As he prepares to retire, Aurora’s City Manager Jim Twombly names Aurora’s most pressing issues as housing and homelessness, public safety and infrastructure needs.
They’re all challenges city staff have sought to begin tackling, he said in an interview with the Denver Gazette.
Aurora sought to curb homelessness and a lack of affordable housing with its Pallet-built temporary shelters “where we were able to house people who can leave encampments and go into these little shelters where they are safe and warm,” he said.
City staff is still working on plans to bring a new navigation center and supportive housing campus to Aurora as a new approach to reducing homelessness, as well as partnering with the governor to transform the former youth corrections campus called Ridge View into supportive housing.
The city’s housing strategy is multi-pronged, includes working with local counties, the Aurora Housing Authority and developers who will build affordable housing on city-owned land, Twombly said. The city is also streamlining its development review process to try and get projects built more quickly to increase housing stock, he said.
For roughly two years, city staff and council have been deliberating another quandary. Aurora in unique in that it has very old portions of the city that need infrastructure replaced while at the same time “70 square miles of undeveloped territory” that will need new infrastructure.
“We have kind of a double whammy in that respect,” he said.
The city does not have adequate funding to address that dilemma right now, Twombly said. Staff are investigating options, such as federal infrastructure funding, but those funds often require matching dollars. Aurora has identified several potential projects but with matching requirements, could still be needing to put forward “$15 million here, and $10 million there,” he said.
“So, huge challenge,” Twombly said.
As for public safety, Aurora is like many communities across the state and nation dealing with officers leaving police departments and at the same time seeing fewer new people join the rank and file, he said.
When Twombly came to Aurora, academy classes boasted between 40 and 45 people, but “now we’re seeing classes of 8, 10 and 12.” The city also has need for new fire stations, and addressing older housing that doesn’t have modern fire protections built in.
The region’s water crisis and tackling the city’s water supply was another of the biggest challenges he faced, Twombly said. The city shifted its water billing structure to a tiered system in an effort to incentivize residents to use less water. Last year the city council passed a bill limiting cool weather turf in new developments, and the city has been aggressively pursuing converting turf to xeriscapes, Twombly said.
“We’ve been very active in terms of acquiring new water rights too,” he said.
