AURORA | Aurora lawmakers last week rejected the idea of sending a variety of charter changes to voters, including proposals to move local elections to even-numbered years, increase pay for council members and change how vacant council seats are filled.
At the same time, the group gave initial approval to changes requested by Aurora’s police and fire agencies that would remove limits on lateral hiring, peg the number of senior police leadership positions to the city’s population and allow the chief of police to block promotions.
After those items moved forward from the council’s June 5 study session, they were passed unanimously on first reading June 12.
Giving the chief the power to bypass a candidate who would otherwise be eligible for a promotion was framed as a check in the case of police officers such as Nate Meier, who kept his job after driving a police vehicle while drunk and was promoted automatically earlier this year after passing an exam.
Although a citizen commission met six times starting in March to review the proposed charter changes and provide recommendations, they broke at the end of May without doing so, saying they were not given enough information or time to ask questions about the proposals.
Former mayor Ed Tauer spoke about the committee’s work June 5, saying the group wasn’t able to weigh competing ideas and look into how the proposals stacked up against alternative ways of accomplishing the same stated goals.
“There were questions that we really didn’t have answers to,” he said, adding that committee members emerged from the process with the same opinions about the charter changes that they had come in with. “The team said, you know, if we’re going to give the council some direction or an opinion, we’d like to do that as well as we can.”
Sponsored by progressive Councilmember Juan Marcano, the first charter change considered by the council would have required candidates for Aurora City Council to state on the ballot whether they are affiliated with one of the political parties registered with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office .
Marcano said the change would make the elections “transparently partisan.”
“I say ‘transparently’ because I think they already are very clearly (partisan), and I think it would be beneficial to the public to have more information on the ballot,” he said. “On top of that, having that affiliation on the ballot tends to actually increase turnout because folks have easier access to more information.”
Conservatives objected, saying the change would exacerbate partisan divisions on the council and make candidates with extreme beliefs appear more legitimate by allowing them to associate with established political parties.
“I think it’s terrible to want to make local politics partisan, because local politics is about fixing our roads, making sure we have an adequate water supply for the future, making sure that we fight crime, that we have public safety and protect everybody, so it should not be a partisan issue,” Councilmember Francoise Bergan said.
A majority of conservatives voted against allowing the item to move forward from the June 5 study session. They also cited the report by the citizen commission that said they needed more time to evaluate the changes.
Other items sponsored by Marcano would have tried to increase voter participation by moving local elections to even-numbered years and established a new procedure for filling vacant council seats to avoid repeating the deadlock that occurred in 2021 after Nicole Johnston stepped down. Conservatives voted those items down with no discussion.
Marcano also presented a proposal on behalf of Councilmember Alison Coombs, who was absent June 5, that would remove language in the charter referring to the city attorney and other council appointees as male, replacing these and other gendered references with gender-neutral terms.
The council put off making a decision on the proposal after Jurinsky and Bergan said they would rather replace male and female pronouns with “he or she” as opposed to “they” or instead use the name of the position in question. The group ultimately decided to wait to give Coombs the chance to present on the proposal at an upcoming meeting.
A majority of conservatives also turned down a proposal by Councilmember Angela Lawson to clarify in the charter that being a council member was a full-time responsibility and increase pay by an unspecified amount starting in 2027.
Lawson argued that the change would make the position accessible to more working-class people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to juggle the responsibilities of a full-time job with serving on the council.
“We need to think about the future of Aurora, and I really think that a lot of people who want to be public servants or do this job, they can’t, because they can’t afford to do it,” she said.
While opponents said the change might impact council members because employers who were aware of the charter language might not hire or retain someone who had committed to serving full-time on the council, Lawson said she did not think that would happen and pointed out that nothing in the charter would prohibit a council member from working full-time.
Three changes proposed by police and firefighters weren’t opposed by the council, including charter language allowing the police chief to bypass officers eligible for a promotion and giving those officers the chance to appeal the chief’s decision to Aurora’s Civil Service Commission.
Bergan asked Art Acevedo, the city’s current interim chief of police, whether the change could facilitate favoritism in the police department and exclude people from the department’s command staff.
He answered that promotions above the rank of captain were already appointments and that the change would allow police leadership to hold officers accountable for misconduct. He also stressed that he would have to be able to explain his decision to the Civil Service Commission.
“I’d have to be able to articulate a valid reason for why this employee is not being promoted and why I’d want to bypass them, and quite honestly, in every place I’ve been, there has been a bypass process,” Acevedo said.
On the proposal to move to even-year elections, which has shown to substantially increase voter turnout in every city’s it’s been implemented in, “conservatives voted those items down with no discussion.”
Why is it that the conservatives vote down without discussion things that will improve voter turnout and improve voter knowledge of issues? Are they afraid the majority of people might not agree with their agenda?
Maybe there were other provisions or language in the proposal that were objectionable. Slipping these kinds of things into proposals/propositions is a tactic used by both sides.
you did notice!
“Conservatives objected”
“A majority of conservatives voted against ”
” increase voter participation- Conservatives voted those items down”
“A majority of conservatives also turned down a proposal by Councilmember Angela Lawson to clarify in the charter that being a council member is a full-time responsibility and increase pay starting in 2027.” Any body out there think it’s not a full time job?
This is called OBSTRUCTIONISM and is the Conservative way. There’s no discussion it’s their way or the highway. VOTE BLUE people
DK, so your argument here is just because a political party “objected,” “voted against,” voted down,” or “turned down,” means that party is obstructionist? By your logic if we just replace “conservatives” with “liberals,” we could then declare liberals obstructionist. Instead of providing valid lines of reasoning for your claim, you simply assert and declare a faulty conclusion based solely on your political party interest. Voting is a privilege that must be tempered with logic and reason, not emotional appeals. You should not be voting.
An increase in INFORMED voting is a good thing. Holding municipal elections seperate from national and statewide elections allows for discussion and consideration of local issues as the centerpiece of political considerations. Holding elections along with national and statewide races may dilute voter attention and allowing party line voting up and down the ballet may well be little more than an imposition of political phiulosophy or stance rather than thoughtful consideration on essentially non-partisan issues.
Still, I do not believe it is the city council’s job to prevent the voters from considering restructuring their government. Put the matters before the voters for them to decide. Have a robust public debate on the issues.