With a 9-4 vote, Denver City Council members approved a new $30 million, three-year contract with Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, to run The Aspen, a former DoubleTree Hotel that has been turned into a homeless shelter.

More than two hours of discussion focused on the contract and the new service provider, selected by the city through a competitive bidding process.

Among the council’s concerns were media reports questioning the nonprofit’s finances and oversight practices in San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and other cities where it has worked.

“There’s a ton of very concerning legal mess related to Urban Alchemy in a number of cities,” Councilmember Paul Kashmann said. “These are not 10 years ago. They’re current. They continue to grow at a rapid pace, and I’m just not sure that this is the direction that Denver needs to go.”

Ian Clark-Johnson, Urban Alchemy’s chief talent and development officer, stated that the organization wanted to be “accountable and transparent and judged on the merits” of their work.

“We have had bad actors in the past,” Clark-Johnson told the council. “We’ve moved swiftly to terminate them and hold ourselves accountable with city partners; I know there were some lawsuits around wage theft as we grew early on, and we expanded rapidly, and there were some mistakes in time keeping that we made.”

At one point during the meeting, the councilmembers pondered not approving the contract.

Jeff Kositsky, deputy director for the Office of Housing Stability, cautioned the council that such a decision would require a lot of retooling to replace Urban Alchemy, and there weren’t a lot of available options.

“We would have to seek out another provider,” Kositsky said. “There was not a great deal of interest when we put out the RFP to operate this site, and the panel went with the provider that they thought was the most qualified and the most able to operate the site.”

He added, “There’s no scenario in which we would be able to contract with another provider at this point, at this late stage in the game.”

Only three providers responded to the city’s request to run its three largest hotel shelters.

Each one was awarded a site, city official said.

The contract with The Aspen’s, as well as the two remaining non-congregate shelters, current provider, The Salvation Army, ends on Dec. 31.

Additional pressure came from Clark-Johnson’s announcement that Urban Alchemy has already offered jobs and had been conducting employee training.

“We started making (job) offerings just before, like the week before Thanksgiving, with the aim to start training Dec. 1,” he said.

Although the council approved the contract, city officials noted that it could be canceled with relatively short notice.

Mayor Mike Johnston’s Senior Advisor on Homelessness, Cole Chandler, offered words of support for the nonprofit, adding that it will “be a strong part of this system in Denver, and I think we should be really proud of the opportunity to bring them here.”

Earlier this year, the city announced it would move away from flat-fee contracts for its homeless shelter providers, adopting a pay-for-performance model that gives HOST greater scrutiny of how well vendors fulfill their contract deliverables.