Aurora officials defend city attorney’s role in ‘strong-mayor’ proposal

AURORA | Representatives of the City of Aurora say a deputy city attorney acted within city policy when he made suggestions on a draft version of a ballot question asking voters to empower the city’s mayor.

The campaign to give the mayor the power to veto Aurora City Council legislation as well as hiring and firing powers that currently belong to the city manager stalled in August, with supporters saying they overshot a procedural deadline.

It was sponsored — behind the scenes, at first, and later openly — by incumbent Mayor Mike Coffman and opposed by the majority of council members, some of whom characterized the proposal as a power grab by Coffman.

The city’s impartiality and involvement with the campaign to empower the mayor came under scrutiny earlier this year, when opponents and council members questioned the clerk’s office and city attorney’s office’s creation of a summary that would have appeared on the ballot, which some called misleading.

The clerk, city attorney and outside legal counsel hired by the city were also responsible for ruling on a legal challenge by opponents, who said the petitions generated by the clerk and city attorney for the strong-mayor campaign to collect voter signatures were out of compliance with city law. The challenge was struck down by the clerk, drawing even further criticism from the measure’s opponents.

Emails obtained through a Colorado Open Records Act request show that, the day after a draft of the legislation was submitted to the city by legal staff working for the strong-mayor campaign — May 3, 2023 — deputy city attorney Jack Bajorek made various notes about the formatting and content of the proposed legislation.

Bajorek questioned elements of the proposal, including the creation of a “chief of staff” position who could take over if the mayorship became vacant, even if they weren’t a registered elector, as well as the stipulation that the mayor would be able to appoint a director of finance without specifying whether they could appoint other department directors.

City spokesman Ryan Luby said the City Attorney’s Office is able to provide “limited guidance to any citizen-initiated ballot proposal sponsor as to form, not policy.”

“The policies of the proposal were left to the proponents to decide,” Luby said. “It is well established in the city charter that the City Attorney’s Office is to provide legal counsel to city employees in their official capacities and on city processes they oversee and guide. In this instance, the City Clerk’s Office, and by extension the City Attorney’s Office, was tasked with providing limited formatting guidance.”

Bajorek emailed his comments to an attorney representing the strong-mayor campaign, Suzanne Taheri, copying City Clerk, Kadee Rodriguez.

City attorneys are called on to represent diverse and sometimes competing interests in the course of their jobs, from the citizenry, to individual officials accused of misconduct, to the city government of Aurora itself.

Still, former Aurora city attorney and Aurora City Councilmember Charlie Richardson, who also spearheaded the opposition to the strong mayor campaign, said even comments by Bajorek such as suggested corrections to grammar and capitalization were outside of the scope of the Aurora City Attorney’s Office’s responsibilities.

“There should be absolutely no coordination except for the bare essentials of what the code requires,” he said. “The only thing that a city attorney’s office should do is point out the relevant charter provisions and code provisions and not have any interaction with the proponents.”

Supporters of the strong-mayor proposal have said they plan to resume the campaign in 2025, although it is not clear whether a mechanism exists for them to do so without starting over and again gathering a minimum number of signatures from registered voters.