The Denver department charged with overseeing the city’s roads, infrastructure and waste management has lost key employees in the past six months as its work has come under scrutiny over recent missteps.
The departures from the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure — commonly referred to as DOTI — have raised concerns about a “brain drain” in the department, one former employee told The Denver Post.
DOTI, which is no stranger to the public spotlight because of its sprawling and complex work, has faced a backlash from the public on several fronts recently. Last fall, the agency came under fire — in a conflict that’s still unfolding — after officials made last-minute changes to a planned road diet along Alameda Avenue.
Then, in February, Denverites again lambasted the agency for not communicating clearly that it was converting stretches of two streets from one-way to two-way in East Denver, resulting in drivers going the wrong direction on portions of 13th and 14th avenues.
During that period, the department has lost several key leaders. Since September, DOTI’s head of traffic and safety, its head of capital construction projects, a senior engineering manager, its director of waterway resiliency, a deputy city traffic engineer, a senior city planner and an asset program manager have all resigned, according to former employees and individuals’ public LinkedIn accounts.
from last May indicates that five positions, or about 10% of the top leaders, have turned over in the past six months. With 50 resignations, the department overall has also lost more employees to voluntary departures than any other in the city since a round of city layoffs ordered in August by Mayor Mike Johnston.
In an interview, DOTI executive director Amy Ford said she didn’t see the recent departures as notable and said internal department data showed that turnover hadn’t been higher than in previous years.
“We have turnover throughout all levels of the organization,” she said. “Each of them had their own reasons. … I don’t see any concerns with that.”
She said she also didn’t believe the latest public scrutiny of DOTI’s work was indicative of the department struggling.
“We touch virtually every aspect of individuals’ lives here in Denver,” she said. “This is sort of the nature of the beast.”
The Post had planned to publish a version of this story Tuesday that included comments on the record by a former DOTI employee who is critical of DOTI’s leadership and direction. The Post delayed publication after that person requested Monday night that they no longer be named. Ford had contacted a family member, who is still a staff member at DOTI, about this story and asked for the former employee’s contact information.
The former employee interpreted the outreach by Ford as potentially threatening toward the family member’s employment, but Ford told The Post that was not her intention. The Post agreed to remove the former employee’s name from the story at that employee’s request.
That person, who was one of the core team members who left DOTI, had told The Post that despite wanting to spend the rest of their career with the agency, they decided to leave because of its disorder. The person also described a frustrating workplace at DOTI, with both a lack of clear direction from city and department leaders and frequent overreach into managers’ work. The former employee said the department has recently lost a lot of institutional knowledge as employees leave for other jobs.
“It was kind of like: What direction are we heading?” the former employee said. “Itap really hard, when you have dysfunction at the top, to have an organization that understands what direction to go and who to listen to.”
A handful of other former DOTI employees contacted by The Post echoed those concerns but declined to comment for this story, with some citing ongoing relationships with city government in their new jobs as their reasoning.
In a statement responding to the former employees’ concerns, Ford said DOTI had undergone “quite a bit of change” in the past few years.
”What could be noted as over involvement by some was also part of an intentional refocus, in consultation with the team throughout, on how DOTI was delivering its programs well,” she said. “We will not apologize for how we have continued to shape the organization, alignment that in some cases was necessary, and are working with team members who can adjust, respond and be flexible with change as well as continue to ensure that DOTI is delivering for the people of Denver.”
With more than 1,100 employees, DOTI is among the city’s largest agencies. Its workers keep Denver’s streets plowed during snowstorms, collect trash and recycling, design and maintain roads, and — as of a 2022 citywide vote — implement a voter-approved sidewalk maintenance program. The vast majority of that work happens without much notice from residents.
This year, the department’s budget is about $890 million, including grants, special revenue funds and capital improvements. About $114 million of that spending comes from the city’s general fund budget, accounting for about 7% of the city’s general fund spending this year.
Trouble after 13th and 14th conversions
During the time DOTI has lost those employees, it has faced swells of public criticism in response to street projects.
When the department decided to change traffic on 16-block stretches of 13th and 14th avenues in the East Colfax neighborhood from one-way to two-way, the goal was to improve safety along the corridors, between Yosemite and Quebec streets. But when workers began to carry out those changes in mid-February, many drivers were confused.
