Aurora City Council won’t ask voters this fall to boost pay for mayor, council members

The Aurora City Council on Monday shot down an opportunity to ask voters this fall to substantially raise their pay starting in 2026.

The 7-3 vote defeating an ordinance that would have referred a pay boost measure to the November ballot means council members will continue to make $22,700 a year while the mayor’s salary will stay at $98,000.

Several council members said they heard from constituents that the raises being asked for were too steep.

“Pay raises are hard to pass,” Mayor Mike Coffman said during Monday’s council meeting. “I just don’t think that’s going to fly with the voters.”

The proposed raises — to $151,000 annually for the mayor and to approximately $75,000 for council members — would have substantially boosted pay among Aurora’s elected leaders. Under the proposal, Coffman’s salary would have risen by 52% while most council members would have seen their pay more than triple.

Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky said raises of that magnitude are “pretty much unheard of” for local public servants. The council unanimously passed an introductory version of the pay raise measure on June 23.

Aurora is Colorado’s third-largest city, with just over 400,000 residents calling it home.

The pay raise proposal was structured to pay the Aurora mayor, which is a full-time job, the same as an Arapahoe County commissioner and council members half that amount. The pay adjustments, had they been passed by voters in November, would have taken effect Jan. 1.

Several alternate scenarios for increasing compensation for Aurora’s elected leaders were offered during Monday’s discussion — one reducing the amount of the pay increases and another pushing out its effective date to 2028 — but neither prevailed.

Aurora’s mayor and council members last received a raise in 2018.

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