AURORA | Voices murmur in the city council chambers as the next speaker is announced.
“Aly DeWills-Marcono,” the Aurora City Clerk says on her microphone.
DeWills-Marcono, sitting in her electric wheelchair at the top of the Paul Tauer Council Chamber, begins to move toward the lift, yelling down to the clerk and city council to “hold on,” while she makes her way to the first floor.
She had already spoken to the security guards and made special arrangements in advance to use the handicap elevator to speak publicly to city council members. For her to reach the first floor, she needs staff to open and operate the lift because of safeguards on the elevator buttons.
The lift itself is just large enough to fit Dewills-Marcano in her electric wheelchair, alone. Her husband, former city Councilmember Juan Marcano, can not fit in the elevator to assist her.
“I’m stuck,” she yelled while inside the lift at the council meeting Jan. 12.
People, including her husband, were seen and heard scrambling to help her, as the crowd waited patiently. She finally emerged from the area where the lift lets out and rolled to the lectern as City Clerk Kadee Rodriguez lowered it for DeWills-Marcano to comfortably reach the microphone.
“If you’ll give me just a second before the clock starts, just to center myself,” she said. “I just got stuck in the elevator, and there’s something really terrifying about being stuck in a box and having to yell for someone to let you out.”
This circumstance with DeWills-Marcano is a combination of four separate times she has spoken publicly to city council about accessibility in the chambers between mid December 2025 and January. The council chambers technically comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements, but many critics over the years have found the process degrading.
“Accessibility is often treated as a technical question,” DeWills-Marcano said Jan. 12. “But the ADA is a floor, not a ceiling. Universal Design asks a better question: who does this infrastructure exclude and why?
“Universal design means designing spaces so people don’t need special permission, secret keys or staff intervention just to belong, accessibility experts and activists say. When you design for disabled people, you also design for elders, parents with strollers, injured workers, people with anxiety, people navigating trauma and people who can’t afford to take an entire evening off to attend a meeting. In other words, universal design is solidarity built into infrastructure.”
Although a couple of minutes of time for a person to get through the lift seems like a short time, it can add up, as Councilmember Curtis Gardner pointed out in previous reporting about the lift in city council chambers.
“The current option we have with the lift for public comment is, frankly, humiliating,” Gardner said in previous reporting. “If we had extensive public comment from the disabled public, and we had public commenter after public commenter where that had to happen, I think it would be embarrassing for us to have to sit through that.”
The issue has gone on for years.
Gardner made those comments at a city council meeting in January 2024, and nothing has changed since that time.
During the study session meeting in 2024, a proposed project involved building a ramp extending to the floor of the council chamber through a storage room, and removing the existing lift to make room for another ramp leading to the dais.
Additional accessible seating was proposed, and the room would be repainted and recarpeted during construction, which would take several months. The construction was estimated to cost $840,000, with about $750,000 in funding from the city’s American Rescue Plan Act allocation and $203,000 in building repair funds.
The city had already paid $113,000 on the design and permit fees, and Marcano and DeWills-Marcano said they have heard the design is still usable.
At the time, Marcano had just lost the election for mayor to Mayor Mike Coffman, and his seat in Ward IV was won by the now-seated Councilmember Stephanie Hancock.
The council at that time directed staff to look into the cost of bids to build a ramp to the chamber floor, which would cost less and allow the council to continue meeting in the space during construction.
It’s unclear what bids were offered or why the project stalled after that.
“When people already feel surveilled, targeted or unsafe, asking them to approach strangers, ask for a key and navigate a locked system just to reach this podium is not a small inconvenience; it is another social barrier layered on top of fear,” DeWills-Marcano said.
Colorado was a key leader in the national disability rights movement that led to the passage of the federal ADA in 1990. The movement was taken most seriously because of the way people protested, to emphasize the importance of creating an accessible world for people with disabilities. The “Gang of 19” in Colorado famously used their wheelchairs to block buses and protested by getting out of their wheelchairs to crawl into areas their wheelchairs could not reach.
DeWills-Marcano mentioned getting out of her wheelchair to crawl to the lectern to emphasize the impact of the lack of accessibility for her and others who may not be able to access the stairs to the floor on their own.
“My body is degrading faster than this chamber is getting fixed, and disabled residents should not have to sacrifice their health to attend their own government,” DeWill said. “Do not wait for disabled residents to crawl back up to this podium again to remind you.” I am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.”
City officials have said they are interested in looking into the matter, but there have been no proposed changes.