AURORA | Having finally shed his “deputy” and “interim” titles, Aurora City Manager Jason Batchelor said Wednesday that he’s focused on filling job openings and planning for Aurora’s future with the help of city lawmakers and employees.
“There’s always things that, as an organization, we can improve on,” Batchelor said Feb. 7. “I’m just trying to continue the good work that we do day in and day out.”
Aurora’s city manager oversees the day-to-day operations of the city as well as the hiring and firing of most city employees. They are also responsible for making sure the policy decisions of Aurora’s City Council are carried out by the rest of the city.
Wednesday marked 10 months to the day since Batchelor took over as the city’s top administrator — first on an interim basis, following Jim Twombly’s retirement in April, and lately as a permanent appointee, after Aurora’s City Council picked him for the job in November and watched him get sworn in three weeks later. As city manager, he’ll earn $330,000 per year.
Batchelor, 49, graduated from the United States Military Academy in West Point in 1996. After a five-year stint in the Army, he received master’s degrees in engineering and public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin.
“I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do when I grew up,” Batchelor said. “And then, early on in my career, I learned about the city management profession, and I was like, ‘I like this. This is really what I want to do.’ I like the ability to directly serve my community and solve problems every day.”
Batchelor interned for the City of Austin and later went to work full-time in that city’s budget office. Describing Texas summers as “long, hot and miserable,” Batchelor said he was grateful when an opportunity arose to serve as a budget officer in Aurora.
Since he and his wife, Peggy, moved to Aurora 15 years ago, Batchelor has worked his way up, being promoted to finance manager and then deputy city manager.
In the latter role, he helped draft the consent decree between Aurora’s public safety agencies and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, and served once before as interim city manager, when Skip Noe stepped down in 2017.
“Whether it was Ron Miller, or Skip Noe, or Jim Twombly, they’ve all been really good city management professionals for me to model myself after,” Batchelor said about the city’s past city managers.
“I really try to have a relationship with not only employees but also elected officials and really understand them, so we can have good communication in terms of what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and what their concerns are, and what we can do.”
He described an ongoing strategic planning effort as one of his priorities — during a workshop Saturday, city staffers and council members shared ideas for streamlining city government and promoting economic development, community engagement, public health and safety. Batchelor said his office plans to bring back proposals for multi-year projects realizing those ideas back to the council in the spring.
Some of the projects Batchelor said he’s most proud of from his time in Aurora include helping with the development of the Stanley Marketplace and negotiating contracts with Aurora’s police and firefighter unions.
Batchelor’s new job will require him to balance carrying out the will of the majority of the council and maintaining relationships with individual council members, who have been known to publicly clash over policies and personal disagreements.
He said striking a balance involves getting to know the perspective and interests of each council member while setting clear expectations for how he can and can’t help individual lawmakers accomplish their policy goals.
“I try and be clear with them that, while they may have individual policy agendas, it’s my job to get the information that they need to convince their colleagues. It’s not my job to convince their colleagues. That’s their job,” he said.
“I think that’s going well with the council. … It’s something that requires constant attention. Just like with any relationship, you want to make sure that you’re not taking it for granted.”
Under the form of government described by the city’s charter, the city manager also serves as a buffer between city employees and the political interests of individual council members.
The charter allows the council to hire and fire a few top officials such as the city manager, city attorney and municipal judge. However, council members are forbidden from meddling in the appointment and replacement of the majority of employees, and they can only give orders to those employees through the city manager.
That means a council member who wanted someone hired or fired for political reasons would have to go through the city manager, whose refusal to go along could lead to consequences for their own job.
Aurora’s current council members haven’t withheld their candid opinions about officials serving under the city manager, criticizing and sometimes openly insulting leaders of city departments.
In 2022, Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky referred to then-police chief Vanessa Wilson as “trash” on a talk radio show due to Wilson’s handling of police reform, and Mayor Mike Coffman and other council conservatives lamented the “failure of leadership” in the department after a city consultant raised concerns about a record-keeping backlog.
