The relationship between the mayors of Denver and Aurora, neighboring cities that are home to nearly 1 in 5 Coloradans, isn’t looking so neighborly these days.
“Not good,” Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman told The Denver Post when asked to assess the state of mayoral relations. “We’re not going to be chummy.”
Things have devolved to the point where Coffman says he will no longer meet with Mike Johnston alone, fearing the Denver mayor might not be truthful about what the two discuss. At the center of the discontent is the movement of migrants from Denver to Aurora over the last couple years — and what role Denver may have played in stoking a national furor over the presence of Venezuelan gang members in several Aurora apartment complexes.
“It was seared into the national consciousness,” Coffman says of his city’s recent travails.
While the relationship between the two cities’ leaders is at a nadir, at least for the time being, it’s not the first time that leaders of Denver and Aurora — Colorado’s first- and third-most populous cities — have taken off the gloves. Be it disputes over reaping the economic benefits from Denver International Airport, safeguarding a home for the National Western Stock Show or indemnifying Aurora police officers who helped quell protests and unrest in Denver in 2020, there’s a long history of intercity skirmishes.
Eric Sondermann, a longtime independent political commentator, remembers the relocation of the University of Colorado Hospital and Children’s Hospital Colorado to the then-new Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora nearly two decades ago as a “pretty good pie fight.”
But he said there’s a nasty edge to today’s mayoral melee — likely the result of national partisan “slash-and-burn politics” — that Sondermann doesn’t recognize as clearly from years past.
“I don’t remember these disputes becoming as personal as this one,” he said.
What’s also different in the current tussle between the cities over migrant impacts, Sondermann said, are the contours of the dispute.
“Most of the fights over the decades have been fights over growth and expansion, and about opportunities and who was going to reap those benefits,” he said. “Now, it’s more of a fight about burdens and social obligations — and who’s going to pay those bills.”
For Coffman, a particular sticking point came in late 2023 when Johnston asked him if Denver could house migrants in an Aurora hotel. The Denver mayor, Coffman said, later mischaracterized Aurora’s position as supportive of the arrangement, which he said he halted as soon as he found out that some short-term residents of the hotel had been displaced.
“I’m really distrustful of one-on-one conversations with him, so I’ve suspended that,” Coffman said. “I’m happy to meet with him, but I want staff there. I don’t trust him to relay publicly what was said.”
Johnston, for his part, said Coffman’s new communication protocol is “news to me.”
“He hasn’t communicated that to me. But anyway, I am happy to meet with him individually, with staff — either one is fine with me,” the Denver mayor told The Post.
Both mayors occupy officially nonpartisan offices, but each has engaged in party politics in the past — Johnston as a Democratic state senator and candidate for governor, Coffman as a Republican congressman. While the nuts and bolts of municipal business across the cities’ shared border may carry on as usual, former Denver City Councilwoman Robin Kniech said it’s the big-picture initiatives — the defining, visionary stuff — that is at risk of falling by the wayside when the people at the top are at arm’s length.
“When you can’t have these two large players working together, you’re missing opportunities to leverage regional innovations,” said Kniech, who served all 12 years that Michael Hancock, Johnston’s predecessor, was mayor. “These are the things that are made possible by personal relationships.”
Coffman has been most outspoken
The tension between today’s mayors was laid bare in a blistering Jan. 6 op-ed in The Gazette penned by Coffman, in which he said publicly that Johnston should be “transparent and tell the truth about what he did.”
What he was referring to were Johnston’s actions regarding some of the nearly 43,000 migrants who streamed through Denver starting in late 2022, but ended up in Aurora. Coffman expressed frustration that Johnston wasn’t being forthcoming about how many migrants were being placed — and where — by nonprofit organizations Denver works with.
The column followed months of national headlines about the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua operating in the city. Attention revved into high gear after a video went public showing armed men in August knocking on doors inside an Aurora apartment building.
Two of those men were later connected to the gang after they were arrested in New York City. Just this past week, a third gang member seen in the video was arrested, also in New York.
The situation quickly became fodder in the presidential race. Then-Republican nominee (and now-President) Donald Trump used Aurora as the backdrop for a campaign rally less than a month before he won the election, hitting on familiar themes of illegal immigration and border security.
A massive media fallout ensued, during which some news outlets exaggerated the extent of Venezuelan gang activity as a seeming criminal takeover of Aurora — a sprawling suburban city of 400,000 — while others downplayed its severity, despite numerous arrests of transnational gang members by Aurora police.
The media maelstrom placed a glaring and unwelcome spotlight on the city.
