DENVER, CO — Below is the prepared transcript of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s State of the City address, provided by the mayor’s office and delivered on Monday, July 22 at the Paramount Theater in downtown Denver.
MAYOR MIKE JOHNSTON’S 2024 STATE OF THE CITY TRANSCRIPT
I remember a year ago the first encampment I visited as mayor. The first man I talked to showed me the sores all over his back from being bitten by rats in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. He told me how hard it was to hold a job because when he left for the day to work a shift, he would come back and all of his stuff would be stolen from his tent. He talked about the people that would show up with a gun and take over his tent to turn them into a temporary home base to sell drugs before they disappeared again. He talked about how many times he had been pushed from block to block or place to place, each time forced to start all over again.
The crisis was not only affecting him, it was affecting all of us. Around the corner I went to visit businesses that were thinking of closing because the encampments had cut off the foot traffic and revenues were plummeting, we had a post office that had notified us they might close service because their staff couldn’t get access to the building due to encampments, we had hospitals that patients couldn’t get in and out of. On some blocks of downtown there were more tents than open businesses. And the encampments were magnets for crime, including a young Rangeview High School graduate and army veteran who got shot in the middle of the night trying to take care of his sister.