While Mayor Steve Hogan worked to minimize the partisan politics of the Aurora City Council before he died, there are apparently forces working to bring them back.

Hogan died May 13 after a cancer diagnosis he got just a couple of months ago. His death leaves about 18 months of his term unfilled.

In recent memory, nothing like this has happened before. Aurora has only had a full-time mayor for three mayors now. They all left after serving their terms.

Like most modern cities its size, Aurora is run by a council-manager form of government.  City council makes policy and hires the city manager. The city manager takes care of daily operations. It’s more like a large corporation than a government. The city manager is Aurora’s CEO, in charge of an operation that spends $340 million a year and employs about 3,740 people.

Aurora’s mayor is the city’s chairman of the board. He, or she, however, is the face of the city more than anyone else.

It’s not as if the city is rudderless without a mayor, but the city council is.

Hogan’s fans and detractors all agree that his strength was forging direction and consensus among an increasingly disparate city council. He privately solicited opinions and moods from city lawmakers on issues, weaving compromise into issues before they ever got to the council floor.

I frequently argued with Hogan about how important it was for the public to be privy to those conversations, because they were just as important as the final vote. The “why” and the “why not” shed important light on real agendas and motivations, even with the most seemingly innocuous of issues.

Hogan often argued that nothing would get done if government had to play out every detail in public. But I think even Hogan would be quick to drop a dime to The Sentinel to make public some recent shenanigans among city lawmakers.

Without doubt, everyone on city council fancies themselves qualified for mayor. I agree, only because there really are no qualifications for the job.

But I would be hard-pressed to point to anyone on city council right now as the right person for the position — except Councilman Bob LeGare.

He wants the job.

This is where things get real. The city council wouldn’t pick anyone off of the dais to do the job, even if one of the candidates was Jesus. While the slate is filling up with interesting contenders for the vacancy, it would be impossible to find six people on the current city council to agree to hand over the keys to Aurora to an outsider. At least one city council rep, Bob Roth, has all but filed papers to run for the seat next year.

But LeGare isn’t one of them. In fact, he’s guaranteeing he won’t run for mayor in 2019. Having known LeGare for all of his two tours of duty on the dais, he’s been a man of his word.

Here’s more reality. It’s unlikely that anyone but LeGare can muster six votes for the vacancy. And as Hogan and mayors before him were fond of saying, you can do anything you want in Aurora if you can get six votes.

I’m not ruling out the paper-thin chances that someone outside of city council would have such strong appeal that the city council would invite in a perfect stranger as board chairman. We’ll see.

But here’s where the reality of partisan politics comes into the equation. If LeGare is elevated to the mayor’s office, it creates a vacant, at-large seat on the city council.

More than a couple of insiders say there’s a proposal to let former Councilwoman Sally Mounier have the seat, mostly because she’s only nine months away from vesting in her city council lifetime pension.

Really really, folks.

Mounier lost her bid for re-election to her Ward I council seat last fall to Crystal Murillo, whom Mounier has made clear she does not like.

But Mounier is a Republican, which is how she won appointment to her Ward seat the first time.

Despite the city council being explicitly non-partisan by design, the partisan politics have long been thick with this group — from both sides of the aisle.

Given that even the most ardent Republican might yield to the reality of a toxic council with Mournier on board, hoisted not for the sake of the city residents and taxpayers, but for Mounier’s pension, cooler heads will likely look elsewhere.

Heirs apparent this time around are said to be former Aurora policeman Tim Huffman for the Republicans, and former RTD board member Tom Tobiassen for the Dems. Both were candidates for city council last year.

Tobiassen came within a few votes of winning an at-large seat last November. Since that was the logic for handing a seat to former Councilman Brad Pierce a few years ago, that would put Tobiassen next in line.

Of course, the partisan letters don’t spell that out like they did when Republican council members were able to bring back a fellow Republican.

But rumors, the city lawmakers behind them, and I, get ahead of ourselves.

First the city council has to pick a mayor. Hogan’s replacement has a full agenda for the next 18 months, choosing a new city manager, shaping the next building boom, haranguing RTD and helping protect the city from the Trump Administration. Hopefully, the city council will see the wisdom of making this and other vacancy moves public and transparent.

So let’s get on with it.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook, or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColoradol.com