Hancock Administration Plans to Hire Homeless Encampment Program Executive

Mayor Michael Hancock plans to hire a staffer who will be responsible for managing the City of Denver’s response to homeless encampments.

“What we’re trying to do now is make it more formal and put some intentionality around it and give it a greater element of accountability, transparency and responsibility,” says Evan Dreyer, Hancock’s deputy chief of staff who notes that he’s been overseeing the city’s approach to homeless encampments in recent years in a “very informal way.”

The city has extended the application deadline for the new Homeless Encampment Program Executive position to 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, March 13. The person hired for the job will have a salary between $78,718 and $129,885 annually; the position is a mayoral appointment, so the role will end in July 2023, when the term-limited Hancock leaves office.

The Hancock administration began thinking about the need for such a staffer last fall, when a vote to extend a controversial contract with Environmental Hazmat Services, the contractor that assists the city during encampment sweeps, came before Denver City Council.

“They were asking all the right questions about accountability and transparency,” Dreyer says. Councilmembers Jamie Torres and Candi CdeBaca both voted against the extension. And while the rest of council approved the contract deal, members asked for more oversight of the sweeps, particularly regarding the behavior of EHS contractors toward the people who were being cleared out.

The person who fills this new role will not only oversee the work of EHS, but will be responsible for coordinating the work of the various city agencies involved in homeless sweeps, such as the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure and the Department of Public Health and Environment.

“I do think the City could benefit from more coordination between City agencies that conduct sweeps/clean-up activities – so from that perspective, I think it could be helpful to bring all the agencies together,” says Cathy Alderman of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “However, I’d like to see the role more focused on homelessness resolution versus ‘encampment management.’ At the very least, I think the person selected for the role should have some social work, mental/behavioral health and trauma-informed experience to try to ensure that this position doesn’t just become the Lead Enforcer of the camping ban.”

According to Dreyer, the eventual hire will have to be a “strong leader” who also “brings a deep sense of humanity, compassion, care, and will treat everybody with dignity – everyone from people who are unsheltered neighbors who are living on the streets to housed neighbors and all of the city employees and partners that are working on this.”

Tom Luehrs of the St. Francis Center says that the position will be most effective if the mayoral appointee works on finding more safe-camping sites for people experiencing homelessness. That is “what is working right now,” he explains, “and the services, cleanliness, bathrooms, showers, regular meals, and people feeling respectful and not having to move at a moment’s notice. If this person/position helped find some new/additional locations for SOS sites, I think that would improve the overall ‘campsite’ issue.”

There are currently three official safe-camping sites, which offer a centralized connection to sanitation and services for residents, who live in ice-fishing tents: a parking lot at Regis University, a Denver Health-owned parking lot at 780 Elati Street, and a Denver Human Services parking lot at 3815 Steele Street.

The Hancock administration plans to fill the role sometime this spring, and the appointee will report directly to Dreyer.

“I worry that it’s also just a protective measure for politics. I don’t think what we’re doing right now on encampments is particularly successful,” says Torres, who’s concerned that the hiring could insulate the mayor from criticism regarding the city’s approach to encampments. “Pushing people from one block to another, it’s absolutely insanity.”

And this isn’t the city’s only new job in the area. In late 2019, Hancock established the Department of Housing Stability, which focuses solely on housing and homelessness. Britta Fisher, HOST executive director, is now hiring a director of unsheltered homelessness. “We’re really focused on our goal of reducing unsheltered homelessness by half over the next five years,” says Fisher.

HOST will base its estimate on the number of unsheltered homelessness on stats generated later this year from the 2022 Point in Time count, an annual survey conducted on a single night every January. Since the 2021 Point in Time count conducted did not include unsheltered individuals because of concern about COVID spread, the last Point in Time count to include unsheltered numbers was from 2020. That year, the count indicated that 996 people were experiencing unsheltered homelessness within Denver city limits.

HOST expanded Denver’s Road Home from a team of seven people to an entire department, complete with more than 38 positions dedicated to homelessness resolution, plus a director and seven staff members devoted to strategy, policy and data. The salary range for the new director of unsheltered homelessness is $91,816 to $151,496.

Fisher’s new hire will add to that roster, and will likely work closely with the mayoral appointment. “I think anybody who has that acumen for partnerships will have to work on how to build trust and understand what shared goals and ideas may be available to work from,” Fisher says.