DENVER - The Denver mayor’s office and the city auditor’s office are in sharp disagreement over the findings of the latest audit on All In Mile High, the city’s homelessness initiative.
Mayor Mike Johnston launched All In Mile High in 2024 with the ambitious goal of ending unsheltered homelessness in Denver by the end of 2026.
The report released Thursday by City Auditor Timothy O'Brien's office credits the program with reducing unsheltered homelessness by 45% since 2023 — but that same report sharply criticizes the initiative’s financial transparency, planning and equity.
O’Brien’s office claims the mayor’s office underreported approximately $20 million in program expenses. Senior Auditor Jackson Rossmith said the review determined that from July 2023 through June 2025, the city spent an estimated $178 million on All In Mile High, with $20 million missing from the official cost reporting.
"$20 million in underreported costs is a lot of money, especially when the Mayor’s Office is cutting budgets,” O’Brien said in a release. “It is alarming there’s been no central oversight of spending and measurements of success keep changing.”
Meanwhile, the mayor's office said it stood by its reporting and called parts of the report "willfully misleading."
Auditor's office claims poor planning and reporting
The audit also said that the city measures and reports program outcomes was unclear.
"We could not verify the accuracy of the city’s reported statistics used to track the mayor’s goals of moving people indoors and into permanent housing because the city does not own this data," the auditor's office said in the release. According to the auditor, that data comes Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, a regional homelessness organization.
The mayor's office pushed back on that claim too and said its dashboard provides a "holistic view" of homelessness and various efforts across the city and county.
According to the report, the mayor’s office also failed to analyze data on race, ethnicity and income when deciding shelter locations — raising concerns about potential inequities in access. The mayor's office pushed back on that claim too, saying the claim was inaccurate.
The auditor’s staff noted additional issues, including:
- No formal needs assessment before launch
- Undefined roles and responsibilities
- Lack of resource evaluation for implementation
- Inconsistent communication
- Absence of documented policies and procedures
The audit recommended that in order to improve All In Mile High, the mayor’s office should:
- Conduct a needs assessment
- Create a management plan
- Document communication expectations
- Develop expense tracking policies and procedures
- Develop trainings on expense tracking
- Finalize contract-monitoring policies and procedures
- Review & revise emergency-related expense rules
- Revise public dashboard
- Develop an implementation plan
- Develop a monitoring and evaluation plan
- Develop shelter site selection procedures
- Develop & implement procurement procedures
Of the 12 recommendations, the mayor's office agreed with seven of them, including one to develop trainings on expense tracking.
You can read each recommendation and full responses to each here.
Mayor’s office pushes back
The mayor’s office's response said repeatedly that the report misstated key facts and, in some cases, is “willfully misleading.” In a statement, Johnston’s team thanked the auditor for recognizing progress made in reducing homelessness, but firmly defended its financial reporting.
We disagree with the Auditor’s findings and wholeheartedly stand by the accuracy of the finances we reported.
Every penny of our expenses is accounted for and not a dollar has been spent out of or over budget. The Auditor’s Office does not insist otherwise in this report. Instead, the disagreement appears to lie in which expenses should be counted toward All In Mile High.
Officials also pointed Denver7 to Thursday morning’s Independent Audit Committee meeting, where city representatives discussed questions raised during the audit process. City staff suggested that auditors often approached inquiries indirectly — and that they were not asked for detailed expenditure breakdowns until early 2025.
Terese Howard of the Housekeys Action Network, a group advocating for housing and rights for people experiencing homelessness, says the program needs to evolve.
“We need to reevaluate and change these programs in serious ways — keeping people in the program when they want to be and investing in better policies that aren’t just kicking people right back out to the streets,” Howard said.
You can read the full report below:
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