DENVER — As the number of migrants arriving in Denver stays around an all-time high, the city still doesn’t have a long-term plan for how to handle the strain it’s putting on resources.
The City of Denver knows its current plan to shelter migrants arriving from the southern border is unsustainable. Nearly a year after it first set out to come up with a better plan, it’s now starting over. After a $40 million contract with a security company didn’t work out, Denver is now looking at local nonprofits to help.
"I’ve been really proud of how the city has stepped up, but we’re doing it super reactionary. Very last minute," City Council President Jamie Torres said.
As of late, more than 200 migrants are arriving daily from the southern border. It’s gotten so hectic; city council now holds emergency meetings on the topic. Denver even asked the state to call in the national guard to help a couple weeks ago. That request was denied, but the help is still needed. Torres says the city will begin interviewing potential vendors next week for contracts to outsource everything from food to shelter to medical services.
"I am grateful that we’re actually able to step back, assess this a little bit differently, and work with partners that we know, and we trust," Torres said.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve already been down this road once this year. The first plan failed. Denver was set to sign a $40 million contract earlier this summer with an international security company called GardaWorld. Torres said Denver was being taken advantage of.
"We were getting taken for a ride by GardaWorld," Torres said. "$40 million for what they were proposing was a huge price tag. I didn’t get the sense that I knew exactly why we needed that."
GardaWorld went on to sign a $29 million contract with the City of Chicago a couple months later to shelter around double the number of migrants for $11 million less than what they were charging Denver.
"It seemed easy. And I think it was also probably an overreach in hope and anticipation that just one vendor could come in and solve the whole problem," Torres said.
That hope is gone now. The city now knows one company can’t handle everything. They’re looking to hire several local nonprofits and community groups to run different parts of the operation. It could cost even more than $40 million as the city goes through the submissions of their request for proposals, or RFP.
"The new RFP was tailored to potentially break up the work," Torres said. "Break up the work in both scale and depth. Some of our local nonprofits, some of our local providers, or even statewide providers, could potentially be vendors for a piece of that contract."
The city won’t be ready to pick the vendors until at least the end of December.
As 9NEWS has followed this story, the biggest question is always, 'Why are so more migrants arriving right now?' The answer the city is giving is that the state of Texas is sending buses from the southern border to Colorado, sometimes nearly a dozen every day. Denver says Texas isn’t giving them any heads up on when buses are coming or how many people are on board.
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