File Photo by Gabriel Christus/Aurora Sentinel
AURORA | Aurora lawmakers this week expressed support for asking city officials to draft a plan for shifting domestic prosecutions out of municipal court after balking at an earlier proposal to hand off prosecutions without a plan.
Developed by the city manager, city attorney, court administrator and presiding municipal judge, the plan would include a timeline for the transition as well as a breakdown of the “pros and cons” of such a move.
“I would want to see what the true fiscal impact would be for us,” said Aurora City Council member Dustin Zvonek, who sponsored the resolution that passed out of study session June 24. “Assuming that there’s a plan that I believe is feasible, I would bring forward the ordinance (and) actually move it into place, assuming that there was enough support here.”
Also on Monday, the majority of the council did not oppose a separate resolution from Zvonek directing the Aurora City Attorney’s Office to explore suing the State of Colorado over a state bill that will limit cities’ ability to contract with private attorneys for public defender services.
Zvonek began pushing to outsource prosecutions after House Bill 24-1437 was introduced in the Legislature and signed into law earlier this year.
The bill was sponsored by Democratic Aurora Rep. Mike Weissman and only applies to the handful of Colorado cities, including Aurora, that prosecute domestic violence cases in their municipal courts rather than filing them in county and district courts.
Because Aurora maintains its own public defender office, the bill wouldn’t compel the city to make any changes to how its municipal court handles cases, unless it chooses to privatize the work of indigent defense.
Zvonek last year sponsored the request-for-proposal process that invited private law firms to bid on replacing the city public defender office — the council received no bids by the time the deadline came and went March 8.
A few weeks later, when a draft of Weissman’s bill was shared with the city, Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said the council would “not back down” from pursuing privatization and would instead shift the responsibility of prosecuting domestic violence onto overlapping counties.
However, Zvonek has tried to distance his latest proposal from the debate over the future of the city office, describing it as a way of saving money by following the lead of the majority of Colorado cities and relying more on district courts.
“The Legislature is trying to hamstring local governments and our ability to control costs,” Zvonek told the council’s public safety policy committee last month. “Our city has a ton of priorities that our taxpayers expect us to address.”
Meanwhile, the counties that overlap Aurora have said they lack the capacity to handle the caseload that would be dropped in their laps as a result of the change.
Arapahoe County has said its share of the docket would include close to 1,600 cases per year, costing the county $2.45 million to handle without significantly delaying justice for crime victims amidst a looming budget crisis.
Adams County’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council also wrote in a June 10 letter to the Aurora City Council that the shift would overburden that county’s justice system, stretching thin its limited victim support services, creating a backlog of cases, threatening representation for poor defendants and potentially forcing the early release of prisoners from the county jail.
Victims, witnesses and police officers would also be compelled to travel to county courthouses in Brighton and Centennial rather than the courthouse in the Aurora Municipal Complex to attend hearings.
These concerns were echoed by council members when Zvonek brought an ordinance that would end prosecutions to the group’s June 10 study session. In response to a question from Councilmember Alison Coombs, Pete Schulte of the Aurora City Attorney’s Office told the group that leaving the prosecution of the city’s entire domestic violence caseload up to district courts would likely lead to some cases not being prosecuted “as vigorously.”
City staffers also said at the time that outstanding warrants and pending cases could mean the city continuing to move domestic violence cases through its court for at least a few years after police stopped filing charges there.
Zvonek agreed to amend his proposal to better facilitate a “transition phase” covering the time period during which cases would be moved out of the city’s jurisdiction. On June 24, he brought a version that he described as “taking a step back” to plan alongside Aurora police, public defenders and local judicial districts, and address the concerns that had been raised.
“There was some opposition to the plan, period, but there were also just more questions around how you would make a move like this, of this size, happen,” he said.
After Coombs questioned why the item included language indicating the city would stop filing domestic violence cases in its court Jan. 1, Zvonek said he wanted to set a “benchmark” for when a plan should envision ending prosecutions by. He accepted an amendment to replace the language with language indicating that staff should investigate the feasibility of the Jan. 1 date.
The majority of the council did not object to the item moving forward to a regular meeting for a formal vote.
Also on Monday, Zvonek brought forward and his colleagues did not oppose a resolution directing the city attorney — currently Jack Bajorek, who the council unanimously voted to appoint to the role on an interim basis Monday — to explore bringing a lawsuit against the state in response to Weissman’s bill.
“Forget the public defender’s part of it — I think the bigger question is whether this violates local control and home rule,” Zvonek said. “We went through the whole process. Nobody came back and said that they wanted to participate in the RFP. And that’s fine, that’s settled. But I don’t think that we should ever find ourselves in a situation where the state is mandating this type of language on us, and we just take it, essentially.”
Schulte told the council that the City Attorney’s Office had already communicated with the City of Lakewood to gauge their interest in participating in a lawsuit as a fellow plaintiff and that Aurora would continue to reach out to other Colorado municipalities that prosecute domestic violence if the council wanted to explore a lawsuit.
Coombs said she viewed the bill as promoting equal pay for attorneys doing the work of public defense, as cities will still be allowed to pay private attorneys per-hour to do that work so long as they are paid at least the same rate as attorneys working for the state’s Office of Alternate Defense Counsel.
“It’s equal pay for equal work, which we are bound by, and I don’t think we should be saying we shouldn’t be bound by that,” she said.
Mayor Mike Coffman said he spoke with Weissman earlier in the year and that the Colorado House of Representatives member “acknowledged to me that he was already treading on home-rule authority.” Weissman told the Sentinel later that he believes House Bill 24-1437 is legally sound and that he did not indicate otherwise during his conversation with the mayor.
“Any time the General Assembly makes policy concerning the operations of home-rule municipal courts, we do acknowledge the constitutional basis of municipalities. We also acknowledge that the policy-making power of the General Assembly flows from our state Constitution, as well,” Weissman said. “I think that House Bill 24-1437, balances those realities, just as many, many bills also dealing with the question of municipal courts have over the last decade.”
Like Zvonek, the mayor presented Weissman’s bill as an infringement on the autonomy of home-rule cities.
“I think it’s important, however you feel about the issue, to preserve home rule (and) local control as a state constitutional issue,” Coffman said.
A majority of council members did not oppose the lawsuit proposal moving forward from Monday’s study session.
The council is tentatively scheduled to vote July 8 on directing staff to draft a plan for transitioning domestic violence prosecutions out of municipal court, and the plan itself would be presented to the council in August.
A formal vote on exploring legal action against the state is also slated for July 8.
The argument has been made that shifting this burden to the counties, where it has always belonged, would create a travel burden for Aurorans. I ask why? Could the City and the Counties not agree to have the counties use a courtroom in the City to handle the cases? Also the counties argue that they would be subjected to large costs. They don’t thank the City for having assumed that cost over the years, they instead say they can’t bear the costs of a responsibility that nearly every other county in the state bears. The answer here is obvious and always has been though it is not seen by Jack Bajorek, Dustin Zvonek or Danielle Jurinsky. The counties should be subsidzing the effort in the Aurora courts. The counties could make a donation to the City to cover a few probation folks and could send a prosecutor or two and a public defender or two for rotations in the City. If the counties would send the City even one half of the costs they estimate this would cost to the City in cash and employees this matter could easily be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. Time for our leaders to lead, not merely criticize. Maybe there is a lesson in there for the Sentinel as well.