PERRY: The forces behind Aurora’s mayor king scam won’t come out of the dark, so here’s some light

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman isn’t talking about a clandestine plan to make his job supremely powerful in the city.

So allow me.

If you’ve missed the latest on just how weird the state’s third-largest city can be, I’ll fill you in.

A month or so ago, readers started calling the Sentinel, saying they thought they’d been hoodwinked by petition gatherers.

With no notice at all, canvassers were popping up at local grocery stores and a post office, asking people to sign a petition for a ballot initiative petition collectors said would strengthen the city’s term-limit regulations.

Several phone calls and emails from reporters here turned up little detail about why, out of the blue, someone was interested in city council term limits.

Normally, that kind of detail about a ballot initiative — which is the term for the law that allows residents to write legislation and enact it with a majority of voter approval — is easy to find. That’s because, normally, any group who wants to get an initiative passed is anxious to make their case to the public.

That’s absolutely not the case here.

The more reporters from the Sentinel tried to find out who wrote the so-called “Term Limits for a Better Aurora” legislation, who was behind promoting it, and who was paying to write it and pay canvassers to get the proposal on the November ballot, the more everybody loosely connected to the scheme refused to talk.

It took only hours after city lawmakers and others saw the text of the proposal that everyone figured out the “term limits” ploy was a ruse. The real purpose of the ballot question is to undermine Aurora’s city council form of government and create a mayor-king who would run pretty much everything in the city, with virtually unilateral authority.

I’m old, and I’ve been doing this Aurora journalism thing for a long, long time, and I’ve seen some things.

But I have never seen anything as dubious as this colossal scam.

There are virtually no records at city hall about who’s behind this swindle, and it’s pretty sure the backer of this bogus bill wants to keep it that way.

Besides the copy of the whopping 22-page rewrite of city government structure, making the mayor into Aurora’s Decider, few other facts exist. There’s a treasurer of the campaign, who works with a Denver lawyer who reportedly filed some paperwork associated with the proposal, and three people who signed the originating petition, to get the eight-ball rolling. 

At the top of the list is Garrett Walls, a member of the Aurora Planning and Zoning Commission. As soon as The Sentinel and other metro reporters started calling, Walls backed away from the scheme, deferring to, ummm, others.

Walls told the Denver Gazette that he talked about it with Coffman. Same thing for Elizabeth Hamilton and Paul Mitchell. When Sentinel reporter Carina Julig went to their home to find out who asked them to sign and why, they volunteered that Coffman bought them lunch and asked them to sign.

Sources on city council say Coffman pitched the idea as a referendum when former City Manager Jim Twombly announced his resignation earlier this year. Those in a closed meeting said the mayor was loudly told to “go fish.”

Looks like he did.

After weeks of digging, every sign points back to Coffman and his political pals, and they all refuse to talk about their involvement.

I can see why. Not only is the bait-and-switch petition drive a scam — a growing list of voters who got swindled into signing the thing want their names stricken but can’t figure out how — but it’s even worse than what Coffman’s elected Aurora peers say about the scandal.

“This is extremely deceptive for the people of Aurora, and whoever is behind this, shame on you,” Conservative Republican Danielle Jurinsky said during a press conference about a month ago, where just about every other elected official, current and past, the police, the fire department and more appeared for a rare bipartisan dog-pile on this “shameless power grab.”

Coffman repeatedly says that he will only talk about it when and if the measure makes the ballot.

So here’s the deal, this is not just Coffman single handedly trying to ram this thing down the throats of Aurora voters. He’s getting help from an eclectic gang of Colorado far-right Republicans.

First, there’s Suzanne Taheri. She’s the Denver lawyer who city officials say filed paperwork for the term-limit scam, and a former GOP candidate for a state Senate seat in Denver.

Her associate is Steve Ward. He and Taheri also worked together on the effort to ask voters to lower the state’s sales tax. He’s listed as the treasurer of the Aurora term-limit scam committee.

