The Denver City Council on Monday approved a $6 million contract for a group to manage the distribution of food and provide services for immigrants participating in the city’s work program.

The vote on the $6 million contract with Haven of Hope was postponed in late August and again last week after councilmembers grilled the Johnston administration and one member said it resulted in more questions than answers.

Those questions seemed to have been answered on Monday, when 12 councilmembers voted in favor of the contract, though Councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez pressed about the program’s sustainability.

“One of the things we last heard was that the program will not be continuing after this cohort, there won’t be another cohort, so I just want to know how many people will this contract serve?” she said. “It’s $6 million, so how many people will it serve?”

Denver currently has 865 people enrolled in the Denver’s Asylum Seekers Program, roughly half of whom are children, according to the program’s Deputy Director Victoria Aguilar. This means the contract will provide almost $7,000 per person for the contract term of roughly one year.

During Monday’s meeting, Aguilar said the contract would go toward providing food, shelter and other services to both people in the program and those who are eligible to apply for it. The contract provides money for food and other aid items until members “graduate” from the program within about six months, she said.

“This contract will serve DASP and non-DASP community members alike,”

Shontel Lewis voted against the proposal because, she claimed, providing taxpayer-funded aid but with conditions to immigrants — and people in general — is not the best way to help them.

Specifically, Lewis wants the program to follow the Denver Basic Income Project. In that program – which Denver spent $2 million on this year – a little under half of the 400 people who continued to respond to study questions owned or rented housing. When the program began, only 10% of the 600 people originally part of the study had housing.

Lewis insisted that the city can trust people getting taxpayer money to prop themselves up.

She did not mention 220 people in the basic income study who did not find stable housing, or the other individuals who stopped responding.

“Basic income does work and we’ve found that when you give unconditional dollars to folks to make decisions over their lives, that’s an effective use,” she said. “I’ll still be a no on this contract. I really appreciate you all.”

Also on Monday, Councilmember Kevin Flynn raised a question about Denver’s sidewalk fee, whose implementation faced long delays and where the fee structure has been extensively reworked.

Approved by voters, the measure shifts sidewalk maintenance from residents to the city. Its latest incarnation is a flat fee of $150 for residents, provided their properties are not extra large. If the sidewalk area is extra large, the property owner must pay an additional amount.

Flynn wondered whether the city is still citing people with sidewalks that are “out of kilter” and ordering residents to replace them.

The answer is “no,” according to the city’s infrastructure team.

“We are not citing folks… This kind of goes back to (a committee conversation) about potential tattling on yourself at this point is okay,” Nick Williams, the deputy manager of internal and external affairs at the department, said.

Williams added the infrastructure department is keeping a list of sidewalk complaints so the city can expedite fixing those areas.