Just as important as whom the Aurora City Council chooses to fill the remaining term of deceased Mayor Steve Hogan, is how the city council arrives at its decision.
The city council meets in open session Monday night to discuss those details, and that’s the form it should follow through the process.
Hogan died May 13 after a battle with cancer, creating a vacancy that must be filled by city council appointment, and not a special election. That’s a matter the city council should reconsider for future vacancies that carry substantial time in office.
Aurora is governed by a council-manager system. Although the mayor’s position is full-time, he or she acts more as a member of city council than the city’s administration. The city council and mayor appoint the city manager and make policy. The city manager carries out that policy and daily municipal operations.
Aurora is a large and complex government, which includes one of the largest and most powerful water agencies in Colorado, an urban renewal authority governing billions of dollars in development and a unified city government employing upward of 4,000 people.
The decisions this city council makes in whom becomes the public face of Aurora and guides the city council in making decisions is important not just to the approximately 350,000 people who live here and thousands of commercial and government concerns, but to the entire state.
Aurora is home to Buckley Air Force Base and Anschutz medical campus, composed of the University of Colorado med schools, university hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado and in just weeks, a massive, regional VA hospital complex.
Because of the vast influence Aurora’s mayor and city council cast on so many issues and entities critical to the metro area and the state, job one for the Aurora City Council is to ensure every aspect of the selection process is held in public.
Previously, city councils have held discussions about whom to interview or whom to select in closed sessions, stating that the issue is a “personnel” matter in nature and privy to executive session.
It’s not. With the unfinished term of Hogan being so long, over a year, it borders on being an institutionalized end-run on the electoral process. And should city council choose a mayor among themselves, such a move would open a seat on the city council that almost should be filled by appointment, rather than a vote of Aurora residents.
Already, some members of city council are sporting plots and plans to fulfill partisan or political goals, making a public process all the more important.
Transparent and open government isn’t a cause for one party over the other, or left over right, it benefits all political flavors and causes. But most importantly, open and accountable discussion on an event that supersedes the public’s democratic role must be held in a public forum.