Denver does such an insufficient job of tracking how much money it spends on enforcing its camping ban, cleaning up homeless encampments and conducting street outreach to unhoused people that the city auditor’s office says it had to do its own math.

Using numbers provided by 10 city agencies, Denver Auditor Tim O’Brien and his staff found that from the beginning of 2019 through June 2022, the city spent an estimated $13.65 million responding to encampments, including $8.18 million on outreach and $2.49 million to regularly clean up, or sweep, those settlements and move residents on to other places.

But O’Brien emphasized, as part of a report released Thursday by the Denver Auditor’s Office, that the estimate is likely well below actual spending because it doesn’t include figures from the Denver Police Department and most agencies did not provide a full 3½ years of expenses.

During the audit period, city officials performed 1,400 encampment assessments.

“Members of the community on every side of this issue have been asking for tracked expenses for a long time now,” O’Brien said in a news release. “Although defining encampment response expenses is complicated, it’s unacceptable that agencies are still not working toward a clear plan to address this.”

Greatly improving financial tracking is just one leg of the recommendations in the auditor’s report on Denver’s response to homeless encampments.

Other recommendations included:

Making sure unhoused people have equitable access to their belongings that are confiscated and stored after encampments are swept
Analyzing staffing for encampment responses to make sure it’s sufficient to meet the city’s goals
Improving the city’s draft plan for its encampment response program to better lay out what is expected of each agency involved

“I hope Denver’s next mayor — as well as both current and incoming city leaders — will see this as the roadmap for how to start tracking expenses and better serve our communities in the future,” O’Brien, himself fresh off an election win, said in Thursday’s news release.

The city agreed to implement all 36 recommendations laid out in the audit report, according to O’Brien’s office.

In a response letter sent to the Auditor’s Office earlier this month, Matthew Wilmes, the city’s encampment response program executive, committed to steps including assessing whether the storage facility the city uses for property confiscated during sweeps should be moved, among dozens of other changes.

The city has agreed to implement upgrades to its expense tracking by the end of this year.

“The Unauthorized Encampment Response Program will work alongside city agencies to identify which expenses should be included, the methodology, and calculations that need to be used when tracking encampment response expenses,” Wilmes wrote.

The existence of the Unauthorized Encampment Response Program itself is evidence the city already has taken steps since the summer of 2022 to better centralize and standardize its approach to encampments, officials said. In its own news release Thursday, Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration described encampment cleanups as “important work” meant to improve public health and safety while simultaneously connecting unhoused people with resources.

Evan Dreyer, Hancock’s deputy chief of staff, acknowledged the administration could have done a better job tracking expenses and a better job responding to the request for information for the audit, at a committee hearing with O’Brien and other officials Thursday morning.

In his response to those findings, he focused on the proportion of spending as a sign the city is working to help people living on the street. According to the auditor’s breakdown, 60% of the trackable spending was going to outreach, or efforts to get people living in encampments connected with services, while 22% was going to enforcement and 18% to cleanups.

“The fact that we are spending most, almost two-thirds, of resources, as analyzed in this audit, on outreach is a positive,” Dreyer said.

The audit found that the city at times has violated its 2019 settlement agreement governing encampment enforcement. Those violations included city teams throwing away personal property without sufficient notice or without keeping it for the required 60 days after it was confiscated at an encampment.

Andy McNulty, a civil rights attorney who helped negotiate that agreement on behalf of unhoused people who sued the city, said he was not surprised by those findings, which he characterized as the city clearly breaking the law.

In McNulty’s view, the lack of clarity around spending is by design.

“It’s clear that those in power don’t want the public to know how much money they’re wasting pushing people block to block rather than engaging in solutions that would solve homelessness,” he said, like building housing.

The Denver Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon about why it did not provide the auditor’s office with spending estimates. The department told the office that it did not track officer expenses dedicated to encampment enforcement work separately, according to O’Brien’s news release.

The audit report comes a week after a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that regularly sweeping homeless encampments could lead to a nearly 25% increase in deaths for unhoused people who use injection drugs over a 10-year period in major cities including Denver.

Both Kelly Brough and Mike Johnston, the two candidates facing each other in the city’s mayoral runoff, have pledged to end unsanctioned camping in Denver by providing people living in encampments with sanctioned places to go with on-site services. But both have said they would enforce the city’s camping ban.

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