Don’t stop now.
Led by Councilmember Curtis Gardner, Aurora lawmakers took the first step this week toward cleaning up the city’s frail ballot initiative regulations.
This week, city lawmakers unanimously moved to the council floor a measure that would make it a misdemeanor to try and deceive voters when presenting them with a petition to get a citizen initiative on the ballot.
“It’s unfortunate that I think we have to tell people they can’t deceive residents in Aurora when collecting signatures,” Gardner told fellow lawmakers on Monday. “But here we are.”
Yes, here we are.
Aurora voters are currently being suckered by a deceptive push to ask the electorate this fall to upend Aurora’s government structure and create a position of mayor-king to run the city next year.
“Unfortunate” is the diplomatic word that comes up a lot when anyone outside of Colorado Springs publicly talks about the attempt to hoodwink Aurora voters into approving this scam.
Getting someone to admit to being a part of the ruse is really hard. The Sentinel and other metro media have worked diligently to tell the public who’s behind the push to make the mayor the boss of everything, creating another berg like Denver, Chicago, or New York.
The people who wrote the deceptive proposal don’t want to step up and claim responsibility. The people who are paying the deceptive petition signature gatherers, hired by Victor’s Canvassing of Colorado Springs, don’t want to tell the public who they are. The people who won’t step up and stop signature collectors from lying to voters about what they’re signing are trying to keep all this quiet.
Even the contrived name of the “committee” behind the gambit is a total scam. Calling themselves “Term Limits for a Better Aurora,” one of the biggest complaint so far from those who actually read the fine print is that this has almost nothing to do with term limits.
The Sentinel revealed a few weeks ago that it’s the city’s current mayor, Mike Coffman, who luncheoned up an Aurora couple and talked them into putting at least one wrong address and both their John Henrys on the initial petition to get all this started. Another city official, a planning commissioner, also said Coffman hit him up to sign on the dotted line, but he’s since backed away from the plot.
Coffman has said repeatedly he’s not saying anything.
The rest of the characters involved in the ploy is a who’s who of Colorado Springs Republican politics and the dregs of past GOP campaigns that turned to vinegar.
Coffman’s old congressional campaign manager, Tyler Sandberg, kind of says he is the sorta-spokesperson for this mess. But he only offers a little boilerplate and no answers to questions about his involvement, who’s paying him and what his ties are to the mayor-king scandal.
Victor’s signature collectors? That’s an old Colorado Springs GOP stalwart. They’re not returning phone calls, either.
One of the few names on any city documents associated with the racket is a past GOP candidate for state legislature, Suzanne Taheri, a lawyer who may have filed some initiative paperwork with the city.
The campaign treasurer? An Englewood city councilmember-nee-paralegal who, along with some big-name Republicans, recently tried to sue Democrats over a statewide ballot measure.
They’re not talking.
The delivery boy? That’s the son of the Colorado Springs Gazette editorial writer, a former Soldier of Fortune editor who just can’t say enough good on the editorial page about Aurora’s mayor-king scam.
Behind all this deception is the fact that this is a poorly hidden attempt by Coffman, and a truckload of washed up statewide Republicans, to hang onto some corner of political power in Colorado, even if it’s just a city council here, a school board there or maybe an HOA in Elizabeth.
Tragically, the Colorado Republican Party is a raging dumpster fire, unparalleled in state history.
The glory days of solid, widely-admired conservatives like Bill Owens, Dottie Wham, Cole Wist, Al Meiklejohn, Ingrid Lindemann, Tony Grampsas and Cynthia Coffman are long, long gone. Current Colorado Springs GOP Chairperson Dave Williams has ushered in an era of GOP worship for Congressperson Lauren Boebert and sketchy election deniers like Tina Peters and the state’s foremost furry Fox-philiac, Heidi Ganahl.
Remaining Republican Party devotees are desperate to find a political foothold anywhere they can, including on the Aurora City Council.
There’s plenty of room on this city’s council for conservatives, liberals, small “l” libertarians, agnostics and progressives alike. But partisan politics have created a foul situation in Aurora, and it’s not hard to see how the motivation behind the mayor-king scam would make it even worse.
