After years of talks and hundreds of thousand of dollars spent examining the issue, the Aurora City Council has decided to scrap the idea of becoming a city and county.
At a weekend workshop, the board came to the conclusion that Aurora, which is mostly in Arapahoe and Adams counties, should not pursue the city-county issue anymore.
“There was recognition that unless it was near unanimous (among council members), any ballot issue would be unsuccessful,” City Councilman Charlie Richardson said.
The council has been split on the notion, with Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan leading the way in favor of moving to a city-county system. Aurora has spent about $400,000 over the past several years on studies that examined the issue.
“A waste in a sense, but not a waste in another sense. The figures showed we would be in the red for a long time,” City Councilwoman Renie Peterson said.
of Bethesda, Md., found that it would cost the city upwards of $325 million over 20 years to build all the facilities it would need, while another study found more cost-saving measures.
About 88 percent of the city’s 350,000 residents live in Arapahoe County and 12 percent in Adams County and a fraction in Douglas County.
Peterson said she was told by Adams County commissioners that the county was considering adding more services for Aurora residents but the city-county talk stymied those efforts.
Making the switch would have been . The council would have had to decide to ask its voters to approve a measure. The state legislature would also have had to agree to put it to a statewide vote.
For Aurora, the potential move to a city and county was always more about controlling its own destiny than it was over the services it receives, Hogan has said in the past.
Arapahoe County Commissioner Rod Bockenfeld said the county has had a good working relationship with the city of Aurora.
“There’s a lot of growth that occurs in Aurora and Aurora has a great vision for their city,” Bockenfeld said. “With that greater vision, sometimes it leads to the idea that maybe (the city) can provide county services, too.”
Carlos Illescas: 303-954-1175, cillescas@denverpost.com or @cillescasdp
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