“Aurora has suffered from a national embarrassment that has harmed the image of our city in a way that could have lasting economic consequences,” Coffman, 69, wrote in his column.
His city has asked its larger neighbor to the west to reveal how many migrants have come to Aurora and what role Denver played in getting them there. Aurora City Attorney Pete Schulte said the city recently began sending formal records requests for information about Denver’s relationship with its partner nonprofits, which he said were allowed to find housing for migrants in cities other than Denver.
Coffman told The Post it’s information Denver could easily share, but won’t.
“Here we are, two cities side by side, and we’re going through open records requests because Denver isn’t being transparent,” Coffman said. “How can there be trust?”
In an interview with Westword in early January, Johnston said Denver works with nonprofit groups that place migrants in housing. But he said the city doesn’t decide where they go.
In his interview with The Post, the mayor said he’s not hiding anything.
“We’re fully transparent with that information. We’ve answered all the questions the mayor has,” Johnston, 50, said of Coffman. “There’s nothing we’re concealing and nothing that he doesn’t know. I understand he’s probably facing a great deal of political pressure from the president and others, and we’re always happy to help.”
As for Coffman citing the late-2023 hotel episode for some of his distrust, a Johnston spokeswoman provided more details of what happened. Jordan Fuja said nearly 300 people arrived in Denver on Thanksgiving Day that year, triggering the city’s request to Aurora for accommodations.
“Once we learned other guests had been displaced to another hotel in the chain, we immediately worked with the hotel operator to ensure those guests could return at the same extended-stay rate,” she said. “The operator also offered to provide those guests with a free week’s stay.”
Bob LeGare, who served as Aurora’s mayor from June 2018 to December 2019 following the death of Mayor Steve Hogan, says he feels the larger relationship between the municipalities is solid, notwithstanding the current mayors’ relationship. Coffman succeeded him.
“What you’re hearing about is the migrant issue, because it’s been made into a national issue. But my guess is that there are still things going on in the background where they are cooperating,” LeGare said.
He characterized the conflict over immigration as part of a natural rise and fall in political relations.
“It seems like you’ll have years where everything’s great, and then you’ll have some years where there’s some oil and water,” LeGare said. “I think it’s just part of the dynamics of two of the largest cities on the Front Range being right next to each other.”
Locking horns over the years
That same proximity existed 45 years ago, when Dennis Champine became mayor of Aurora at the age of 37. But in 1980, the city had 160,000 residents, compared to more than double that today.
“The times are significantly different now,” said Champine, 82, who is still a practicing attorney.
At the time, Denver was even more the center of gravity than it is today, Champine said. But Aurora was growing rapidly, assembling critical water rights and coming into its own.
Champine knew he was up against a political luminary in Bill McNichols, who had already been mayor of Denver for 11 years when Champine ascended from Aurora councilman to mayor in 1979. McNichols, who died in 1997, was more than 30 years his senior.
“He called me Denny,” Champine said. “The only other person to call me Denny was my mother. I guess it was an Irish thing.”
In his second term, Champine found a new Denver mayor across the table — Federico Peña, who won election at age 36.
“I just liked both of them a lot and it made things easy between the cities,” he said.
But not too easy. The first fights over Denver’s future airport were just coming into view, with the bigger city looking to annex 54 square miles of Adams County, just outside Aurora, for the gigantic facility.
“The biggest issue then was that there wouldn’t be any more annexation by Denver, beyond the airport,” Champine said. “All of that tax base around the airport — we wanted that to come to the city of Aurora. It was on our boundary.”
DIA, which opened in 1995, replacing Stapleton International Airport, remained a bone of contention between Denver and Aurora when Wellington Webb and Paul Tauer led the cities, respectively, over the next decade-plus. Webb said one of the most contentious battles over DIA during his tenure was about where to locate cargo carrier facilities.
Adams County and Aurora wanted them north of the airport, while Webb wanted them closer to Interstate 70.
“I moved it,” he said. “I was doing my due diligence as mayor of Denver.”
Mike Dino, Webb’s adviser on intergovernmental affairs, remembers the move of the hospitals from Denver to the Anschutz Medical Campus — the former site of the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center — as a moment of particularly high tension between the cities.
And embedded in all of that tension was the friction between Webb and Tauer themselves, ripples stirred by the two men’s outsized personalities.
“Wellington and Paul Tauer were more of a personality situation,” Dino said. “There was a lot of distrust between the two of them.”
There was the time Webb poked fun at Tauer for his shorter stature, Dino said, and the time Tauer expressed irritation over Webb’s decision to name DIA’s entrance road Peña Boulevard, in honor of the prior Denver mayor, instead of Airport Boulevard.
