The Aurora City Council discussed two proposals from Mayor Pro Tem Curtis Gardner on Monday that would change council meetings times and how council votes on some issues that come up for consideration.
Gardner’s first proposal seeks to change council meetings times from 6:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., an idea that met with scrutiny from both councilmembers and a few members of the public who spoke on the matter.
“This is a simple change,” Gardner said.
The mayor pro tem wanted to help staff who work long hours on council meeting days, he said. Moving the meeting up might also help members of the public who have voiced concerns about having to wait until late in the night to comment on agenda items when council meetings run long, he said.
In recent meetings, council has debated agenda items, such as controversial developments well past 11:30 p.m. Gardner responded to members of the public who opposed the time change, telling one man — who called the proposal "fascist" — that the comparison was “frankly absurd.”
The handful of people who commented worried members of the public would not make it to 6 p.m. meetings because of evening traffic and daytime work schedules, and that it would lessen public participation in meetings.
“I sat through four different traffic lights two times,” one woman said about her drive to the Monday meeting.
Multiple councilmembers said they, too, worried that moving the meeting time up would make it hard for constituents to get to meetings after work, and that councilmembers who work during the day could face the same dilemma.
“I’ve had to run down these stairs to announce that I’m present during roll call,” Councilmember Alison Coombs said.
Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky suggested a compromise of moving the meeting time earlier to 6 p.m. but also to begin scheduling public comment later on the agenda so that it might start close to 6:30 p.m.
Councilmembers Dustin Zvonek and Gardner had voted against tabling the proposal, although a motion to table it until a later meeting passed in a 9-2 vote.
Gardner also proposed changing council rules so that resolutions, final approval of ordinances that passed unanimously on first vote, appointments to boards and commissions and some planning commission matters will be placed within the consent agenda. Council approves consent agenda items through a single vote without discussion.
Any councilmember can still pull an item off the consent agenda for discussion and an individual vote, Gardner said, and members of the public can comment on any consent agenda item during public comment. Councilmembers passed that proposal.
Jurinsky voiced support for the rule changes, saying they will save time and prevent council meetings from going longer than necessary. Coombs agreed, discussing an past agenda that included 31 resolutions, which she described as nearly identical but were voted on individually.
Jurinsky urged constituents who would like councilmembers to discuss an item to ask a councilmember to pull it off the consent agenda.
“There have been times where there’s things that we go through, that we’ve heard before, we’ve already passed once,” Jurinsky said.
