The Denver Post’s editorial board has made it official among his voting base: Mayor Johnston made a grave misstep cutting services directly impacting families to pay for Biden’s open borders and resulting migrant costs.
The bottom line is this: Denver is still out $28 million for sheltering, feeding, and shipping off tens of thousands of migrants to other cities paying for their bus and plane tickets.
Instead of using the $262 million in the city’s emergency reserves or even the $34 million in contingency funds to cover those costs, Johnston opted to make Denver taxpayers feel the pain just to recoup a measly $5 million of the city’s $4 billion budget.
From the Denver Post:
Johnston announced cuts last week to some of Denver’s core services that the public will feel most acutely — summer flower bed plantings, Parks and Recreation Center hours, and Department of Motor Vehicle hours. All told, the cuts will save $5 million to help the city cover the expenses of hotels for refugees through March.
We fear that making these cuts will result in a public backlash to the asylum seekers who have been shipped to Denver from the southern border at the very moment that these individuals need public support the most.
Johnston announced these cuts in a hissy fit of a staged moment to play presidential politics and blame Trump. His intent was to create a public backlash to Republicans in general.
But the Post is right. When working parents want to take their children swimming on the weekend and find the park closed, will they blame the mayor who fussed about cuts instead of using money he already had, the migrants, or an out-of-office president?
If a migrant crisis is not emergency enough to tap the city’s $262 million “emergency reserves,” then it’s not emergency enough to close parks on Sunday or cuts to make the DMV even more annoying than it already is.
Johnston is predicting a budget shortfall of $180 million for the next fiscal year, that’s four times more expensive than during the height of Biden’s chaotic open border policy for one year.
Of course, if a Democrat is not reelected president, it’s unlikely the open border crisis will continue.
But taxpayers are always appreciative when government can make cuts to save them money, so we encourage Johnston to keep looking for savings.
In the future, he should focus on budget trims to bureaucratic waste, not cuts that punish his constituency because Democrats’ open border policies are dramatically backfiring.