Strong-mayor prop opponents raise questions about process that led to Aurora clerk’s ruling

AURORA | Opponents of a campaign to empower Aurora’s mayor are questioning how the city clerk arrived at her decision to throw out a written protest Monday, calling out conflicting information shared by city leaders.

Former city official Charlie Richardson challenged the petition forms that the strong-mayor campaign used to gather signatures from registered voters to try to get the item on the 2023 ballot, saying the forms did not comply with city law.

Aurora City Clerk Kadee Rodriguez ultimately rejected Richardson’s arguments in a ruling issued Sept. 11, after that night’s Aurora City Council meeting. The city has said she was assisted by outside legal counsel while drafting her ruling.

Prior to the final ruling being issued, about 10 minutes before an executive session that preceded the council meeting, Councilmember Curtis Gardner said interim City Manager Jason Batchelor informed him that the clerk had ruled in favor of Richardson and was prepared to throw out the petitions.

But just a few hours later, Rodriguez ruled against Richardson, standing behind the format of the petitions that her office and the office of city attorney Dan Brotzman had helped create.

Mayor Mike Coffman was closely involved in the campaign to ask voters to empower Aurora’s mayor. While Gardner did not accuse Coffman of interfering in the drafting of the ruling, he pointed out that Coffman and Rodriguez were both absent from the executive session.

Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, who said she was seated near Gardner when he received the news from Batchelor, also questioned the discrepancy between what Batchelor said and the final ruling, and asked why Coffman and Rodriguez weren’t present for the session, calling the events “very strange.”

“Where was Coffman? (This is) just speculation, but was he off bullying Kadee?,” Jurinsky asked. “He just always feels so sneaky. Who the hell knows what’s going on? And it seemed like everything just changed. Like, in the blink of an eye.”

Coffman later said he recused himself from the executive session because it concerned the hiring of a permanent city manager, and the strong-mayor campaign still hopes to bring the matter before voters in 2025, as 2023 deadlines have passed.

“I never had any communications, written or oral, with the clerk over the ballot initiative but I assume that she had communications with the individual who was responsible for turning the petitions as well as with the lawyer for the ballot initiative who had to procedurally represent the interest of the initiative’s proponents before her,” he wrote in response to the question of whether he or anyone with the strong-mayor campaign had conferred with the clerk about her ruling between the time of the Aug. 30 hearing and Monday night.

The measure failed to make the November ballot because of a timing issue, which proponents say was caused by protests of the measure.

While Gardner said Batchelor told him the information came from a draft news release, Batchelor later said that he was relaying what other city employees, whose names he could not recall, told him.

“What I had heard was that they were going to rule against the proponents (and) that the signatures were invalid,” Batchelor said. “I was relaying information that I heard thirdhand; I had not spoken with Kadee. … You caught me participating in the City Hall rumor mill, so it is true that (Gardner) heard it from me, but I had nothing official.”

Batchelor said that, in retrospect, he believed he should not have shared the unverified information with Gardner.

Councilmember Alison Coombs said she had been told by Brotzman that Rodriguez was absent from the public portion of Monday’s council meeting because she was finalizing the ruling.

City spokesman Ryan Luby said in an email that Rodriguez was absent from the executive session because she was working on protest rulings, including Richardson’s. He said the clerk drafted the ruling solely with the help of her team and outside counsel.

“Staff cannot speak to the mayor’s whereabouts during the executive session, but the clerk did not confer with him or the petitioners during that time or at any time during the deliberations leading up to the decision in Mr. Richardson’s protest,” Luby wrote.

“The city clerk has complied with every facet of the city code and statutory guidelines throughout the entirety of the charter amendment proposal process. She and her team have relied on the City Attorney’s Office, and the outside legal counsel it hired, to provide legal interpretations of city code and research case law to guide all their work.”

Richardson said the opponents of the campaign have submitted open-records requests to try to better understand the decision-making process behind the clerk’s ruling. (The Sentinel has separately submitted a similar request.) He said he believed the fact that it took the city until the deadline to produce a ruling reflected some interference in the process.

“The fact that there was some bizarre behavior last night is indicative of some monkey business going on, but I don’t want to disparage monkeys,” he said.