"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 headlines after it was revealed during a Denver City Council Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness committee meeting focusing on House1000 financials that officials 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 the auditor's office is currently in the "scoping process" to figure 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 Denver's shelter system has been audited before, his office released a report on homeless encampments just last year, and it didn't like what it saw.
"We touched on the spending of the encampments in the encampments audit report," O'Brien says, noting that his office determined that the city was not tracking expenses related to homeless encampments or sufficiently monitoring invoices and contract performance. "I'm hoping that 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 "sufficient monitoring system" for homeless encampment-related contractors as well as "sufficient 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 recent settlement agreement that outlined requirements for encampment removal and cleanups," the audit report notes. "The city cannot ensure people experiencing homelessness 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 Office 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 findings," 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 homelessness. Second, the fledgling homelessness advisory committee’s draft bylaws lack some important elements, which may compromise its ability to be effective."
Created in 2005 by the Hickenlooper administration, 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 office 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 official "Audit Plan" by the third Monday of October for the upcoming calendar year. While doing that, the office keeps what is known as a "risk tracking file." The file comprises interviews with public officials, 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 finger 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 investigation being weighed by the auditor's office.
"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."
Denver's shelter system found itself in the media spotlight late last month after two people were shot to death inside of a room at the city's converted DoubleTree Hotel shelter at 4040 Quebec Street. Year-to-date data shows that at least seven people have died at the property since the start of 2024, with it being run by the Salvation Army. City officials have stepped in to take over security and implement a safety plan, according to the mayor's office.
Security isn't much at the converted DoubleTree homeless shelter at 4040 Quebec Street, with just one person standing guard and a flimsy-looking metal detector.
Chris Perez
For O'Brien, taking a look at the shelter system as a whole 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 audit, you will see that it involves eight to ten different departments of city government, including the mayor's office. 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 definitely be analyzed 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 significant 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 Johnston 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, confirms 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 working to implement the recommendations."
Adds Fuja, "We’re aware of the shelter audit taking place and look forward to reviewing the findings."
