AURORA HOMELESS BATTLE: Mayor, lawmakers, workers and homeless people quarrel over proposed ban

AURORA | Mayor Mike Coffman continues to draw fire for circumstances surrounding the city’s new camping ban — this time, for statements made about how his office and the city helped, or failed to help, a homeless veteran.

Nathaniel “Omen” Crawford brought the council’s Feb. 28 meeting to a raucous halt when he vowed to challenge Coffman for the mayorship and called out Aurora lawmakers for their endorsement of the camping ban.

Two weeks later, the U.S. Army vet who’s spent around five years homeless in Aurora says he’s the new face of a pilot program sponsored by the mayor, which aims to connect veterans with employment and other services.

“He’s referring to me as the tip of the spear now,” Crawford said of his new working relationship with Coffman. “I’m not going to sit on my hands and watch as this program expires.”

Under the terms of an intergovernmental agreement with Adams County inked last year, the program, which according to a news release can help as many as eight veterans at a time, will expire at the end of June.

Last week, Coffman posted on social media that his office had “tracked down” Crawford after the Feb. 28 hearing on the ban and enrolled him in the Aurora Veterans Day Works Program. He later said Crawford is the fourth veteran to be enrolled.

The mayor also slammed city staff for inviting Crawford to the hearing and failing to tell him about the program for vets.

Coffman wrote in one Facebook post titled “How Not to Help a Homeless Veteran” that staffers “defended encouraging (Crawford) to come to the city council meeting to testify against the urban camping ban by saying that he was already aware of it and they were just sharing public information with him,” adding, “I doubt this is true.”

“My suspicion is that staff has a bias against the program because it has a work requirement consistent with a ‘Work First’ model and, from everything I’ve heard, they subscribe to a ‘Housing First’ model,” the mayor later wrote in an email.

Around $288,000 was allocated for the program from a combination of marijuana proceeds, federal sources and private grants. The city, through Adams County, contracts with Bayaud Enterprises Inc. to administer all aspects of the program.

The skirmish between Coffman and staffers comes after the mayor criticized the role of “unelected bureaucrats” in the city government at a council meeting March 7.

Coffman’s social media remarks drew swift backlash from others on the council, with progressive Councilmember Juan Marcano accusing the mayor of misrepresenting the city’s contacts with Crawford.

Marcano again said that the camping ban would criminalize homeless residents such as Crawford. Crawford made similar comments at city council in February and appeared again March 14, criticizing the proposed camping ban for how it could only harass and endanger people without homes.

Marcano went further.

“Use your bully pulpit to advocate and vote for comprehensive solutions like permanent supportive housing instead of finding ways to pat yourself on the back for solving a problem you created,” Marcano commented on one of Coffman’s posts.

Marcano said Coffman’s office didn’t “track down” Crawford after the Feb. 28 meeting — Crawford had reached out to the city’s outreach team more than a week prior, which the mayor later acknowledged.

Crawford said he communicated with Alia Gonzalez from the mayor’s office ahead of the meeting and met with Coffman for the first time a few days afterward to talk about his situation.

While Coffman said city staffers “encouraged” Crawford to speak, Marcano said they only mentioned to Crawford that the proposed ban was coming before the council and added that “Omen was apparently aware of it.”

Marcano forwarded an email from Jessica Prosser, director of housing and community services for the city, in which she describes the city’s contacts with Crawford. She said Crawford “stated he was aware of the ban and his displeasure” of it when the topic came up in a conversation with a city liaison on Feb. 25.

Prosser wrote that the liaison then told Crawford the date and time of the hearing and that he, “like all people from the public,” were “welcome to attend and that he would be allotted three minutes to express his opinion.”

Crawford later said during an interview that he wasn’t aware of the camping ban or the hearing prior to his conversation with the city worker.

“He told me, ‘I don’t know if you know this or not, but there’s this hearing on Monday, and if this law passes as is, it’s going to affect you and everyone around you, and so it’s your choice if you want to go speak, but that’s when that is,’” Crawford said. “They didn’t tell me to do anything.”

In an email thread verified by other council members, Coffman also asked Bob Dorshimer of the Aurora Day Resource Center why his staff would “use a homeless veteran to achieve a political agenda instead of directing him to a program specifically set up to help him,” saying Crawford told him it was an employee of that agency rather than the city who mentioned the hearing.

Dorshimer replied to say his agency had no record of contacting Crawford and that Coffman had been given false information. He said Coffman also called out the organization in a social media post that appears to have been deleted or edited to remove the reference.

“It the future please allow me the time to find the information, it’s a morale buster for my staff to read your post and they work so hard and we deal with so much, I hope to show them an apology post or some sort of update so they can feel just in the work they do; honestly I’m shocked by your assumption it was us!,” Dorshimer wrote in his email.

Prosser wrote in her email that the Aurora Veterans Day Works Program wasn’t included in a brochure of homeless services that had been given to Crawford previously because “it is a pilot program and at the beginning of the program, there was not clarity that Bayaud was able to (fulfill) the requirements of the contract.”

“Bayaud also has a specific outreach team dedicated to Aurora for their Day Works program and thus they receive referrals from that outreach team and through the (Build for Zero) process,” Prosser added, referencing a city effort to eliminate veteran homelessness.

“There is no excuse for not putting out the information about this program to homeless (veterans just) because it’s a ‘pilot program’ which makes absolutely no sense to me,” Coffman said in an email Monday.

As for Crawford, he says he’s happy to go to bat for a program that promises to help homeless veterans like himself. For now, Crawford is still living out of his vehicle. He said he also plans to meet with homeless aid agencies around the city to improve collaboration and hopefully strengthen the network of services in Aurora.

“To me, aid is a web. It’s a web that hangs there, and if someone falls, you try to bounce them back up,” Crawford said.

He said he hopes to continue working with the mayor to guarantee the future of the program. However, Crawford said he will continue to oppose the camping ban sponsored by Coffman.

“The mayor and I are on generally amicable terms, but even he recognizes that he and I are opposed to each other on this particular issue,” Crawford said.