4 APRIL 11-17, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Down for the Count AUDITOR TIM O’BRIEN IS REVIEWING DENVER HOMELESS SHELTER EXPEN- DITURES AND ACCOUNTABILITY. BY C HRIS PEREZ An audit of Denver’s shelter system and how much the city is actually spending on housing the homeless is in full swing, according to the Denver Auditor’s Offi ce, which hopes to have things wrapped up by late July or early August. “I don’t know if they’ve ever been audited. I know they haven’t been audited since I’ve been the auditor,” says Tim O’Brien, who was elected to the independent post in 2015. “One of the biggest questions is, how much are we spending on it?” Last week, the City of Denver made head- lines after it was revealed during a Denver City Council Safety, Housing, Education & Homelessness committee meeting focusing on “House1000 Financials” that offi cials had only spent $10.3 million of the $46 million they expected to spend on the homeless — when council had already approved more than $110 million in expenditures. So where is all that money going? “Will that be included in the audit report? Absolutely,” O’Brien says. “We have access to that information, and we will ask for that information.” According to O’Brien, the city shelters audit began in late 2023, and his offi ce is currently in the “scoping process” to fi gure out what it will cover and what needs the most attention. “When we scope an audit, we start very wide,” O’Brien explains. “For example, I’ll use the Department of Transportation & Infrastructure: We couldn’t do an audit of just the Department of Transportation & Infrastructure; it’s too big and there’s too many components to it. But say that is the assignment: ‘Go audit transportation.’ What we would do is we would look at budget documents, we’d look at ordinances, we’d look at information that we would be able to get out of the press — old stories from the press, new stories from the press. We’re trying to get a feel for what parts of a given operation are at risk of not achieving the objectives that it should be achieving. “We narrow it down so we can keep it as brief as possible and still be meaningful to the administration and to the public,” he adds. While O’Brien doesn’t recall that Den- ver’s shelter system has been audited before, his offi ce released a report on homeless encampments just last year, and it didn’t like what it saw. “We touched on the spending of the en- campments in the encampments audit report,” O’Brien says, noting that his offi ce determined that the city was not tracking expenses related to homeless encampments or suffi ciently monitoring invoices and contract perfor- mance. “I’m hoping the records are better when it comes to the shelters audit,” he adds. According to the encampments report, Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration did not have a formal process to track costs for homeless- and encampment-related efforts between 2019 and 2022. The city also lacked a “suffi cient monitoring system” for homeless encampment-related contractors as well as “suffi cient procedures and reliable data to ensure people experiencing homelessness who live in unauthorized encampments are treated equitably and lawfully” in Denver. “While the city meets most requirements overall, it is not fully compliant with a re- cent settlement agreement that outlined requirements for encampment removal and cleanups,” the audit report notes. “The city cannot ensure people experiencing home- lessness have equitable access to services or their stored personal belongings.” O’Brien also points to the 2019 Denver’s Road Home audit followup, which looked into the type and level of funding that Denver Human Services and the Offi ce of Economic Development used on homeless services and prevention between 2014 and 2018, along with the “effectiveness of Denver’s Road Home’s collaboration and coordination with other key groups within the city.” It was a followup to an audit done years earlier by Auditor Dennis Gallagher and “revealed two fi ndings,” according to the 2019 report. “First, gaps exist in Denver’s Road Home’s collaborative efforts and staff resources that impede, among other things, the division’s ability to address homeless- ness. Second, the fl edgling homelessness advisory committee’s draft bylaws lack some important elements, which may compromise its ability to be effective.” Created in 2005 by the Hickenlooper ad- ministration, Denver’s Road Home was touted as a division of DHS that would work to “end” homelessness in ten years, in accordance with a federal mandate. These efforts now fall under the Department of Housing Stability (HOST), after the auditor’s offi ce determined the original program was a failure. “The whole focus and resources dedicated to the homeless problem have changed dramatically since Denver’s Road Home,” O’Brien notes. The city auditor is required to produce an offi cial “Audit Plan” by the third Monday of October for the upcoming calendar year. While doing that, the offi ce keeps what is known as a “risk tracking fi le.” The fi le com- prises interviews with public offi cials, such as the mayor, and other information related to whatever has prompted a proposed audit. “We meet with all the department heads,” O’Brien tells Westword. “The question for those sort of insiders is, ‘What is it that keeps you up at night? What do you worry about? Where can we be your eyes and ears?’ Because if you’re in charge of something like Public Safety, there’s 3,000 or 4,000 employees in Public Safety. For the executive director to have his or her fi nger on the pulse all the time is an unreasonable expectation.” Then there’s the community aspect of the audit. “We know what’s going on in the community by way of the media,” O’Brien says. “The media plays an important role in oversight of government.” Another vital piece to the puzzle is how other municipalities around the country are handling similar situations and what Denver residents think about the areas of investiga- tion being weighed by the auditor’s offi ce. “I have been to well over 300 registered neighborhood organizations’ meetings since I’ve been [auditor],” O’Brien says. “We get emails that will come in, we’ll get texts, we’ll get phone calls — whatever it is, we listen. And if we start to hear the same concern in multiple places around Denver, we’re going to be thinking through this risk-assessment process of attaching audit resources to it.” For O’Brien, taking a look at the city shelter system has been a long time coming. “The homelessness issue has been front and center for a while,” he says. “We started out looking at things like affordable housing, because if you keep people in their house, they’re not going to become homeless. We looked at affordable housing with the audit on the encampments. If you look at that au- dit, you will see that it involves eight to ten different departments of city government, including the mayor’s offi ce. It’s a complex subject, and it touches a lot of lives.” With the encampments audit, one thing that stood out to O’Brien was how much wasn’t tracked by the city. “The amount of time, for example, that the police department would spend on an encampment sweep isn’t recorded,” he says. “I mean, that is a cost to the taxpayer. Also, you wouldn’t have the same ten people doing a sweep of an encampment, and some people would keep better records than others, and some people would keep no records...and then tracking the expenses was not done well at all. But again, that’s under a different administration.” Issues such as this will defi nitely be ana- lyzed during the shelters audit, he says, taking a “sort of a comprehensive-cost approach to it.” O’Brien calls homelessness one of the biggest issues facing Denver today. “I think it’s a signifi cant problem,” he says. “And now we have the migrant problem layered on top of it. I think Denver is doing a good job, but is it enough?” One good sign, O’Brien says, is how John- ston and his administration have been using his encampments audit report as a guide for how to handle situations involving the homeless. “In a conversation with the mayor, I found out that his team is using it as a sort of ‘go by’ to get the job done,” O’Brien notes. “So that’s very encouraging.” Johnston’s press secretary, Jordan Fuja, confi rms that the mayor is using O’Brien’s recommendations as a guide. “Our team has reviewed the encampment audit, and we’ve been using it to inform all of our encampment responses,” she says. “We are currently work- ing to implement the recommendations.” Adds Fuja, “We’re aware of the shelter audit taking place and look forward to re- viewing the fi ndings.” Email the author at [email protected]. NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The DoubleTree Hotel at 4040 Quebec Street is currently being used as a city-run homeless shelter. CHRIS PEREZ
