PERRY: City council is not a spectator sport. Lawmakers must listen — in public

It’s open season on the City of Aurora’s open government meetings.

After months of being berated and barraged with accusations and insults from public commenters at bi-weekly city council meetings, lawmakers have moved to keep the public quiet, or at least some of them.

Aurora City Council meetings have frequently been anything but tame. Aurora city lawmakers and residents are a vocal and boisterous lot.

There were the 1970s and 1980s days of Aurora Mayor Dennis Champine, who was renowned for being loudly frank with the public and fellow city officials. He once took a swing at the city attorney in 1979.

Mayor Paul Tauer was famously heavy-handed with the gavel and his public-school math-teacher “knock if off” barking baritone, regularly inflicted on the public during city council meetings.

Once furiously angry with Sentinel reporting when his son, Ed Tauer, applied for a council vacancy, Tauer leaned toward me at study session when I approached him, trembling and red when I asked for further comment.  He said, “Get away from me — now,” with a clenched fist.

I returned to my seat next to Ricky Bennett, the police chief at the time, who leaned over to me and said he was unclear what he was going to do in the awkward situation where the mayor punched a reporter.

Irked Aurora residents are equally not shy about their public criticism. 

Protesters have shut down Interstate 225 to make a statement about the wrongful killing of Elijah McClain in 2019.

Inside council chambers, both liberal and conservative lawmakers alike have drawn loud, unruly and often profane verbal attacks from residents standing behind the council lectern.

Residents angry about water restrictions, curfews, heavy-handed homeless intervention, lackadaisical homeless intervention, and just about every issue that comes before the city council have filled their ears with the public’s displeasure.

Former Mayor Bob LeGare was tormented almost weekly by protesters angry about the direction the city council had taken in handling mobile home parks being shut down by owners. One protester angrily called LeGare “Mayor F***boy” and even wrote it on a sheet cake placed in the council lobby at the end of a meeting, serving slices to meeting participants.

City Councilmember Alison Coombs last week told fellow lawmakers that when she was first elected to city council about five years ago, she was regularly verbally pummeled at council meetings by residents infuriated by her progressive votes and commentary from the dais. 

She’s among the few on the dais pushing back against city council efforts to stop a group of regularly appearing critics and protesters, focused primarily on the Aurora police shooting death of Kilyn Lewis last May.

Lewis was fatally shot while being arrested in Aurora in connection with allegations that he shot and injured a homeless man in Denver. During the planned SWAT arrest in an apartment parking lot, Lewis was putting his hands above his head with his cell phone in one hand when he was fatally shot by SWAT officer Michael Dieck.

Former Arapahoe County District Attorney John Kellner said he determined that Dieck broke no laws in the shooting death, and Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said Dieck did not violate any police policies.

The group, often led by former Denver School Board director and activist Auon’tai Anderson, has disrupted city council meetings for months, sometimes pushing the city council to recess and even scurrying to a private room to finish meetings.

The group insists the city council should intervene in the shooting, despite lawmakers from both sides of the issue making it clear the city council is precluded from doing that.

The comments are often heartbreaking, with Lewis’s family members lamenting the loss of their son and brother. They are just as often profane, alarming, repetitive and seemingly endless.

Exasperated by the constant, lengthy revilements, council members Stephanie Hancock and Danielle Jurinsky sponsored a bill that sought to end public comments before the meeting, push them to the back of the council meetings, which could mean 10 p.m. or even later. The measure would allow the city council and police to stop disrupted meetings if they felt like it, allowing lawmakers to finish them virtually, and even clear city council chambers, arresting those who don’t hustle out fast enough.

Aurora’s not alone in having crowds of angry and persistent frequent fliers essentially grab the wheel of government meetings. In 2022, the Institute for Local Government released a report and best practices about how to handle angry mobs overtaking public meetings.

Other than appealing to the public to be on their best behavior, and respect the rules regarding brevity and disruptive behavior, all that’s left is shutting down meetings and finishing them behind closed doors, a bad option that sets a bad precedent for governments often looking for a way around transparency.

Open meetings means open meetings.

As for closing down city council chambers during meetings and threatening arrests, that’s unacceptable.

While chanting protesters are absolutely disruptive and unruly, they’re not “terrorists,” which Hancock called them after scurrying into a closed meeting one-night last summer. She denies she said it, but her comments are on city council video recordings and are unequivocal. 

Councilmember Crystal Murillo pointed out that much of the problem with the lack of civility and decorum from council critics in the audience comes from the dire lack of those qualities among city lawmakers themselves. If council representatives can conjure up endless indignities from the dais, why shouldn’t the public be able to do the same from the lectern?

“If y’all have been watching long enough, you know that this council is not about respect,” Murillo said at the city council meeting last week. “If you’re not in the majority, this council has been vicious; personal attacks that don’t get decorum called on, straight-up lies to the media about what’s happening in our city. There’s no concern for the truth or respect.”

It’s a valid point, and one that the local government Institute says is often a big part of the problem and should be corrected.

It’s unclear why city council members simply don’t hold a public hearing regarding Lewis’s death. After that, if the regular protests continue, put the matter on the agenda each week, with limited public hearing time, automatically precluding the matter from being broached by the public during “Public Invited to be Heard” segments.

As for Lewis protesters, I once had an editor who listened patiently as I described everything I was doing to get stubborn, bullying sources to come clean on story details while I inflicted a long list of heavy-handed tactics — and got nothing.

“How’s that working for you?” my editor asked. The point was well taken.

Lewis’ death at the hands of Dieck is absolutely linked to the larger problem that has put Aurora police under the thumb of the Colorado state attorney general’s office. Whether Dieck was justified, or at least understandably wrong, in shooting Lewis is now a matter for the courts to decide, not the city council.

Whether Aurora police’s SWAT team bungled the arrest in the first place, something that could have prevented the shooting if the arrest was carried out differently, is for internal and independent experts to decide, not the city council.

Even if the Lewis protesters persist, pushing the entire city of residents out of city hall and restricting their already limited ability to make their concerns public, just like city lawmakers do, is bad business. It’s bad for the city and for the city council.

Champine, in talking with the Sentinel years after he retired, had good advice for impatient Aurora lawmakers when it comes to taking time to hear the public.

“Toward the end (of Champine’s tenure) things started to repeat themselves. I was sitting up at city council one night and somebody was talking. I found myself thinking, ‘Come on, come on, I’ve heard this so many times before.’ Then I caught myself, and said, ‘You may have heard it so many times before but you didn’t hear it from him. And if you’re not listening anymore, you need to move on.’ That was in 1986, and that’s when I decided not to run for mayor again.”

Listening is as much a part of the job of being a government representative as is talking. Suck it up.

 Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com