It’s a Republican and small “l” libertarian on the city council, Gardner, who’s been most vocal about the danger the mayor-king scam presents to the city, and how the dishonest way it’s trying to crawl onto the November ballot is even worse.
So he and other Republicans and Democrats alike are trying to fix the problem, after the fact.
Keep going.
As the Sentinel has dug and scraped for answers and details, we’ve found that once you’ve been conned into signing a mayor-king petition, believing the misleading summary or a collector’s false pitch, too bad for you. There’s no legal mechanism to get your name off the list.
Even though the city’s charter says the city clerk and attorney are supposed to write a petition summary, they didn’t, and they don’t think they should. There’s not even a mechanism the city wants to admit to or follow that forces officials to ensure the fakery in the mayor-king summary scheme doesn’t happen again.
And if you think it’s critically important to know who’s behind an attempt to change the government by voter fiat, or even rename a rural street, before you sign? Too bad. The city requires only the most meager of details, allowing anyone, including this current Republican mob, to sneak their proposal onto the streets of Aurora without having to provide even a hint of who they are and what they really want.
If you want a solid argument to save local journalism, this is it, folks.
This isn’t the first time Aurora voters have been duped by an initiative scam. Years ago, the owners of a Colorado Springs race track duped voters into banning race tracks here, only to shore up their own failing proposition down there. They used many of the same tactics the mayor-king clan are implementing right now.
Keep going, Gardner, and others on the city council. Clean this mess up once and for all so that the next time Aurora voters get a petition for a ballot initiative, they can have the truth, too.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
“Aurora voters are currently being suckered by a deceptive push to ask the electorate this fall to upend Aurora’s government structure and create a position of mayor-king to run the city next year.”
I don’t support the “strong mayor” model any more than Perry does, but this “mayor-king” pejorative is certainly par for the course for Perry’s puerile sensibilities. Aurora’s next-door neighbor has one of the most powerful executive positions in the country–the mayor of Denver arguably has more power to affect the state than even the Governor does, by virtue of both population and the construct of what the mayor can do.
The best argument against the petition is that the city has largely run just fine for decades under its current model, and any dysfunctions can be boiled down to the atmosphere of hyper-partisanship that took over after the Emerge claque took their seats on the council–something even the Sentinel inadvertently admitted a few years ago.
“Coffman has said repeatedly he’s not saying anything” Huh?
The Sentinel has reported they have gone through the CORA records request procedure with the city. It is odd the city has no records to be able to produce that have been filed by any of Coffman’s collaborators. Yes, this latest debacle, a fake bag-man by someone wanting a strong mayor has created an upcoming unmanageable situation for Mayor Coffman.
I couldn’t disagree with Perry any more that this is some feeble attempt of some kind of GOP- going out of business coup to take over Aurora politics. This planed take-over has to many troubling challenges and would likely only accomplish Coffman will be hoisted by his own petard.
“Strong-Mayor” or Strong Mayor” seem specific search terms. A CORA request to the mayor’s staff and the city attorney’s office, the only city offices with staff with the expertise to write this initiative, demanding the author and date of any document, whether memorandum, email, or draft legislation mentioning either of those specific terms might well be telling. If the mayor worked on this himself, or with outside consultants there would be no documents. If the documents and emails do exist, that tells 90% of the story. The city can claim privileges for the contents of the documents, for advice given, but not that some discussion was had or some efforts made and by whom, how often, and when.
Dont believe anything this hack says
The message here is that, as citizens of Aurora, we’re too stupid to read the text of what we’re voting on. That the very act of studying issues and candidates, and casting a vote (a right held by every person 18 and up), has become more than the average citizen can navigate. Because the absolute worst thing that can happen here is that this gets on the ballot, The Sentinel exposes and advises against voting for it, and the stupid lemmings of Aurora vote for it anyway.
This voter can read. And will carefully study whatever shows up on the ballot this fall — regardless of how it got on there. Aside from cluttering the ballot with too much stuff (something if I recall has been dealt with) I am unconcerned with the initiative process and hijink$ of those who might abuse it. Because I get to vote; and you get to vote.