DENVER — The weeds this time of year grow fast, too fast for the City of Denver to keep up with mowing them.
Denver’s parks are overrun with weeds and the city's budget cuts are helping them grow. Denver Parks and Recreation Department is struggling to hire people fast enough to mow the grass after they put a pause on new hires earlier this year.
Back in February, Mayor Mike Johnston announced millions of dollars in cuts to the Parks and Recreation Department to help pay for migrant services. The city didn't fill some seasonal and contract jobs at the time.
"We will start to have to green light a set of hard decisions about budget reduction across the city to meet those costs that we know will continue to arrive," Johnston said at a press conference on Feb. 9.
"We will have on-call workers that we won’t hire for the summer that we would’ve hired otherwise. So, this does reduce new hires that we would’ve brought on, and that impact is real," Johnston added.
Parks and Recreation, along with the Department of Motor Vehicles, were the first two departments to have their budgets cut in February. Those were the most public facing budget cuts, and there were a lot of outcries from the public after they were announced. The final budget cuts announced this spring ended up being far less than originally anticipated and were aimed to be less impactful, or at least less public facing.
In April, that decision was reversed, and the budget cuts were redistributed.
"All of our parks and rec programming will be restored for the summer and the fall," Johnston announced on April 10.
But we’re still seeing the impact in our parks.
“We currently have nearly 100 open positions which is impacting regular mowing schedules typical during this time of year,” Denver Parks and Recreation told us.
Even though the budget cuts were scrapped, the department can’t hire people fast enough to mow the grass.
The city says “the timing of recruitment” for jobs like grass mowers was affected by the budget cuts at the beginning of the year. They pointed to a list of dozens of parks and recreation jobs still open for the summer months.
Denver hopes to be fully staffed in that department by the end of next month. At that point, the city says it can get back to a more regular mowing schedule.
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