Help tackle the red tape - duplicative steps, confusing requirements, excessive waiting, or any other barriers that make it difficult for our residents and customers to work with the city.
We want to hear from city employees on how the city can fix processes that are burdensome and/or unnecessary for customers, make employees' jobs harder, or keep employees from serving their customers as fully as they want to.
In 2025 we held a variety of Red Tape Reduction Initiative Events that brought City employees and City Subject Matter Experts together to share insights and brainstorm how to address barriers.
"Red Tape" can be any duplicative steps, confusing requirements, excessive waiting, or any other barriers that make it difficult for our residents and customers to work with the city.
The core mission of the Denver Peak Academy is to inspire and empower City and County of Denver staff at all levels to continuously improve service delivery for our community. By surveying city employees and the public, we can better understand your Red Tape Reduction ideas and identify the best approach to turn those ideas into action.
We want to use this moment to dig deeply into the struggles around requirements that are out of front-line employee control, that make their jobs harder, or keep them from serving customers as fully as they want to. We’re calling these things red tape, and we’ve created a system to give front-line staff the control to cut them.
Everyone can:
City employees can also:
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The core mission of the Denver Peak Academy is toinspire and empower City and County of Denver staff at all levels to continuously improve service delivery for our community.By knowing who submitted what idea, Peak Academy staff can follow up with you as they have questions on the idea. Your input will only be used to help us better understand your ideas and identify the best approach to turn those ideas into action.
To be clear, Denver's Peak Academy is not involved with personnel decisions or city budgeting.
HIV Services Intake Form for people who have been recently diagnosed with HIV. It was taking 4-8 weeks for clients to access services, and 4 hours for staff to process the intake. Each of 15 partner agencies had their own unique intake forms.
Mamadou partnered with the State and 15 other agencies to improve the intake process. They all use the same form and a new checklist, unnecessary documentation was eliminated and the wait time went down to zero.
One crucial element of the hiring process to join Denver Police Department was an in-depth test with strict technology requirements and contained 619 questions taking ~4+ hours to complete on average. Feedback from applicants indicated that this was a massive barrier to completing the hiring process and a 41% abandoned test rate in 2024 verified this challenge.
The Civil Service Commission collaborated with the testing vendor to develop a new Denver-specific police entry-level written test that was made accessible to more technology, switched to making it un-proctored to simplify scheduling, and eliminated redundant components duplicating other process steps. They saw a 133.58% increase in completed tests Q1 2024 vs Q1 2025.
At the Denver Office of the Municipal Public Defender (OMPD), defendants in criminal cases have the choice to apply for free, legal representation. This is a lengthy, time consuming, and wasteful process that is only done on a paper application. Due to the limitations of a paper application, defendants become frustrated as they spend time traveling to the office the fill out the application, waiting for determination, and corresponding with administrative staff on the status of their application. Similarly, staff are overwhelmed by the sheer number of paper applications (~3,720 applications processed per year) and the need to manually digitize the information on these applications.
Hannah Lucey, Laura Stamps, and TC Bell brought the paper application online and created a corresponding QR code for both the application and OMPD's website. As a result, staff were able to transfer data into the system in a more timely fashion and applications were able to be processed more swiftly. Defendants were also able to access the OMPD application and the website with ease from the courtrooms. OMPD was able to clear a backlog of thousands of applications and reduce the application process time by 80%.
DSBO requirements applicable on RFP/Q, specifically the MWBE Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Plan (MWBE EDI Plan), was often a barrier to small businesses proposing as primes due to the time and effort needed to put together a comprehensive plan with details needed to standout and compete with large firms that have dedicated proposal-writing departments; it was also adding undue administrative burden to internal and external stakeholders, often delaying/extending the procurement process/contract execution.
DSBO implemented a fillable MWBE Utilization Plan form as a replacement to the MWBE EDI Plan, focusing on small business utilization and support strategies that call out three specific areas of focus. This allowed for a more straightforward and easy experience for both large and small proposers when filling out the form. Additionally, the panelists do not need to score the MWBE Utilization Plan form; DSBO reviews for “responsiveness” on a Pass/Fail basis, but may request additional information upon proposal review as needed.