AURORA | A judge last week forced the City of Aurora to turn over a recording of a secret Aurora City Council committee meeting to the Sentinel, marking at least the second time since 2022 that the council or a subgroup of the council was found to have violated state law while meeting behind closed doors.
City lawmakers met without informing or admitting the public to discuss the performance and pay of the city’s four top appointed officials last October, including candid doubts about the court administrator and city attorney, whom they nonetheless recommended for raises.
The discussion between Mayor Mike Coffman and Mayor Pro Tem Dustin Zvonek, which also involved Director of Human Resources Ryan Lantz and Performance Management Administrator Doreen Falcon, took place during a virtual meeting of the Council Appointee Evaluation and Compensation Committee.
“The Court finds that the (committee) meeting involved public business, and therefore notice of an executive session was required, if the meeting was not open to the public,” Arapahoe County District Court judge Elizabeth Beebe Volz wrote in her May 15 ruling, in which she ordered the city to release a video recording of the meeting to the Sentinel.
Order Denying the City’s Application to Restrict DisclosureDownload
The newspaper asked Volz to weigh in after the city turned down a formal request for the recording and petitioned the court to affirm that the recording was not subject to disclosure. Volz instead ruled in favor of the Sentinel, citing the newspaper’s last Open Meetings Law case in her order.
“It is undisputed that the city failed to give notice of an executive session meeting, and the public was not admitted to the meeting,” Volz wrote. “Where a public body fails to comply with the requirements for holding an executive session, the recordings or minutes of that session are open to the public. There do not appear to be any exceptions to this result.”
The four appointees — Court Administrator Candace Atkinson, City Attorney Dan Brotzman, City Manager Jason Batchelor and Presiding Judge Shawn Day — were not informed of or present for the meeting.
Colorado’s Open Meetings Law allows local government bodies to meet in private, a circ*mstance known as an “executive session,” to discuss certain topics after satisfying a list of requirements that include informing the public about the meeting by publishing agenda information ahead of time.
Judges have further interpreted the law to mean that, when a government body fails to live up to the state’s expectations of transparency by not following the rules for closing a meeting to the public, that body can’t claim the meeting was a legitimate executive session for the purposes of withholding records such as audio and video recordings.
Because the public wasn’t notified about the Oct. 13 meeting and three subsequent meetings of the same committee, the Sentinel requested the associated recordings from the city.
The city said the three latter meetings were “inadvertently not recorded,” despite the Colorado Open Meetings Law requiring that such closed-door meetings be recorded and the recordings be kept for at least 90 days.
On May 21, after Volz published her order, the city turned the recording over to the Sentinel.
The case comes after a Colorado Court of Appeals panel found in December that Aurora’s City Council broke the law in 2022 when it voted to end censure proceedings against a member during an executive session. The Sentinel had asked for was denied a recording of that meeting, which the panel ordered the city to release.
The city has since asked the Colorado Supreme Court to hear the case, and the panel’s order has been stayed pending a reply from the higher court. The Council Appointee Evaluation and Compensation Committee continued to hold unannounced closed-door meetings before and immediately after the Colorado Court of Appeals ruling.
City spokesperson Ryan Luby wrote in an email after the October recording was released that city officials “take open meeting requirements very seriously and continuously work with staff to ensure that all requirements are met.”
“While we strive to have a flawless record in that regard, very infrequently mistakes might occur like they might at any organization,” he said.
Luby said the failure to publish information about the meetings ahead of time was the result of a “misunderstanding” that took place when the responsibility for posting agendas online was transferred from one group of city employees to another.
He also said the city was retraining its staff and introducing additional checks and balances to ensure the city complies with the law.
As for the lawmakers who participated in the meeting, Zvonek was indignant after being emailed a list of questions, saying it was “wildly inappropriate to have these conversations in public” and criticizing the Sentinel’s decision to report on what happened during the unlawful executive session.
“If I as an employer can’t have candid conversations with my employees or with my other executives about a particular employee’s performance because it could end up being in the newspaper, (we) just won’t have them,” Zvonek said.
Even though Zvonek and Coffman said during the executive session that they supported giving raises to Atkinson, Brotzman and Day — despite the council having criticized the leadership and interpersonal skills of Atkinson and Brotzman — Zvonek told the Sentinel he supported the subsequent decision of the entire council to give Atkinson and Day raises while putting off the question of changing Brotzman’s pay.
“We have a responsibility as a council to ensure that we have the right people in place and ensure that, to the best of our ability, their compensation reflects the value that they’re providing to the residents of Aurora,” Zvonek said. “I don’t think that we got that decision wrong with any of them.”
A Dec. 27 letter sent from the city’s Human Resources Department to Brotzman, and shared with the newspaper by Luby, said the city council would reconsider Brotzman’s pay in three months’ time. On March 25, the city announced Brotzman would be retiring at the end of June.
No recommendation on Batchelor’s pay emerged from the meeting — the city at that time was still negotiating Batchelor’s employment contract, as Batchelor had just been elevated from interim city manager to the permanent city manager role.
He and Day were ultimately given bonuses in addition to a raise for Day and a salary increase Batchelor that was included in his contract.
