Denver City Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore has resigned from her position as chair of the safety and housing committee, saying Tuesday that she doesn’t trust Mayor Mike Johnston or his administration to be forthright about his homelessness strategy.
Gilmore announced her intention at the end of a tense, untelevised meeting between most of the council members and officials from the mayor’s office. As they discussed the city’s emergency response to unsheltered homelessness and the influx of migrants from the U.S. southern border, some council members’ frustrations boiled over into pointed comments.
The third-term councilwoman chaired the Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness Committee, the first stop for many contracts tied to the new mayor’s plan to move 1,000 unhoused people into hotels, temporary micro-communities and other shelters by the end of the year.
“I feel like I’ve been gaslit in meetings — giving me bits and pieces, just enough to do a good dog-and-pony show for the cameras on Channel 8 to get things through to the full council,” Gilmore said, referring to Denver’s public access TV channel.
The city’s overlapping homelessness and migrant situations have resulted in confusion and frustration among council members, including about just who is in charge of the migrant response at city hall. The tensions came to the fore during the noontime meeting even before Gilmore made her announcement.
The mayor was not present. In a statement provided afterward by his office, Johnston said his staff was moving with urgency on both matters.
“We’ve been straightforward with council members by providing them with information as soon as we have it,” he said. “These situations change quickly and we will continue to inform council as we work toward our joint effort to support those most in need.”
Councilman Darrell Watson, whose District 9 stretches north and east from downtown, said during the meeting that he had learned from constituents and colleagues that morning about the city’s relocation of some migrant families without his knowledge. They had been staying in a hotel in his district and were moved to another shelter site to the east.
That happened even though some of those families already had enrolled their children in a nearby school.
“There’s no trust in how you’re managing the migrant crisis,” Watson told Johnston administration officials. “And it appears your administration isn’t talking to each other. I asked one person a question, and the other person doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Evan Dreyer, Johnston’s deputy chief of staff — who served in the same position under former Mayor Michael Hancock — took the blame for poor communication around the relocations. He is the point person on migrant response in the mayor’s office, he said.
Dreyer said after the meeting that the city was trying to make the most of its limited shelter resources with cold weather bearing down this weekend, and that’s what led to some of those relocations.
“Unbeknownst to us, some of those families had enrolled kids in schools nearby,” he said. “Some of them may have had jobs nearby. And so we didn’t know that we were disrupting that. So we have stopped that movement.”
Dreyer apologized to the council members during the meeting. But Gilmore, in particular, was not satisfied.
She said she no longer wanted to oversee the safety and housing committee’s agendas, which lately have been packed with contracts and agreements to meet the goals of Johnston’s House 1,000 initiative.
Gilmore said she suspected Johnston and his homelessness advisors had withheld information from her, especially when it came to potential shelter sites. She could be a more effective representative for her district, she said, if she focused on asking more questions about proposals as a committee member, rather than being in charge of running committee meetings. She represents far-northeast District 11.
On Wednesday morning, after the original version of this story was published, Gilmore led the committee’s 10:30 a.m. meeting all the way through before the announcement — made by council President Jamie Torres — that Gilmore would hand over responsibilities to a new chair. Torres said the committee’s vice chair, Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, would take over the chair position.
The committee’s agenda included the advancing of another micro-community contract and a briefing about the health impacts of cold weather on homeless people.
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