Denver City Council on Monday delayed the reimbursement of $38.6 million in federal emergency dollars that would have been repaid to the city government, the airport and Denver Health and Hospital Authority for virus-related spending.

Denver City Councilman Chris Hinds led the effort to block the grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, citing transparency issues and the fact that Denver Health executives received major bonuses one week after hospital front-line workers were asked to take pay cuts. The only other member to join him was Candi CdeBaca.

“It’s imperative and, frankly, our charge to ensure that there are three functioning branches of government,” Hinds said Monday night. “I would say, obviously, we’ve demonstrated a lot of work with the executive branch: We’ve given additional authority to the mayor through our emergency declaration. We’ve bypassed the typical committee process with numerous direct files, and the mayor has asked us to reduce our budget.”

But Hinds’ main problem with the resolution, he said, was that it was a “late filing” by the Hancock administration at the last minute.

“It’d be easier for us to digest the 71 pages if we had a few more days’ notice than yesterday,” he said.

City officials received notice of the funding award from the state on April 21, according to the mayor’s office, but the agreement was not finalized until Thursday after the council’s filing deadline had passed.

Because the Hancock administration did not file the resolution in time, the council needed a unanimous vote to suspend council rules to allow the late filing on the agenda for the meeting, which Hinds and CdeBaca blocked from happening. 

“This isn’t the time for irresponsible grandstanding,” Hancock spokesman Mike Strott said in a statement. “These reimbursement dollars are completely unrelated to the issue these two Council members chose to base their votes on tonight. At a time when we need all possible funding to protect our community and serve our most vulnerable residents, this is an incredibly short-sighted decision to delay these funds from being used in our response to this global pandemic.”

Councilman Kevin Flynn – among several other members, including Kendra Black and Chris Herndon – was strongly in favor of approving the grant agreement.

“As a reminder … this is reimbursement of spending that we’ve already authorized previously, so it’s paying us back,” Flynn told Hinds. “It does us no good to delay the acceptance of this money.”

Flynn told Colorado Politics that he received the grant letter on Sunday, “just like (Councilman) Hinds … and managed to read through it.

“In fact I found a $7,500 discrepancy in the figures that was corrected for Monday and shared that with the whole council. I don’t think it should be this difficult to let people give us $38.6 million.”

The council is expected to vote on receiving the grant dollars next week.

If approved, more than $18.8 million will be allocated to Denver Health, $2 million will be put back into the pocket of Denver International Airport and an additional $17.7 million will be reimbursed to the city government, which has now spent about $22.6 million on its COVID-19 response, according to the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

Brendan Hanlon, the city’s chief financial officer, said that the reimbursements will not help offset the estimated $180 million revenue loss the city is currently bracing for.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that the $38.6 million grant agreement was a late filing, not a direct file.