EDITORIAL: Appeals court agrees with the Sentinel — Aurora council can’t keep a secret

Clearly, the Aurora City Council has yet to grasp the secret to success in governing: No secret meetings.

The hard and principled truth behind that was driven home last week when the Colorado Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion that the Aurora City Council violated state law when it voted in secret last year to end censure proceedings against Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky.

It’s the second time a Colorado court has made such a finding after the Sentinel sued in an effort to force Aurora to make public recordings of the illegal meeting. The lawsuit was made possible by a local collaborative effort among news media, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

The debacle began with a Jan. 27, 2022 appearance by Jurinsky on a local right-wing talk radio show.

Jurinsky spent considerable on-air time criticizing officials in Aurora’s beleaguered police department, which had not long before entered into a consent decree with the state’s attorney general to make numerous reforms. The mandates came after a long investigation revealing patterns of racism, malfeasance, accountability and shrouding information.

Jurinsky talked disparagingly about then-Chief Vanessa Wilson and especially about the deputy chief. She told KNUS radio show host Steffan Tubbs and listeners that she wanted to fire the chief and talked with her about firing her deputy chief as a show of good faith.

Aurora operates under a council-manager form of government, and the chief reports to the city manager, not the city council. City lawmakers are precluded from intervening or interfering in personnel matters.

The radio interlude prompted former Councilmember Juan Marcano to seek censure against Jurinsky, in part because of her comments.

Jurinsky claimed the issue was one of free speech.

Rather than debate the issue in public, the city council decided to upend Marcano’s censure effort — illegally in a closed meeting — according to witnesses and the city’s own admissions.

According to lawmakers and staff in the room, at one point Mayor Mike Coffman polled each council member about the issue. Those wanting to stop the censure proceedings prevailed.

It was a flagrant abuse of open meeting laws, convening government action in secret.

A district court, and now the state appellate court, agreed.

But the district court judge ruled earlier this year that the city essentially “cured” the illegal meeting by having limited discussion for public benefit at a later meeting.

The appellate court ruling was profound: There is no “cure” for an illegal secret meeting. The public’s business was wrongly conducted behind closed doors. The only remedy is to release the tape of the meeting and allow for the scrutiny the public was deprived of more than a year ago.

So far, the city has yet to comply with the court order to release the recording to the Sentinel. The city has about a month left to comply or appeal the decision.

Fighting against sound public policy and law — requiring that all public business, with very few exceptions, be conducted in public and be available for public scrutiny — only makes this exploit all the more tawdry.

It’s also a waste of taxpayer money to continue this unjust and futile fight.

The city hasn’t spent its own legal staff time on defending its illegal meeting. City attorney officials hired outside counsel to argue its case in district court, and then again during the Sentinel’s appeal.

It’s almost certain that, should the city council agree, the city attorney’s office would continue to hire outside counsel for a final appeal.

The cost of all this outside legal help to protect the city’s ability to conduct business in secret has yet to be released to the Sentinel. The city has required reporters file Colorado Open Records Act requests rather than simply supply what is clearly public information: how the city spends public tax dollars.

The good news from all this is that the courts have made explicit that legal semantics used to conceal what is obviously an illegally conducted meeting won’t be overlooked by the courts. Aurora, and all state governments, must conduct the public’s business in public.

Just as importantly, offering parts of a secret meeting in public does not expunge the city’s illegal behavior. Aurora, and other guilty governments, must divulge their secrecy to the public.

Transparency isn’t just lawful government, it’s good government.