While the mayors had their differences, Dino remembers 1995 to 2000 as the “golden years of Denver-Aurora cooperation,” highlighted by the herculean joint effort to redevelop the former Lowry Air Force Base into a residential neighborhood.
But relations during Webb’s and Tauer’s last years in office wore thin, Dino said. For his part, Webb, now 83, said he and Tauer, who died in 2022, were “cordial” with one another.
“We both knew we had a job to do, and we both did that job,” he said.
Differences inevitable, former mayor says
Tauer’s son, Ed, assumed his father’s seat in 2003. Of Webb’s successor, now-U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, Ed Tauer said: “I got a great mayor of Denver to work with.”
“Between two communities, you’re not always going to see things the same way,” Tauer said. “But it was the ability to work those differences out that was special about John. He was never satisfied with a win-lose situation. If it wasn’t win-win, you keep working on it until you get there.”
That included negotiations over the development of FasTracks, the Regional Transportation District’s vast metro-wide network of rail and regional bus lines that voters approved in 2004.
Hancock, who served as the next elected mayor of Denver for a dozen years, through mid-2023, intersected with Aurora’s Hogan, LeGare and Coffman during his tenure. He declined to speak for this story.
Out of the gate, Hancock faced a massive challenge: Talks had begun in early 2011 about moving the century-old National Western Stock Show to Aurora, to be part of a larger entertainment-themed development featuring the 1,500-room Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center.
Janice Sinden, Hancock’s chief of staff for the first half of his mayorship, said Hancock staked a flag on keeping the institution in the city.
“Hancock put a line in the sand that we were going to do everything to keep the National Western in Denver,” said Sinden, who now heads the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. “Michael just made certain to put all the resources into the institution. We built the infrastructure to make sure the Stock Show stayed.”
By year’s end, the proposed move to Aurora was dead and Denver’s billion-dollar effort to redevelop and expand the National Western campus in northern Denver began taking shape.
Less than two years later, the tables were turned.
Hogan, along with other area leaders, decried a plan by Hancock to create an “airport city” on more than 9,000 acres surrounding DIA, on airport property, as a violation of a 1988 agreement. It had stipulated that any development around the airport be limited to airport-related businesses so that Adams County could lure businesses, and their associated tax dollars, to its turf.
After years of mediation, and even a demand from Adams County that Denver return the land it annexed for the airport decades earlier, the cities arrived at an agreement that was approved by voters in 2015.
Alan Salazar, Hancock’s chief of staff in the mayor’s later years in office, said Hogan and Hancock had a good relationship “even when there was conflict.”
“Hogan and Hancock couldn’t help but laugh and joke — their affection for one another was apparent,” Salazar said. “They were comfortable trusting each other.”
Charlie Richardson — a former Aurora City Council member who also served as city attorney and acting city manager during his decades-long career — said the rapport between Denver’s and Aurora’s mayors has largely hinged on the personalities of the two officeholders.
“The late Mayor Hogan was a statesperson; he had a really good relationship with his counterpart,” Richardson said, referring to Hancock. “Obviously, it’s a pretty dysfunctional relationship right now.”
“No hard feelings,” Johnston insists
Whether both cities can repair their leaders’ rift in 2025 is yet to be seen.
Under Coffman’s leadership of the last five years, the cities have done battle with each other on several fronts. In January 2020, DIA sued Aurora for greenlighting home construction too close to a future runway. And last year, the state’s high court settled a yearslong legal battle over noise impacts from DIA on surrounding Adams County neighborhoods, including homes in Aurora.
The judge ruled in favor of the airport, concluding that the plaintiffs brought the case decades too late.
In May 2023, Aurora sued Denver over disputes arising from the massive 2020 racial justice protests. It alleged that Denver refused to pay the full cost of lawsuits against Aurora and the police officers it lent to its larger neighbor.
Then, hours after Johnston took office as Denver’s newest mayor in mid-July of that year, the Aurora City Council narrowly voted to chuck the cities’ mutual-aid pact until its neighbor agreed to fully indemnify Aurora officers.
Despite disagreements with the Hancock administration, Coffman said he never doubted Hancock’s sincerity.
“From the standpoint of trust, I just had a great relationship with him,” Coffman said.
Not so with Johnston, he said.
The Denver mayor, though, said he was ready to work anytime on public safety, homelessness and other big issues with his counterpart in Aurora.
“I think our personal feelings should be secondary to the job we have to serve both our cities, and I’ll always put that first,” Johnston said. “He can always pick up the phone and call me anytime — my line is open, and it will continue to be. I have no hard feelings.”
Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.