I spent the last three days in Denver with a hundred people from Portland: business owners, nonprofit directors, agency staff, and elected officials. It was the Portland Metro Chamber’s Best Practices trip, which takes Portland leaders to another city to learn what it does well.
I paid my own way and went to talk up consolidation. What I didn’t expect was for Denver to make the case better than I ever could.
Denver has been a consolidated city and county since 1902. That wasn’t the subject of any session. It came up anyway, over and over. By the end of the first day, it’d been mentioned so many times that a few people on the trip had started to wonder whether I’d put the speakers up to it. (I hadn’t.)
All the Levers
Mayor Mike Johnston spoke to us on Monday morning. The person interviewing him was Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, who was eager to learn everything he could about how Denver has done what Portland is still struggling to do on homelessness.
At one point, Mayor Johnston said (I’m paraphrasing from my notes) how much it helps that Denver is a consolidated city and county, because that gives him all the levers he needs to work on the problem.
According to Denver’s charter:
- The mayor appoints the sheriff, who runs the jails.
- He appoints the police chief.
- The heads of public health and human services answer to him.
- The city attorney, who prosecutes municipal offenses like trespassing, sits in his cabinet.
- He appoints county court judges from a nominating commission’s list.
He gave an example from his work on addiction. As he described it, the city set aside space in its jails for treatment. That answered judges who didn’t want to criminalize addiction and needed somewhere to send people other than a cell. He also mentioned a special drug court.
After the trip, I looked up what I could verify on my own. Roads to Recovery, a program run from the mayor’s office, moves people with addiction and mental health needs out of the criminal justice system and into treatment. When Denverite reported on it last year, the police chief said his officers bring the program in and treat arrest as a last resort. The sheriff said that people booked into jail are connected to a mental health practitioner and assessed by Denver Health. The program’s director said it had served 303 people, and that their arrests and days in jail had dropped. In March, Denver County Court opened a Recovery Court for drug cases and the low-level offenses that come with them, like trespassing and petty theft.
The police chief, the sheriff, and the program’s director all answer to the same mayor.
Denver’s count this January found 518 people sleeping outside, down 64% since 2023. Total homelessness in the city fell 12.5%, the first drop in nearly a decade.
The Same Levers, in More Hands
Portland has every one of those levers, but they’re split between two governments.
Mayor Wilson runs the police and the city’s shelters. The jails belong to a separately elected sheriff. Public health, behavioral health, and homeless services belong to the county. Much of what Denver did relies on tools that the mayor of Portland doesn’t have.
When those offices agree, things work. When they don’t, we get what we’ve had. Multnomah County’s most recent count, in January 2025, found 10,526 people homeless, about two-thirds of them without shelter. (The county counts differently than Denver does, so the numbers don’t line up exactly.) This year the city’s budget kept about $30.5 million that it used to send to the county for homeless services, and the two governments have argued in public over whose numbers are right.
I don’t think the people in those offices are the problem. We’ve built a structure that needs two governments to act as one and then leaves it to goodwill.
One Government to Deal With
Later that morning, a panel on Denver’s economic development strategy explained how a company chooses a city for an expansion. It starts with a handful of candidates. No single factor decides it, like who has the lowest taxes. The company weighs many things together. When two cities come out about even, the decision turns on things like an unpredictable political climate or extra red tape. The city with less of both gets the investment.
Denver gives that company one government to deal with: one mayor, one council, one budget, one set of priorities. Portland gives it a government with two heads, and the two don’t always agree. From the outside, that looks like unpredictability, whatever the merits of either side.
Multnomah County’s own consultants described the result in March. They mapped nearly 30 organizations working on economic development here, with none of them in charge of the strategy. Among the peer counties they compared, Denver had the largest gain in traded-sector jobs from 2019 to 2024, at 24.8%. Multnomah County lost 6.8%, the worst of the group. (I wrote about that report here.)
We Have What We Need
Consolidation isn’t a panacea. Denver faced a $250 million budget gap last year, and Mayor Johnston told us himself that the work on homelessness isn’t finished. But nobody I heard blamed any of that on being one government — quite the opposite!
My biggest takeaway from the trip is that Portland already has the resources to make big strides. A hundred of the people who make this region work got on a plane together to learn how to do it better. Mayor Keith Wilson, Council President Jamie Dunphy, County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, Metro Council President Juan Carlos Gonzalez, and Senate President Rob Wagner were all there, and heard these arguments themselves.
What we’re missing is a structure that gets everyone moving in the same direction.
Oregon already has the law that makes consolidation possible. The City-County Act is 55 years old, and it needs updating before Portland can use it well. The 2027 session is the time to do that, and I hope Senate President Wagner will take it up.
In November, voters will choose a new county chair and half of the city council. The Act lets the council and the county commission start the consolidation process themselves, by resolution, with no petition at all. When the moment is right, I’ll bring the new council and the new chair what I heard in Denver.
Denver’s mayor has all the levers. Portland has them too. Consolidation would put them in the hands of one government that answers for the results.