Coffman declined to comment on the events of the Oct. 13 meeting, writing in an email that it would be “highly inappropriate to discuss personnel matters publicly.”
Atkinson, too, did not want to comment on the concerns raised by the council, beyond saying that she “had been here just a year at the time of this evaluation and am committed to meeting the expectations of council as well as its citizens in the coming years.”
“I love living in Aurora and working with our City Council, all of (whom) I admire,” she wrote in an email. “I am proud to serve the citizens of our city.”
Brotzman said he had not watched, and would not watch, the recording to continue to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
The city’s litigation of the Sentinel’s records request was handled by third-party law firm Hoffmann, Parker, Wilson & Carberry, P.C., and Brotzman said deputy city attorney Jack Bajorek had been responsible for coordinating with the firm.
First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press represented the Sentinel in the case.
Through March 2024, the city incurred more than $40,000 in expenses, including the cost of hiring outside attorneys, to fight the release of the 2022 and 2023 executive session recordings requested by the Sentinel.
Luby previously said the city’s third-party attorneys are being paid from the city’s general fund.
Council committee reviewed appointee salaries, raises
During the Oct. 13 meeting of the Council Appointee Evaluation and Compensation Committee, Coffman and Zvonek reviewed the council’s assessments of Atkinson, Brotzman, Batchelor and Day, speaking frankly about what the council as a whole may be willing to pay each of the four.
The court administrator, city attorney, city manager and municipal judge are the only city employees that directly report to the city council. Per Aurora’s City Charter, all other employees report to one of the council’s four direct appointees, making them the most senior non-elected officials in the city.
Council members are also responsible for establishing salaries for the four — a process that begins in the Council Appointee Evaluation and Compensation Committee, which also reviews complaints related to the behavior of any of the four appointees or against council members.
The committee consists of the chairperson of the Management and Finance Policy Committee, currently Councilmember Curtis Gardner, as well as the mayor and mayor pro tem. Gardner was absent from the October meeting.
On Oct. 13, performance evaluations that had been completed by the appointees’ coworkers and the appointees themselves were considered along with evaluations by the council, as Coffman and Zvonek talked about how much money each appointee deserved.
Atkinson and Brotzman received overall scores of 60.8% and 69.1% respectively from the council as a whole, while Batchelor and Day received scores of 87.7% and 92.9%.
Council members scored Atkinson the lowest in the categories of “organizational leadership” and “elected body relationships.” Coffman said during the meeting that Atkinson “did not do herself any favors” by giving unsatisfactory answers to questions about vacancies among court and jail staffers at a September budget workshop.
As for Brotzman, Coffman said he believed the council’s skepticism was largely “personality-driven” and that Brotzman had been doing a “much better job” of communicating with the group. Brotzman earned the lowest scores in the categories of “community / stakeholder relationships” and, like Atkinson, “elected body relationships.”
Coffman observed in response to the evaluations by council members that “they’re not crazy about Candace or Dan but love Judge Day and, I think, love Jason.”
Atkinson and Brotzman scored their own performance higher than they were scored by the council, giving themselves scores of 94.4% and 86.1%, respectively.
The council praised the other two appointees, and Zvonek said he believed Batchelor’s pay should reflect how he had guided the city through the 2023 retirement of former city manager Jim Twombly.
Both Batchelor and Day scored themselves lower on their self-evaluations than they were scored by the council.
Coffman also described quelling past conflicts among council appointees and said that — while Batchelor had been holding productive meetings with the other appointees as city manager and although Coffman did not expect “those kinds of disputes that we’ve had in the past” — the four nevertheless needed “a venue to fall back on” in the form of quarterly meetings with Coffman.
The mayor would not explain the nature of the friction he alleged has occurred among council appointees.
As for the pay of the four, Coffman and Zvonek discussed paying a bonus to Day on top of a 5% base pay increase for him, Atkinson and Brotzman. Coffman and Zvonek agreed that discussing Batchelor’s pay was premature since the city was at that time still negotiating Batchelor’s contract.
They also agreed that the city should have an outside attorney review the final version rather than Brotzman, with Coffman saying he suspected there was “competition” between Batchelor and Brotzman.
Zvonek argued that Brotzman and Day did not deserve comparable raises, saying he didn’t “see them as having the same…,” before he was interrupted by the mayor. Zvonek later said his comment was in reference to the differences in the performance between the two as assessed by the council.
Zvonek told Coffman that he expected there was “going to be a faction that is going to not want to do anything for Brotzman, and then the opposite faction is going to want to do nothing for (Atkinson),” which he later said referred to “different points of view” among members, declining to elaborate further.
Lantz agreed with Zvonek’s “factions” comment at the time, as did Coffman.
The City Council held at least two executive sessions as a group after the Oct. 13 executive session of the committee to discuss the pay of the four appointees. At the end of the process, Atkinson’s annual base pay increased from $180,600 to $189,630 while Batchelor’s increased from $274,500 to $330,000 and Day’s increased from $193,131.54 to $202,788.14.
Batchelor and Day also received bonuses of $27,450 and $20,279, respectively.
Brotzman did not receive a pay raise or a bonus.