Nearby residents said they didn’t know the change was happening and that the only indication was added signs that said the streets were now two-way traffic, . DOTI, which wanted the road to match other local streets, initially didn’t add yellow double center-lane striping.
Drivers appeared unaware of the change, as many of them traveled the wrong way in left-hand lanes that were now reserved for the opposite direction of traffic.
After five members of the City Council sent a letter to Ford and the mayor’s office, demanding to know how the confusion happened, Ford acknowledged that her team didn’t do enough to alert drivers about the changes.
“DOTI recognizes that our communication around this project was not at the level it should have been. We are working on correcting that to prevent it from happening in the future,” she wrote in a Feb. 26 letter to the council.
Ford said the department had posted digital signs in the area and had met with local neighborhood groups about the changes in 2025. She said her office failed to follow up with the specific timing of the change and “missed an opportunity” to use social media to alert motorists.
“We believe our mistake in this particular instance around implementation and communication stemmed from our excitement to get the safety improvements in place and, in the process, we severely underestimated the complexity of it,” she wrote.
Two former DOTI employees, who requested anonymity because of their new employers’ relationships with the city, told The Post that DOTI was a workplace that struggled to make decisions amid bureaucracy and a lack of vision from top city leadership. During his 2023 campaign and most of his time in office, Johnston’s focus has largely been on homelessness and other initiatives outside transportation.
Allen Cowgill, a member of since 2021, said the latest public focus on the department is heightened compared to previous years and pointed to the fact that one board member resigned over the changes to the Alameda road diet.
DOTI initially developed a plan that would have eliminated one of the street’s four lanes between Pearl and Franklin streets, leaving just one through lane in each direction and a third one for left-hand turns, in an attempt to slow traffic along the corridor. But months after the agency sent out construction notices, city officials announced they were changing that design. Jaime Lewis, a disability rights activist, resigned soon after that decision, saying he was noticing a trend of DOTI changing community-vetted plans at the last minute.
Now, the city says it will demonstrate the road options before making permanent changes.
“Advisory board members have been more upset in the last year than I’ve ever seen them,” Cowgill said.
During the citywide layoffs last summer, DOTI laid off 31 people, amounting to a combined 170 years of experience. Six of the laid-off employees had more than 10 years of experience, according to a list of laid-off employees obtained through a records request by The Post and other media outlets after repeated denials by the city.
One of those laid-off employees was Earl Jackson, who was the chief financial officer for the organization. He told The Post in August that he volunteered to lose his job because he was already considering leaving the department after years of “chaos.”
“When we get on the other side of this and the dust settles, is that the type of organization that you want to work for? I asked myself that question, and it was a resounding ‘no,’ ” he said at the time.
Councilman asks: Is DOTI too big?
During a recent council briefing about the Alameda project changes, Councilman Chris Hinds asked Ford whether the department may just be too big of an agency to accomplish its mission.
“No,” was all Ford responded.
Hinds said in an interview he was still curious about that question but added that it would take a change in the city charter to break the department’s duties into smaller chunks. Voters in 2019 approved the renaming of the Department of Public Works to the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure to put an emphasis on its transportation functions, but that change didn’t affect its funding.
In her interview with the Post, Ford said she didn’t see a need for any kind of structural change at DOTI.
“I think there is always room for us to continue to look at how we improve on how we do everything,” she said.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office also rejected the idea that the department needed to make major changes.
“DOTI does a fantastic job of carrying out core city services and has a strong track record of delivering complex projects on time and in keeping the community informed,” Jon Ewing said.
He added that the 13th and 14th conversion problems were an “unfortunate and rare situation” and that DOTI had learned from it.
Ford has been in the executive director position since Johnston appointed her following his election in 2023. The pay for Ford’s role, along with the rest of his appointed executive directors, has been frozen since 2022 and can be raised only through a vote of the council.
Last May, Johnston tried to propose raises for those positions but ultimately withdrew that request amid a budget crisis. If that had been approved, Ford’s salary would have gone to $240,676 from $195,219.
