It’s now been a year since I moved back to Aurora after 24 years in Denver’s south suburbs, and my wife and I have been enjoying all that this vibrant city has to offer, as well as gaining an appreciation of the challenges Aurora faces. Moving here has also given me a front-row seat for the three-ring circus that is Aurora city politics, with a municipal election approaching that could change how Aurora is governed and which party governs it.

Earlier in these pages, I wrote about races taking shape for Aurora mayor and five of 10 city council seats in the Nov. 7 city election. And I noted the head-scratching fact that in a city where voters lean Democratic, the sitting mayor and a majority on the council are Republican-aligned (although the positions officially are non-partisan), most of them elected with just a fraction of the vote.

Now there’s another act at the circus: The question of whether Aurora’s next mayor should have more power in running the city. Following a petition drive, a proposed charter amendment creating a so-called “strong mayor” system in Aurora appears to be headed to the fall ballot barring a successful challenge.

It’s a question that deserves serious consideration in this complex city of nearly 400,000 people. But the rollout of the proposal has been a botch of the first order, spawned in a swamp of bait-and-switch tactics by backers and, until recently, attempts by Mayor Mike Coffman, running for re-election, to obscure his involvement in a plan to greatly boost his office’s powers.

It’s a “colossal scam” and a “swindle,” says Dave Perry, editor of Aurora’s hometown news outlet, the Sentinel. And most Aurora City Council members, left and right, oppose the plan and how it was introduced.

In Aurora, as in many other Colorado cities such as Fort Collins and Lakewood, municipal functions are run by an unelected city manager hired by and accountable to the city council. Aurora’s mayor presides over city council meetings and can break tie votes, but otherwise has a mostly ceremonial role. It’s called a “weak mayor” or “council-manager” system.

The ballot proposal would switch Aurora to a “strong mayor” or “mayor-council” system with the elected mayor as a true chief executive for the city, hiring and supervising department heads. The mayor could also veto city council actions. It’s the system used in Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, with some variations. Aurora is the biggest Colorado city with a weak-mayor structure.

The push for the new system began ignominiously early this year, with backers in the shadows and petitioners asking voters to sign what they pitched as a term-limits measure. The “strong mayor” bit — the real meat of the proposal — was reportedly underplayed by signature gatherers.

At a May 24 news conference, frequent foes on the Aurora City Council — including right-leaning Danielle Jurinsky and left-leaning Juan Marcano — shared a podium with other leaders to blast the petition drive, with Jurinsky calling it “extremely deceptive.” Marcano is running to replace Coffman as mayor, yet even he opposes the strong-mayor plan.

Backers of the strong-mayor petition have turned in barely enough signatures — just 181 more than the required 12,017 — to place the initiative on the fall ballot. That’s unless enough petition signers claim they were misled about the issue and get their signatures removed. The deadline for challenges is Aug. 14. Meanwhile, opponents of the measure filed suit on Aug. 5, alleging that the ballot petitions were misleading, violating election laws.

It took months of poking and prodding by news reporters to pin down who was masterminding the proposal. Most backers shied away from talking about it, but a few pointed fingers at Coffman. At first, the mayor ducked questions about his role.

Finally, in late July, Coffman admitted to Marshall Zelinger of KUSA-9News that it was he who “initiated the process” leading to the petition drive and contributed money to support it. He said he was “certainly sorry” if petition signers felt they were duped, but he lectured unhappy signers that they should have read the petition summary more carefully.

Even some of Coffman’s allies aren’t buying that. Aurora Councilman Curtis Gardner, who like Coffman is a Republican and says he agrees with the mayor on policy “90% or more of the time,” told 9News that voters were “hoodwinked” when they were “told this is about term limits, when it’s really not.”

Some critics say the strong-mayor system would open the door to cronyism at city hall and raise the potential for a major bureaucratic turnover with every mayoral election. And Gardner told The Denver Post that Aurora is “actually a very well-run city” under the current weak-mayor structure. (Coffman has said he plans to keep existing department leaders in place, including Aurora interim Police Chief Art Acevedo, if he becomes a “strong mayor.”)

But despite the stench left by the plan’s rollout, there is merit to the idea of Aurora moving to a strong-mayor system. It gives the mayor – an elected official – a bigger role in administering vital city functions instead of an unelected administrator. A bad mayor can be voted out or recalled. A bad city manager can be ousted only by a majority of the city council that hired them.

Ultimately, in the quest for a better Aurora, there may be a more important reform to enact than boosting the mayor’s power: Requiring that candidates for city office get at least 50% of the vote to win. Unlike Denver, Aurora has no two-way runoff after the general election. Coffman himself was first elected in 2019 with just 36% of the vote in a five-way race. At-large council members typically win with less than a quarter of the total vote. And partly because city elections are held in an off-year cycle, just 31% of registered voters turned out in 2021.

So Aurora should adopt a runoff system someday – or perhaps a primary leading to a two-candidate general election – to improve chances of better representation in city government.

For now, Aurorans should give the strong-mayor plan strong consideration. But they should also consider whether Coffman – the mastermind of the plan’s misleading rollout, who spent months obscuring his role – can be trusted to assume a strong mayor’s powers.

Mark Harden has been a Colorado journalist for three decades, serving as an editor and reporter at The Denver Post, the Denver Business Journal, Colorado Politics, Colorado Community Media and other publications.

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