If he sounds familiar, it’s because he’s an Englewood city councilman and the only private citizen who joined in a recent lawsuit by a far-right Republican group that tried to keep the Democrats’ Proposition HH off the ballot this fall.

If you press hard enough among those who are desperately trying to gnaw their legs off — trapped-coyote style — to get away from this thing, they’ll point you to Tyler Sandberg.

If you don’t remember, Sandberg was Coffman’s campaign manager back when he lost his congressional seat to current Democratic Congressman Jason Crow. Sandberg has been tied in tight with a variety of GOP groups and causes, including Republican stalwart Josh Penry’s partisan machine.

Sandberg won’t talk either, other than to offer “go-team” word salad, without disclosing who’s asking him or paying him to say it.

Same goes for the guy behind the fraudulent petition drive in Aurora, which got booted from a local Post Office after the Sentinel started asking questions.

That would be Victor’s Canvassing of Colorado Springs, the nexus of the self-immolated remains of the Colorado Republican Party.

The GOP takes a lot of “sign here” business to Victor’s, run by Republican Daniel Fenalson. He isn’t talking either right now, despite the growing list of complaints about how his collectors tell people they’re signing up for stricter term limits, not to create an Aurora mayor-king.

For some weird reason, Colorado Springs is enamored with calling the shots in Aurora. The land of Focus on the Family, Douglas Bruce and Phil Anschutz can’t keep their cash or their opinions out of Aurora’s political business.

Even the Colorado Springs Gazette employees have their families helping out with Coffman’s mayor king caper. Besides offering gushy editorial praise for Coffman and his outlandish scheme, the son of Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Page Editor Wayne Laugesen, Huey Laugesen chipped in to deliver paper and petitions to the Aurora City Clerk’s office, according to city records and sources. He works for Colorado Springs Republican strategist Daniel Cole, principal of Cole Communications. Cole is also the CEO of Victor’s Canvassing, according to state records and social media.

You can’t keep following the stale Republican bread crumb trail on this thing without asking why the Colorado GOP is so interested in changing Aurora’s government. Surely they have access to county voting records that reveal Aurora, already home to a large left-leaning-and-voting majority, just keeps getting more that way.

National and regional pundits make it clear that in popular states like Colorado, where extremist Republicans decimated their party among rational voters, there’s a push to grab power in “non-partisan” governments like school boards and city councils.

But if voters pay attention to party affiliation from now on? Coffman and the GOP could seal themselves out of Aurora politics for good, especially with stunts like this.

All this is a gamble on the fine print in Coffman’s caper. If you read closely, you’ll see that the change to creating an Aurora mayor king takes effect almost immediately after this November’s election.

Whereas credible, vetted city charter changes go through months, even years of review, public scrutiny and vetting, this scheme was cooked up secretly and would allow whoever wins the mayor’s race in November to take over the city in January. Wham, bam.

Of course with everyone in Aurora other than Coffman already screaming “oh hell no” already, the chances for this hot mess to make it to ballot without a big fat lawsuit, let alone make it past voters, shrivels more every day.

It’s a shame this has cast a shadow on legitimate efforts to modify the city’s charter, because there are several changes with merit that deserve public scrutiny, a strong mayor system being among them. Aurora absolutely should consider the roles of the mayor and city council members. Perhaps it would be better for the council to appoint the police and fire chiefs, not the city manager.

It’s certainly time for Aurora to provide for runoff elections, rather than handing power to people sometimes with far less than majority-voter support. And if the city council is going to behave in clear partisan fashion, why not make it a partisan organ?

That’s not what this covert mess is about, however. With everyone associated with this thing already scuttling away as the media lights come on, who among the influential in Aurora would want this scarlet letter on their resume and conscience for the rest of their lives?

Perhaps we’ll see.

But they aren’t filing any paperwork in the city clerk’s office, and they’re certainly not returning phone calls from us or anyone in the media.

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