QUID HAS HEARD the folks at City Hall are making a run on wick and wax, scrounging up as many candles as they can for this fine burg’s 125th birthday — the celebration itself stretching from this spring until whenever everyone gets sick to death of the quasquicentennial or the calendar ticks over to 2017, whichever comes first. The good people of the Aurora History Museum already have trotted out an assortment of historical pics that have already become ingrained in the memories of anyone who’s lived in A-Town longer than the most-recent, millennial-infused, population-engorging green rush. So while all the usual suspects will be having their cake and eating it, too, Quid would like to remind you, dear reader, of all of the amazing history that Aurora and the area has beyond the curated collection down on Alameda Parkway. Who could forget Tracy Baker and his double-billing of Arapahoe County and expensing out a lux suite at Adam’s Mark Hotel and hundreds of sexually explicit messages made while carrying on an affair with one of his employees in the Clerk and Recorder’s office? Surely his old cell merits a pedestal placement amid it all. And the walls definitely need to be cleared for framed Jack Kirby drawings of the failed Science Fiction Land. And once all the snow melts off, perhaps there should be an outdoor memorial for Aurora’s first tree, which was planted circa 1993 and later joined by about a dozen other saplings. Alas, it was chopped down in recent years, pulped and used as paper for the countless lawsuits filed over the Gaylord Rockies project. A moment of silence, if you would.
AND QUID HAS HEARD that the ongoing saga of photo red-light cameras is speeding into a yellow as the hoo-haws on city council edge closer to re-upping the contract with Xerox, which runs the system that you curse when that $75 fine shows up in your mail. Lots of budget-minded folks see red on the horizon for Aurora’s coffers, and doing anything to upset the photo red-light revenue apple cart would further complicate things. Enter Ward IV rabble-rouser Charlie Richardson, who is working with the city attorney to prohibit cracking the whip for any red-light scofflaw who gets caught at a yellow light shorter than four seconds. In case you haven’t noticed, not all photo red-light intersections are created equally — it remains to be seen if they will remain endowed by their creators with the ability to bring in upward of $3 million each year.
AND THAT’S ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS.