EDITORIAL: Colorado courts have ruled for the public. Aurora must heed open meeting laws

An Arapahoe County District Court decision illustrated the folly among those who insist that government is best when run like a business.

Government, including the City of Aurora, is not a business.

The City Council that does run Aurora last week lost a court case filed by the Sentinel earlier this year in an effort to ensure the city follows state open meetings laws and conducts the public’s business in public.

The Aurora City Council — again — did not in the case of a council committee that oversees top city officials and minds the behavior of fellow city lawmakers.

Aurora’s City Council has about a dozen standing committees, generally composed of three council members, which review and preview a wide range of city legislation, activities and other city business.

In nearly every instance, the meetings are open to the public, and the Sentinel regularly covers the meetings.

One committee that regularly precludes the public is the Council Appointee Evaluation Committee.

The committee work is sometimes of great interest to the public because its three members act as sort of an ethics committee, hearing complaints from city employees about city lawmakers.

That was the case when city employees complained about off-hand and inappropriate, sexual remarks made to city employees by Councilmember Steve Sundberg in 2021.

The same committee fell under scrutiny for how it reviewed Sundberg’s misbehavior, for which he later apologized. The committee not only met behind closed doors to discuss Sundberg’s behavior and allegations, but it erred in how the meeting was posted and how minutes of the meeting were handled, according to an Oct. 16, 2022 story by reporter Max Levy.

Essentially, the committee met to hear allegations against Sundberg, and it decided there was no cause for a rebuke. The committee did this without informing the public, and without recording the meeting, required under state open meetings laws.

Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said at the time that, if the group of three council members made the decision not to discipline Sundberg, the city put itself in a dubious position by not keeping records of their meetings.

Despite multiple stories in the Sentinel and other media, and Sentinel house editorials criticizing the city for its lack of transparency and appreciation for doing the public’s business in public, committee members repeated their unlawful acts last fall.

This time, however, armed with attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Colorado open-meetings attorney Steve Zansberg, the Sentinel was able to force the City Council by court order to provide a recording of an Oct. 13, 2023 meeting, held unlawfully because the city, once again, did not follow state law outlining how the public had to be notified.

In a May 15, 2024 ruling by Judge Elizabeth Beebe Volz, the city was forced to hand over a video recording of the meeting. The city violated state law again by not recording two subsequent Review Committee meetings.

Determined to prevent the public from hearing what the committee discussed, the City Council has authorized, so far, more than $40,000 in legal expenses, “including the cost of hiring outside attorneys, to fight the release of the 2022 and 2023 executive session recordings requested by the Sentinel,” according to the Sentinel’s most recent story.

The money comes from the city’s general fund, your tax dollars.

City council members seem determined to keep the public from hearing what they say — officially — about one another and about the city’s top officials.

The city manager, city attorney, chief judge and courts administrator are selected by and report to the city council. All other city employees are managed by those council appointees.

In Aurora’s council-manager form of government, these four appointees — and especially the city manager and city attorney — essentially run the city. Their performance, often behind the scenes of public purview, is of keen interest to city residents and businesses.

But city lawmakers insist that the city council’s opinion of their performance is a private matter, not the public’s business.

“If I as an employer can’t have candid conversations with my employees or with my other executives about a particular employee’s performance because it could end up being in the newspaper, (we) just won’t have them,” Councilmember Dustin Zvonek said in this week’s Sentinel.

Such a notion comes from some politicians who say the government should be “run like a business.” 

They are not employees of the City Council.

These appointees make upward of $300,000 a year and — individually — have more influence on the public than any other government official in Aurora. City council members do not have any “employees” working for them among Aurora’s government. 

The role of the city council is to make policy. The role of the city council appointees is to see that it’s carried out. Their ability, or inability, to do that is of primary concern to the public.

To ensure top city officials and elected officials are acting on the public’s behalf — and not their own — meetings and the public’s business must be conducted in public.

The Colorado Court of Appeals has made that clear. Judge Volz has now made that clear. The Aurora City Council must follow the law.