During an interview with ABC News on Thursday, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said that if the sanctuary city doesn’t get help from the federal government to deal with the financial impacts of the migrant influx in the city, the budget impact of dealing with migrants will be so large that they’ll have to cut the rest of their budget by about 10%, which would be a deeper cut than the cuts they made during the recession in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Johnston stated that he doesn’t know where he’d make cuts, but “We’re having that hard conversation with our departments and our city right now. We’d like to avoid that problem. We think if the federal government can take action on the supplemental budget that President Biden has proposed, that would be $14 billion that could help meet this need. And so, we want to avoid having to make those hard trade-offs and we want the federal government to take action. If they don’t, we’ll be looking at a $160 million impact. That’s 10% of our entire budget. So, if you imagine cutting all of your city agencies by 10%, and that would be historic cuts, larger than we’ve seen even in the recession times of the 2009 and 2010 cycle.”
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