AURORA VOTE 2023 — The race for Aurora Mayor

Why should Aurora voters pick you as their next mayor?

The mayor’s primary responsibility is constituent services, and I’ve been the most responsive and accessible council member the city has had since it began tracking constituent service requests. I will continue this level of service as mayor. 

The mayor’s most unique duty is to run our regular meetings, and I have a strong grasp on parliamentary procedure that will ensure our meetings are run efficiently. We have frequent bouts of confusion during our meetings, and I will ensure we have a much smoother run through our agendas.

Finally, it is the mayor’s duty to bring the council together on common ground and set a vision for the future of the city. I will be communicative with my colleagues and focus on areas of agreement to build consensus and deliver results for our community.

What will be your top three legislative priorities if elected?

Public safety, housing, and homelessness.

On public safety, we need to continue to hold lawbreakers accountable while we make serious investments to address the root causes of crime. We must also ensure that accountability means restoration for the injured and reformation for the convicted so that they can be successfully reintegrated into society. We will also fully fund alternative response options to emergencies, such as the Aurora Mobile Response Team, to free up sworn officers to patrol for street racing and quickly respond to serious crime. 

Public safety also includes fixing defects in our infrastructure, and we’re on track to break another record for traffic fatalities in Aurora. We must adopt Vision Zero and revise our engineering standards to prioritize safety over speed for our city’s road network.

On housing, we need to take full advantage of funding from Prop 123 while we increase funding for and execute on Aurora’s Housing Strategy, to include land banking and grants for nonprofit development. I would also like us to work towards creating a nonprofit housing program modeled after Vienna, Austria’s approach to housing that has produced high quality, socially integrated, mixed-income housing for their residents for over a century.

Deepening housing affordability while creating a permanent supportive housing program modeled after Houston, TX will allow us to rapidly decrease homelessness while saving taxpayers money. We’ll need to work together as a region to get this problem under control, and many of our jurisdictional partners are ready to get moving on this approach. We just need a mayor and council majority that have the political will to make it happen.

Aurora’s City Council has become increasingly polarized in recent years, with members publicly coming into conflict over topics such as police reform and social justice. How will you get work done despite this, and what sort of working relationship do you want to develop with council members who don’t share your political views?

Communication goes a long way. There has been a long-standing tradition for the mayor to check in with council members, typically on Sundays, to discuss Monday’s agenda and any other matters that the council member may be considering for introduction. This gesture builds trust, identifies common ground, and opens channels of communication which have been closed under current leadership, leading to fragmented caucuses that often operate in secrecy and at odds.

Organization is also important. I’ll work with my colleagues to put together a legislative calendar beginning with areas of agreement. We do have many areas that we can come together on, and our current mayor’s botched “Strong Mayor” debacle genuinely did bring many of us closer together and allow us to discuss other issue areas. I believe that even if the partisan makeup of council doesn’t change, we’ll be able to make progress on a performing arts center, developing a proper downtown, setting a prevailing wage for trades, cracking down on slumlords, making graffiti removal supportive rather than punitive for businesses, and more. We may not all get everything we want, but the city will make progress.

Since 2020, Aurora has taken several steps to promote diversity in its city government — for example, by creating an Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and by introducing Native American land acknowledgements at the start of council meetings. Has the city been moving in the right direction with these efforts? What additional steps or corrections would you like to see the city make?

I believe both of these initiatives are steps in the right direction, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.

With regards to DEI, our current initiative is understaffed after the council members elected in 2021 decided to gut it during our first budget cycle. It’s important to note that this initiative isn’t meant to be purely an internal staffing matter, but to address the inequities in our existing economic development strategy and contracting practices as well. I’d like to fully fund this department to ensure we make Aurora a gold standard for equity in these areas.

With regards to the land acknowledgement, I believe that is the bare minimum that we can do, and we couldn’t even make that a permanent feature in our council meetings with our current mayor and council. I believe knowing our history is important, and that Aurorans should learn the story and contributions of those who made this land home before it was called Fletcher. In addition to making land acknowledgments a permanent feature in our meetings, I’d like to follow Arapahoe County’s lead in partnering with first nations to create educational programming for our residents through existing city initiatives and through the Aurora History Museum. 

Last year, Aurora’s City Council responded to the phenomenon of homeless camping by banning camping on public property and stepping up sweeps of encampments. Do you think the city did the right thing by introducing its camping ban? Why or why not?

The camping ban has been a failure, as have similar policies in Denver and the rest of the nation. It’s important to note that Aurora was already sweeping camps in the years leading up to the camping ban. The ban simply sped up the clock, and thus increased the spending on this policy with nothing to show for it. Our residents are right to demand clean streets and a solution to homelessness, but simply banning camping isn’t going to accomplish either goal. 

Last September I led a delegation from our council, Adams County, Arapahoe County, and the City and County of Denver to Houston, TX to better understand how they’ve been so incredibly successful at reducing homelessness. In short, they put their resources behind a unified regional strategy of permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless, with rapid re-housing to keep people from becoming homeless to begin with. With this strategy, Houston has reduced their homeless population by over 60% since 2011, and they spend between 50-75% less than we do per person per year to do it. After two years, 90% of their clients are still self-reliant and housed. When I asked Houston Mayor Turner and Harris County Commissioner Ellis how they built the political will to make this happen, the response I got was that it took a few elections to make it happen.

Adams and Arapahoe Counties are on board with this approach, and it seems that Mayor Johnston is already moving Denver in this direction. With the political will on our council after this coming election, I believe we can achieve similar success and save taxpayer dollars while we’re at it.

