AURORA | Monday’s Aurora City Council meeting will not be held in person tonight because of unsepcified security threats, according to city officials and sources asking to remain anonymous.
Related to that, the city council meeting segment dedicated to public comment was cancelled for Monday.
Both the 5:15 p.m. study session meeting and 6: 30 p.m. regular session were moved to “virtual” status, where lawmakers use virtual meeting software to convene and the meeting is live-streamed via the city’s YouTube channel.
Multiple city sources, asking to remain anonymous, said the council meeting was moved to virtual status after “credible” danger was posed to the city.
Neither police nor city administrators would offer details about the reported threats.
They added that the “public invited to be heard,” or public comment segment, was canceled because the city has yet to develop a protocol for vetting virtual comment, and that security threats were somehow linked to potential comment, multiple Sentinel sources said.
According to Sentinel sources, City Attorney Pete Schulte emailed council members early last week, relaying the police department’s safety concerns and asking them to respond individually about whether they would want to cancel public comment.
City council rules require a public vote to make changes to agenda, and precluding public comment would take a super-majority of council members, according to city documents.
Sentinel sources said there will probably be a public vote to cancel the “public invited to be heard” at the beginning of Monday’s meeting.
“City council can provide direction to staff before their meetings and then vote to suspend the rules,” said Ryan Luby, Aurora deputy director of communications. “Two-thirds of the council members individually have indicated to staff they will do so at the upcoming meetings – the required threshold in Council Rules to do so.”
It was unclear at press time whether the solicitation for mail votes by the city attorney’s office among city lawmakers violates state open meeting laws.
Sentinel sources said it appeared through conversations that the next city council meeting in February could also be moved from public to “virtual” status.
A regular public commenter at city council meetings, Auon’tai Anderson, told the Sentinel Friday that he was upset the public comment was canceled. Anderson and others regularly speak to the city council regarding the Aurora police shooting death of Kilyn Lewis last year.