Denver city councilmembers had no idea how much the city has spent on its homelessness response until a briefing from the Department of Housing Stability on Tuesday.

The day before, two councilmembers voted against a $5 million contract to provide homelessness services, citing their frustration with Mayor Mike Johnston’s office for not providing a public-facing briefing on the costs of his campaign to curb homelessness.

As it turned out, the city is on track to spend $155 million between July 2023 and December 2024 — $65 million more than Johnston previously said it would cost, according to the Tuesday briefing.

Johnston has made getting homeless people out of the city’s streets his top priority. He vowed to transition 1,000 people by the end of 2023 and another 1,000 before next year.

Since passing the 2024 budget and approving contracts for homeless services, the City Council had never once received a briefing on where the total cost of the program stood. On Tuesday, Councilmember Amanda Sawyer, doing math on the fly during a committee meeting, said the city will spend about $155 million between July 2023 to December 2024. The program’s startup costs alone totaled $84 million, Sawyer said.

Members of the Department of Finance clarified how she came to that total, noting she used actual expenditures from 2023 and planned expenditures from 2024.

Stephanie Karayannis Adams, the city’s chief financial officer, said the amount is about that — but maybe “a little less.”

A day after the meeting, Sawyer said she is concerned that residents would miss out on programs because of the inconsistent and varied amounts the city must spend to fund Johnston’s “All in Mile High” — the administration’s name for the homelessness campaign.

In 2023, the city budgeted $45 million, followed by $39 million for 2024. Now the city is saying it needs to budget $57.5 million to fully fund the program, she said.

“I’m concerned about what programs our residents are going to give up paying the $57.5 million per year in ongoing costs,” Sawyer told The Denver Gazette. “I am also concerned that the mayor told us and everyone else that the budget was $45 million in 2023 and $39 million in 2024, but yesterday we learned that the startup costs were $84 million. That’s a huge disparity in costs.

Other members of the housing and finance departments told Sawyer that the amount budgeted for 2024 did not consider some “unforeseen” circumstances and expenses. Specifically, after multiple people were shot and killed at the hotel shelter, security was expanded and expenses grew.

These expenses were “largely one time” and included some state grants, according to Rachel Bardin, the budget manager at the Department of Finance.

“One of the challenges that I realized earlier about the $39 million from 2024 and what rolled over from ’23 is that I don’t think we had included the state grant in that 2024 plan,” she said.

That prompted Sawyer to reassert that the total cost will be $155 million. Later, Adams appeared to confirm the value is accurate.

Of the $155 million, the lion’s share totaling more than $100 million has gone to fund city purchases and leases of hotels for use as shelters, according to 9NEWS. That’s roughly the same amount the city said it is estimated to spend this year on its response to the illegal immigration crisis.

Other expenses included more $35 million on establishing “micro-communities” and $14 million on other miscellaneous expenses, 9NEWS reported.

The Department of Finance said it hasn’t reduced any other city budgets to fund Johnston’s campaign on homelessness. But the city had to make significant cuts and implement a hiring freeze to pay for the city’s $90 million response to the illegal immigration crisis.

To date, the city has received 42,323 immigrants at a cost of more than $71 million. While Denver has received state and federal funding, taxpayers are shouldering the bulk of the expenses.

Despite officials in El Paso Texas blaming onward travel for drawing immigrants to Denver, officials here have doubled down on its onward travel policy as part of the city’s new long-term strategy designed to pivot away from an emergency response. Under the city’s so-called “Newcomer Program,” immigrants receive at taxpayers’ expense six months of rental, food and utility assistance, a computer, prepaid cell phone and metro bus passes.

Denver taxpayers don’t care about where the money comes from — they only care about the final dollar amount, Sawyer said.

“They know we have two huge programs that we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on in 18 months and they aren’t getting their street paved or they aren’t getting their trash picked up on time or whatever else,” she said. “While we can think of the dollars in these programs in silos, that’s not the way our residents feel and they don’t care about the funding source.”

The Denver Gazette’s news partners 9NEWS contributed to this story.