Wilson was fired not long after these and other comments — she and the city dispute what led up to her firing, with Wilson saying that some council members pressured then-city manager Jim Twombly into firing her because of her efforts to hold cops accountable for misconduct. The city has said Wilson’s firing was apolitical and that she neglected to manage the operations of the police department and engage officers.
When asked how he would respond if he faced pressure to replace an employee for reasons unrelated to their job performance, Batchelor said he would try to understand any council member’s concerns about an employee but that he wouldn’t abdicate his duty to fairly manage the city’s workforce.
Echoing a comment made weeks earlier by Art Acevedo, who resigned as the city’s police chief in January, Batchelor said he is “here to do the job, not keep my job.”
“Ultimately, that’s my decision. And I’ll handle that, and the councilor could hold me responsible for the performance of the organization,” he said.
On the topic of Acevedo’s departure, Batchelor said the city is still determining how it wants to proceed with finding someone willing and qualified to serve as chief on more than an interim basis.
The interim chief title has since passed to Heather Morris, a retired Texas police officer who Acevedo invited to join the Aurora Police Department as his second-in-command last year.
Batchelor praised Morris on Wednesday, saying her appointment had promoted stability during the leadership change and that she has done a good job so far of reaching out to officers.
“It’s given me the ability to kind of step back and take some time to think through what’s next,” Batchelor said. “We’ll probably over the coming weeks try to figure out what’s next in terms of filling that position on a permanent basis. We’re just not there yet.”
Batchelor also said Acevedo put the city “back on track” to meeting the goals of the consent decree, which requires the Aurora Police Department and Aurora Fire Rescue to enact dozens of operational changes meant to crack down on racial bias and the use of excessive force by police officers as well as the improper use of sedatives by paramedics.
In 2023, the department implemented many of the reforms in the decree, including by rewriting policies on physical force and constitutional rights, retraining officers on those policies and changing how uses of force are reviewed after the fact.
APD also struggled to produce data quantifying uses of force and the demographics of people contacted by police, which the firm tasked with monitoring the city’s compliance with the decree described as “extremely concerning,” and missed a deadline for anti-bias training.
Batchelor acknowledged that the city made assumptions that have since turned out to be false about the amount of time that it would take to meet some of the goals in the decree.
In some cases, such as the department’s data woes, Batchelor said the delays were due to technological challenges. Other times, like when the department decided to tailor an anti-bias training for Aurora officers, Batchelor said the city and department accepted that it would take more time than initially planned to meaningfully comply with the decree.
“It’s the old adage, right? You don’t know what you don’t know,” he said. “It’s not for lack of effort. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for lack of any of those things. It’s that we want to get it right.”
Batchelor said he is proud of how close the department is to rolling out an online portal that will allow the public to view current enforcement data. He said the portal would become active in the coming weeks.
He also anticipated the department will finish implementing all of the reforms included in the decree “in the next few weeks,” at which point the second phase of the decree will commence, with the monitoring firm following the department’s compliance with the changes for the next three years.
When asked whether he felt any sense of closure following the mixed prosecutions last year of the first responders involved in the homicide of Elijah McClain, which spurred the creation of the decree, Batchelor said he viewed the incident as something the city should find lessons in rather than try to move past.
“It is something that, as an organization, is now part of us,” he said. “It’s something that I think we have to be aware of and continue to learn from.”
As for the most pressing issues facing the city’s administration, Batchelor mentioned the struggles the City of Aurora and businesses face hiring and holding onto qualified employees.
He highlighted the ongoing cooperation between the city’s Human Resources Department and APD, which he said has contributed to the largest police academy cohort seen by the department in years. But he said he wants to figure out what else the city can do to hire and retain employees.
In response to the question of whether he views advocacy on behalf of city staffers to the council as part of his job, Batchelor said the role includes honestly explaining the challenges faced by his administration as well as maintaining high standards among the city’s 3,000-plus employees.
“It’s also about holding people accountable. That’s part of what we do as leaders is make sure that we’re getting performance from the entire organization,” he said.
“Our job as a city is to make sure that the services we’re providing to our residents and our businesses are top-notch. And I want folks to know that they’re very fortunate to have a high-performing organization where there’s thousands of employees who come to work every day to make their quality of life better.”