Teamsters Union organizer Latoyia Terry leads chants as Denver County employees picket outside the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Building before a Career Service Board hearing. June 18, 2025.
Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Nearly 200 Denver government employees are set to lose their jobs starting Monday as the city makes sweeping layoffs to close a major budget deficit.
The city announced 171 workers would be laid off. In addition, 665 open positions will be eliminated and nearly 100 other jobs will be transferred to other funding sources. The layoffs and job closures represent 7.6 percent of the workforce budgeted in the general fund.
City workers have been bracing for layoffs since May, when Mayor Mike Johnston announced the city faced a $250 million budget deficit for 2025 and 2026. The city will notify the affected employees by the end of Tuesday, and no further reductions are anticipated this year.
The scale of the layoffs is smaller than some anticipated. Union leaders speculated that up to 4,000 workers could be laid off.
It isn’t immediately clear how the layoffs will be distributed among city departments. The layoffs are targeted at the roughly 11,000 employees whose salaries are paid by the general fund — which includes sanitation workers, police, firefighters, parks workers, city planners, technology staff and others.
The city’s budget has been struggling amid an economic slowdown, with its slowest revenue growth in more than a decade. Sales and use taxes have not grown this year — and that revenue represents more than half of the general fund budget. At the same time, salary costs are growing, and the city has spent heavily on housing and immigration responses.
Mayor Mike Johnston’s administration anticipated slower revenue growth, but didn’t expect such a dramatic change, the mayor said in a recent interview with CPR News and Denverite.
“We predicted half of this slowdown, not the other half. So we already started taking corrections a year ago to say, we think the costs of the city are growing and we think the revenues of the city are shrinking,” he said.
The city has also ordered most employees to take unpaid furlough days, and departments will have to find additional ways besides layoffs to cut costs, too.
“We’ll make hard cuts to make sure we have government that works better but costs less,” Johnston said earlier.
The layoffs are not expected to affect employees at independent agencies like Denver International Airport, which have their own freestanding budgets. But some of those protected employees have still been ordered to take furlough days in solidarity.
The city expects to save about $100 million per year with the changes, covering about half of next year’s budget gap. About 70 percent of the general fund is spent on personnel, making it difficult to reduce spending without cutting jobs or benefits.
For comparison, in 2021, the city budgeted savings of about $39 million by holding open 400 jobs. But the city hasn’t laid off workers since the Great Recession, with former Mayor John Hickenlooper cutting close to 200 jobs in 2009.
The city expects to announce more details of the layoffs, including a department-level breakdown, later this week.
How the layoffs will work:
Affected employees will stop work on the same day they get the layoff notice. Notices will be sent out starting Monday and will continue through Tuesday.
All affected workers will be given 30 days of pay and benefits after they are notified. They will receive medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sept. 30.
Employees will also get severance packages based on years of service, ranging from two weeks to eight weeks. Employees with more than 15 years of service would get the maximum severance.
Employees within 90 days of retirement eligibility will be permitted to retire with benefits if they are laid off.
The threat of layoffs has galvanized city workers.
Some city workers have lawyered up, with law firms offering to represent laid off employees in potential lawsuits.
Unhappy employees also pushed back against the city’s Career Service Board changing the criteria for layoffs, which reduced protections for senior employees. During public meetings, lawyers with the City Attorney’s Office warned city officials that mass layoffs could end up costing the city heavily in legal fees.
The layoffs have also drawn the ire of Denver City Council members Sarah Parady and Shontel Lewis. In a press release and a letter to Lewis’ constituents, they criticized the city’s lack of transparency about layoffs and challenged the mayor to find alternative solutions before resorting to layoffs.
Denverite reporter Kyle Harris contributed to this report.