Aurora and other cities in the Denver metro area have recently struggled to respond to increases in certain crimes, including vehicle and retail thefts. To discourage criminal behavior, should the city invest more in social programs (education, job training, etc.), or should it invest more in policing and tougher criminal penalties? What should that investment look like?

“Tough on crime” policies make for good sound bites but aren’t effective policy. Despite local policy changes, we’re still riding regional trends on MVT and retail theft, while spending more on prosecution, defense, and jail.

We need to be smart on crime, which means attacking the conditions that create it and feed it. This looks like investing in affordable housing, raising the wage floor, partnering with our school districts to provide more resources for at-risk youth and their families, and providing justice-involved individuals with paths to vocation and/or education to reduce their risk of recidivism while making victims of crime as whole as possible.

Our criminal legal system focuses on disappearing people, not problems, and that must change. The status quo has resulted in the United States having 20% of the world’s prisoners, but only 4.2% of the world’s population. We’re not any safer for it, and reforming this broken system will take partnerships between municipal, county, state, and federal officials.

After the death of Elijah McClain, Aurora’s Police Department agreed to implement a list of reforms to address what the Colorado Attorney General’s Office described as a pattern of racially biased policing and excessive force. How much progress have Aurora police made toward reform? Have calls for reform gone too far, or are they not ambitious enough?

We’re moving in the right direction overall, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover. Cultural change takes time, and we still have internal resistance to reform within the department that is slowing the process. I believe we’ll be able to expeditiously change the culture upon the appointment of a permanent chief.

I’ve also heard from our community that they’d like to see us stand up the Community Police Task Force once more and revisit the recommendations they made to council before they were disbanded. More importantly, we need to ensure we implement the requests of the community, to include the creation of a civilian review board with oversight over use of force incidents.

I believe the transformational goal for APD should be a department that is trusted by the community, where people know who their local officers are, and that is able to earn the cooperation of community members when crimes do occur. With the consent decree monitor’s oversight, community, and cooperation from city council, city management, and department leadership, we’ll be able to make this happen.

Aurora is grappling with a shortage of affordable housing, with one city representative estimating in July that the city needed about 7,500 additional affordable units to meet demand. What specific steps would you like to see the city take to expand its inventory of affordable housing?

We can tackle this through a combination of policy initiatives and reprioritizing funding.

We must take full advantage of funding from Prop 123, but this will not be nearly enough by itself. We need to dedicate more general fund revenue toward the policy initiatives outlined in Aurora’s Housing Strategy to supplement the funding we’re receiving from the state and the federal government. This includes land banking, acquiring property, and supporting the creation of community land trusts.

We also need to roll back the exclusionary housing policies in the books and legalize the construction of “missing middle” housing. The most livable cities in our nation and around the world allow a variety of housing and use types to be intermixed, creating high quality places that provide close proximity to services combined with mixed-income housing where market-rate units are indistinguishable from subsidized units.

Finally, I’d like to explore the creation of a nonprofit housing policy initiative modeled after Vienna’s century-old successful program. The City of Aurora has resolved that housing is a human right, and we must endeavor to live up to that commitment.

Some lawmakers have criticized the low-density development patterns typical in the eastern and southern parts of the city for inefficiently using land and water. How much of a problem is development “sprawl”? Do you think the city should be encouraging more compact, high-density development? If so, how?

We absolutely must encourage development that creates livable, walkable, mixed-use environments. Our current pattern of development is environmentally and economically unsustainable and contributes directly to our water issues for both residential and commercial property. 

Aurora’s stated policy is that development must “pay its own way”, but the reality is that it has never covered the full cost of the infrastructure build out needed to support it, and rarely generates enough revenue to cover maintenance expenses. This is why we found ourselves in such a deep hole when it comes to road maintenance, and why the city has a $700M+ capital infrastructure maintenance backlog.

We must rework our unified development ordinance in a way that allows for truly livable development. This looks like mixed-use, mixed-income infill in the core of the city (and greenfield development along the periphery) that will bring new services near existing residential areas, new housing to existing commercial areas, and act as nodes for bus rapid transit and other modes of mobility. These kinds of developments are not only better for our health, environment, and overall quality of life, they also generate enough revenue to cover the cost of infrastructure and other public services.

If we hope to be a sustainable city in every sense of the word, we must revisit how we use our land, and tie this into our city’s plans for growth and economic development. Reworking our comprehensive plan, economic development plan, and unified development ordinance are a high priority for me as mayor.

As the demand for water grows, Colorado cities are being forced to reconsider how they allocate and share their limited water rights. If another city wanted to lease water from Aurora, how would you decide whether to support or reject that proposal?

I don’t believe Aurora should be supporting unsustainable land use and sprawl. In the past, I’ve been asked by residents about instituting a growth cap in Aurora. I do not support artificial growth caps like Lakewood put into place due to the adverse impact it has on housing, land values, and more. However, we do have a natural growth cap along the Front Range: our water supply.

Part of the rationale Aurora has used in the past to lease water to other jurisdictions and developments outside of our city limits is that we want to preserve local aquifers from being depleted. I believe that it should fall on the state to protect those resources from depletion, and that the state should deny permits for development that will rely on non-rechargeable sources of water that are close to depletion. If there’s no water, you shouldn’t be allowed to build. Period. 

That said, if another jurisdiction was in temporary need, say due to infrastructure repair or natural disaster, I will support leasing them water if we have it to spare.