The campaign for a proposed ballot measure that would give more authority to the Aurora mayor’s office has heated up in recent weeks, and a campaign finance report submitted Monday shows Mayor Mike Coffman contributed $10,000 to the effort.

The “Term Limits and Empowering the Mayor For A Better Aurora” campaign, submitted its first campaign finance report by the Monday night deadline, detailing contributions to the initiative.

Last week, Coffman admitted to backing the initiative to change Aurora’s form of government after previously avoiding discussing his role in the “citizen-led” effort. Aurora residents Elizabeth Hamilton, Paul Mitchell and Garrett Walls are listed as the petition representatives to get the question on the ballot.

Coffman said getting more than 12,000 signatures on a petition is not an easy feat, so he didn’t want to publicly support the measure until he knew it could make it onto the ballot. While he supported getting the initiative off the ground and has significantly helped fund it, he plans to focus on his own campaign for re-election in the coming months.

The reports released Monday show another $144,000 was reported as an in-kind monetary contribution to the campaign from Colorado Springs-based 501(c)4 organization “Colorado Dawn” to collect signatures for the petition in Aurora; and another contribution of a $100 monetary donation from Colorado Dawn was also listed. The fund has previously supported GOP causes but does not disclose its donors.

No other contributions were reported for the Aurora campaign.

If Aurora residents pass the charter amendment, it would shift Aurora’s system of government from a “council-manager” form of government — in which the city manager reports to the City Council but oversees city staff, and the mayor only votes on ordinances when he or she needs to break a tie — to a form known as “strong mayor,” or “mayor-council.” That means whoever is in the position of mayor could hire and fire department heads, and they could veto ordinances that the City Council passes. Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo use this style of government, as do other cities across the country.

The proposal received its first approval from the city clerk’s office to make it onto the November ballot, but now residents have the opportunity until 5 p.m. Aug. 14 to file protests about the validity of the signatures on the petition. A hearing would take place 10-20 days after each protest is filed, and then the city clerk would have 10 days to issue a decision.

Proponents of the initiative say a city Aurora’s size needs to have a form of government that has a mayor at the helm who will be accountable directly to voters and one that can implement a vision for the city. Opponents, including at least eight of Aurora’s 10 City Council members (both conservatives and progressives), say the proposal appears to be a “power grab” for the mayor.

Opponents of the initiative have claimed that residents were misled about the intent of the proposed ballot question, noting that the campaign was initially only called “Term Limits for a Better Aurora.” They also said signature gatherers were aggressive toward residents when seeking signatures. But supporters argue the onus is on those signing to understand what they’re petitioning.

However, if the clerk’s office determines enough signatures are invalid, the question won’t be included on the November ballot.

As of Tuesday afternoon, nine people had filed signature protests against the petition. The Denver Post has filed a Colorado Open Records Act request for the petitions but has yet to receive them. The city clerk’s office initially calculated 12,198 valid petition signatures of the required 12,017.

Dena McClung is one of the Aurora residents who feels like she was deceived by the signature gatherers. McClung said she was at a King Soopers a couple of months ago where she saw people getting signatures on a petition. She asked what it was about and said she was told that it was about reducing term limits for Aurora’s elected leaders, which McClung thought was a good move. McClung said she then skimmed the first page of the petition as she was in a rush but didn’t see anything about making changes to Aurora’s form of government, so she signed it.

Later, as she was reading the news, she learned what the initiative was about. So, she contacted her City Council representative and then the city clerk to ask that her signature be removed. A formal process had not yet been set up for removing signatures, so the clerk directed her to the campaign. She contacted a campaign representative but said she never heard back. Now, she plans to file a formal protest with the city clerk’s office — a form she called very technical.

“I do think that there has been an attempt on the part of the city government to be less and less transparent and that’s the wrong direction to go,” she said. “We actually need to work toward more transparency in Aurora city government.”

McClung doesn’t support the strong-mayor form of government and said the City Council body as a whole should maintain all its current authorities, rather than ceding several responsibilities to one person.

A challenge in the courts

Meanwhile, the Aurora City Council on Monday night discussed a lawsuit filed against the initiative’s proponents and the city of Aurora over the initiative’s title, which the complaint alleges violates the city charter’s “single-subject rule” and misleads voters about what it does.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit, attorney Charles Richardson, is a former Aurora city attorney and City Council member. As of Monday night, the proponents of the initiative had been served but the city had not yet, according to city staff.

In a news release, Trey Rogers, one of Richardson’s attorneys in the lawsuit, stated that Aurora’s city clerk had to deal with a “nearly impossible task, as the drafters of this initiative made it exceedingly complex and concealed key changes to Aurora government.”

“At a minimum, a judge can act in voters’ best interests and give them critical information so they aren’t surprised about how this overly broad measure might change city government,” he said.

The lawsuit calls the ballot initiative title and submission clause misleading and states that they “fail to inform voters of several central features of the Proposed Charter Amendment,” such as the increase to the mayor’s salary, the addition of an at-large council member, the repeal of some of the City Council’s powers and the addition of new powers for the mayor. Richardson said in an interview that voters can’t agree with either changing to a strong mayor form of government or reducing term limits — they had to vote on both.

In a statement from the campaign in favor of the initiative, attorney Suzanne Taheri, a former deputy secretary of state, said the title of the initiative was set by the clerk, not proponents, and though they would have preferred for the city to use the language from the petition, “we believe the title was properly set in the discretion of the clerk and we did not contest it.”

Taheri told The Denver Post that she disagrees that the initiative is about more than a single subject because the term limits clarify the requirements of the new form of government and mayor’s office. Regardless, she said the city charter’s rules about whether citizen-led initiatives have to only have a single subject are unclear.

The term limits, Coffman said, are an important part of the proposal, because they establish how many years a mayor should serve in the new form of government.

The city is required to respond to the lawsuit by next Monday and the court has 10 days after that to come to a decision.

Richardson and others have also sent a team of analysts to the clerk’s office to review signatures and determine their validity, which he called a parallel track to the effort to defeat the initiative from moving forward.

He said he got involved in the effort when he was approached by people who opposed the initiative, including city staff members, and that he became alarmed by what he read in the petition.

“My biggest concern is no matter if it’s Mayor Coffman or whoever it is in the future, if you get on the wrong side of the mayor, you’re in big, big trouble of doing any business in Aurora because the mayor would appoint all of the high-ranking officials in the city …,” he said.

In July, however, Coffman argued that this proposal would help provide a better vision for the city and allow for the mayor, who is directly accountable to voters, to implement it, rather than leaving it to the city manager.

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