Residents of Colorado’s third-biggest city will vote on whether to adopt a “strong-mayor” system — a variation of what’s already in place in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Denver.
On July 25, the Aurora City Clerk determined that a petition handed in by the “Yes on Term Limits and Empowering the Mayor” campaign had the nearly 12,200 signatures needed to put it on the ballot.
Aurora would be the fourth Colorado city with a strong-mayor system.
But there’s bipartisan opposition to the proposal on Aurora City Council. “My opposition isn’t about one person or one party,” says Curtis Gardner, an Aurora councilman and registered Republican. “It’s about right now, in our current system, we have ten council members and a mayor with diverse backgrounds and experience to represent the whole city. I don’t want to consolidate that into the hands of one person.”
Having a council with diverse backgrounds “creates compromise,” adds Gardner, and in a strong-mayor system, “that doesn’t happen. If something is not the priority of a strong mayor, then it doesn’t get done.”
“We would see the same kind of nepotism and cronyism and spoils that we see in other strong-mayor forms of government across the country,” Marcano says. “There’s a certain level of that in Denver. You can see the folks who got appointed to [Johnston’s] transition team were former opponents of Mayor Johnston, and some of those folks are going to get permanent positions.”
Aurora “would see a lot of favoritism in terms of campaigning support,” Marcano explains. Endorsements could come in exchange for promised positions, he claims, and “more fundamentally, it makes the mayor’s office in Aurora the position that will likely go to the highest bidder.”
The technical name for a strong mayor setup is the “mayor-council system of governance.” In it, the mayor acts like a company CEO: drafting the budget, serving as the face and voice of the city, negotiating contracts for large projects, having the power to veto anything the city council passes, hiring and firing the heads of dozens of agencies and departments, and appointing people to hundreds of positions, including on boards and commissions.
“Putting all that power in the hands of one individual is a recipe for nepotism and corruption,” Gardner says. “It’s an opportunity for that one individual to place people into positions of power that they may or may not be qualified for, but might be campaign donors or might be political friends.”
The alternative to a strong mayor is known as a “city manager” or “weak mayor” government, which puts all the executive duties — such as budgeting, hiring and firing department heads and supervising daily operations — in the hands of a city manager. That’s the system in place in Aurora currently, as well as in most Colorado cities and towns.
Aurora is roughly the fiftieth-largest city in the country, with a population of about 380,000, according to the U.S. Census. Supporters of Aurora’s strong-mayor system argue in favor of it because of the city’s population growth.
Aurora currently has an interim city manager — Jason Batchelor — who came into his position in May after Jim Twombly retired in April after five years in the position. If the strong-mayor proposal passed in Aurora, the city manager position would be eliminated entirely and replaced with a chief of staff appointed by the mayor.
A bipartisan coalition has formed on the Aurora City Council to oppose Mayor Mike Coffman’s push for a strong-mayor government.
Aurora City Council
City size is irrelevant, Gardner argues, and many of the cities with weak mayors are larger than Denver.
“I would argue that a lot of the cities that are strong mayor aren’t as well run as some of the city manager governments,” Gardner says. “Part of that is because you have a city manager — you have a professional manager — who understands budgeting and all the other things that go into running a city rather than an elected politician who in a lot of cases may not really be qualified for that.”
Gardner looks to Denver and Colorado Springs for comparisons with Aurora’s proposal. “Colorado Springs has what I would describe as a ‘strong mayor light.’ They do have a strong mayor, but council still has a significant role in how the city is run day to day,” he says. “Denver goes a little further in terms of the amount of influence the mayor can have. [Aurora’s] proposal goes even further.”
“Under [Aurora’s] proposal, that does not exist,” Gardner says. “The mayor would have big latitude.”
Denver’s ballot measure wasn’t a reflection of what the people in Denver wanted, Webb says. Instead, it was “a concentrated effort by city council to weaken the strong-mayor form of government, and they were successful in their quest.”
A strong mayor would certainly affect the Aurora Police Department, which is under a reform-by-consent decree after the death of Elijah McClain. “The council really is the body that represents the people and ultimately will hold the chief of police accountable,” Marcano says. “With this change, it would just be the mayor.”
“There is a small element related to term limits, but that’s four lines in a multi-page document,” Gardner says. “There are several examples in this [campaign] of our residents being lied to, and that’s disappointing.”
“It wasn’t a big surprise,” Gardner says.
Voters who want their signature taken off the ballot have until 5 p.m. on August 14 to submit a written protest to the city clerk’s office, as opponents of the proposal are encouraging they do. Written protests can be emailed to [email protected]. They can also be dropped off or mailed to the City Clerk’s Office, 1st Floor, 15151 East Alameda Parkway, Aurora, CO. A copy of the proposal and more details can be found online.
“It’s not cleared to be on the ballot yet,” Marcano says. “People still have a chance to protest and have their signatures removed.”
The proposal “never went through a process of community engagement,” says Gardner, who notes that if it passes, “it takes effect right away. “What are things going to look like at City Hall on November 8? … A lot of that is unknown.”
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