safety, noting that the level of Denver’s murder this year had dropped 46%.

“Adjusting the population, the level of our murder this year is the lowest in the last decade,” he said. “The theft of the car fell by more than 50%, and the theft of the catalytic converter has dropped more than 90%.”

He credited some of the improvements in better interaction between the police and residents.

“We have officers out with a knock, building relationships with our neighbors with trust patrols,” Johnston said. “And in the midst of turbulent political periods, our officers have defended freedom of speech and maintaining peace in more than 200 demonstrations -both large and small for the past two years.”

Some are inseparable from reviving the center of Denver City, which was beaten during Pandemi Covid-19 and then had to bear the Multiyear 16th Street Mall reconstruction project, was improving the city licensing system, said Johnston.

The developer has complained for many years that the complicated construction licensing process in this city takes too long, adding costs to projects. In April, Johnston signed his first executive order, creating a Denver licensing office.

“We took a process that used to take three years and promised: Your permission will be done in 180 days or we will return up to $ 10,000 in fees,” he said.