“Budget cuts” isn’t a phrase the public associates with the free-spending administration of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. For that matter, it’s not something you hear around Denver City Hall in general.

So, it was refreshing, in a way, to hear Denver’s first-term chief exec announce cuts this week in unveiling the city’s proposed 2026 budget. As reported in Monday’s Denver Gazette, the administration is calling the city’s 5.8% reduction in spending — to fill a $200 million budget gap — the “most conservative” in 15 years.

The budget deficit wasn’t caused by a revenue shortfall even though the city insists it was. As noted in The Gazette’s report, the administration blames flattening city revenue driven by national economic uncertainty and rising costs for much of Denver’s fiscal woes.

Whether or not the city could have, or should have foreseen the cash-flow crunch is a separate matter. The real culprit is City Hall itself. It has been on a spending spree since Johnston took office in July 2023.

As a sanctuary city — with Johnston preening as innkeeper to the world — City Hall took in, sheltered, fed and extended medical care to tens of thousands of Venezuelan illegal immigrants who deluged Denver over the past couple of years. Johnston spent $80 million on the wave of Venezuelans he dubbed “newcomers” and made city taxpayers — most of whom presumably reside legally in the U.S. — pay for the hospitality. That included cutting hours at the city’s DMV offices and rec centers.

Johnston also has spent at least $155 million on his grand plan to move the city’s teeming street population indoors — without screening them for needed rehab, mental health needs or criminal warrants, and without requiring the able-bodied among them to find work. The administration used most of the money to convert former hotels into temporary shelters and to build “micro-communities” to house people in “tiny homes.” As it turned out, that $155 million had been $65 million more than what the mayor previously had said his campaign would cost.

Fundamentally, the biggest challenge with that dysfunctional population will be preventing them from returning to the streets to resume their familiar lifestyle. Although their departure from street life was welcome, their hiatus — absent substantive intervention in their lives — likely will be short lived. And residents’ and business operators respite from the tent cities will be over.

Suffice it to say, belt tightening not only is in order at City Hall but also is overdue.

For starters, the mayor’s administration commendably walked back some of its own largesse in making the cuts to the upcoming budget, which still must be submitted to the City Council. One of the city’s hotels for the homeless will be closed in March, and a tiny home village for them will be converted into workforce housing. Those two changes will save $11 million.

More generally, the city will realize $118 million in reduced spending from this year’s headline-making layoffs and hiring freezes for city staff. There’s another $77 million in savings from cutting back on assorted services, supplies and contracts.

We’ll take it. Even if desperation, rather than fiscal prudence, prompted this re-examination, it’s at least a modest stride toward greater fiscal restraint.