On February 28, Aurora City Council will vote on whether to enact a camping ban that would shape how Colorado's third-largest city responds to unsheltered homelessness.
"I think it is essential that encampments that are unsanitary and unsafe not be allowed to occur everywhere in the city," says Mayor Mike Coffman, the former U.S. Representative who proposed the ordinance.
The proposal would ban camping on public property and allow city officials to sweep encampments after providing a minimum notice of 72 hours and ensuring that there's adequate shelter space available for encampment residents. During an Aurora City Council study session on February 7, six out of the ten members expressed support for the proposal.
"It’s already decided," says Councilman Ruben Medina, a Democrat who represents parts of central-west Aurora. "You know where everybody lies. It’s sad to me that we can’t even begin a dialogue. I can’t have any dialogue with other people in a genuine way because they don’t want to."
Coffman, a Republican who lost his 6th Congressional District seat to Jason Crow, a Democrat, in the 2018 race, was elected mayor in late 2019. He first floated the idea of a camping ban in October 2020.
At the end of that year, he spent a week living on the streets of metro Denver; in advance, "Homeless Mike" had only told Shaun Boyd of CBS4 what he planned to do. Coffman stayed in a shelter and also lived outdoors, where a camera crew filmed him.
In the CBS4 story that aired about "Homeless Mike," Coffman told Boyd, "These encampments are not a product of an economy under COVID. They are not a product of rental rates, housing. They are a product of a drug culture." The people he met were not homeless because of a lack of shelter, he added. "Absolutely not. It is a lifestyle choice, and it is a very dangerous lifestyle choice."
From his time on the streets, Coffman says he learned "that these encampments must be abated and given an alternate shelter option that is safe, sanitary, and that provides the services that they so desperately need." And he's not backing down: He introduced a camping ban proposal last summer, but failed to secure a majority vote in August 2021.
During last fall's campaign season, some Aurora candidates spoke out in favor of enacting a camping ban.
"Throughout my campaign, I talked about the fact that I would support it and that it was needed," says Dustin Zvonek, a Republican at-large member of Aurora City Council. "What I've said is that I view these encampments that are popping up, that are all over the sides of our highways, just beyond the fence line, as a serious public health and safety issue. I think that we have an obligation to do something about them."
In November, conservatives effectively regained the majority on Aurora City Council: The current makeup is five Republican members, one unaffiliated member who used to be a Republican and four Democratic members. Coffman can break any tie votes.
Post-election, Coffman reintroduced his camping-ban proposal, with a final debate and vote set for February 28.
"Overall, I’m supportive of what’s coming forward," says at-large Councilman Curtis Gardner, a Republican. "I’m realistic enough to acknowledge that by itself, it’s not going to solve our homelessness problem. I think it’s one tool in the tool belt that we have, and for me, it’s really about making sure that we address community safety. I’ve been on ride-alongs with our public safety departments to some of these encampments. They’re really unsafe and have unsanitary conditions, like human feces and booby traps, things like that."
At-large Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, also a Republican, believes that leaving encampments in place is the wrong choice. "Some of these spaces, they’re along our highways. They congregate and put up their tents and put up their homeless communities in very dense areas. One car accident with flipped cars, they’re dead. They’re dead. To me that is inhumane," Jurinsky says. The camping ban would be much more humane, she adds.
But the four Democrats on Aurora City Council reject that.
"This is disingenuous. It’s lying to the public. Nothing about this is humane. A camping ban is a camping ban. Just because you say it won’t harm folks and it’s better, the data is literally telling us the opposite," says Councilwoman Crystal Murillo, a Democrat who represents northwest Aurora. "It’s not actually going to solve the problem."
Like most local service providers, Murillo and the three other Democratic members all say they believe the solution to homelessness is to create more affordable housing and to increase access to services. Even though it won't have an explicit criminal penalty attached, the camping ban would still further criminalize homelessness, they say. People who refuse to move from an encampment could be subject to a citation for failure to obey a lawful order, which can carry a penalty of up to 364 days in jail and a fine up to $2,650.
The Denver Police Department rarely issues tickets for violations of the city's camping ban, which has been on the books in Denver since 2012. But authorities cite the law when asking people to move, and as they do, it disrupts connections that service providers have established with people experiencing homelessness.
"We think it’s shortsighted and unproductive, and that Aurora needs to look no further than to its neighbor, Denver, to see that camping bans don’t work to resolve homelessness and, in fact, make homelessness even more difficult by creating more barriers for people to get connected with shelter, services and housing," says Cathy Alderman of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
"With what Denver is doing, it's making the problem so much worse and costing so much money in the process that resources are diverted and people’s ability to secure housing is harmed by that policy," says Alison Coombs, a Democrat who represents southwest Aurora. "Now we’re going to add Aurora, the second-largest city in the metro region, to that problem. We’re just going to double down."
The City of Denver has been the target of numerous lawsuits related to its camping ban, including one filed in October 2020 by Andy McNulty of the Killmer, Lane & Newman law firm on behalf of homeless plaintiffs and Denver Homeless Out Loud, which resulted in the order from Judge William J. Martinez of the U.S. District Court of Colorado requiring a week's notice before the city conducts a sweep.
Coffman says he considered that order, as well as policies in Boston, Oakland and Arvada, when requiring 72 hours' notice in the current Aurora proposal. "There is no constitutional mandate dictating how long the notice period should be," he notes.
The 2021 Point in Time count by service providers indicated that there were 594 people staying in shelters in Aurora on a single night in January of that year. (Service providers did not conduct an unsheltered count in 2021, owing to concerns about COVID spread; the results of the 2022 count have not yet been released.) The City of Aurora has emergency sheltering capacity — including pallet homes, safe-camping sites and safe-parking sites — of approximately 300 beds; it can increase its capacity in cold-weather situations, officials say.
There are also countless people staying in unsheltered settings. Currently, outreach workers will work with the Aurora Police Department to clear encampments, but there's not a set 72-hour timeline.
"The key difference here is we’re basically taking away that agency that street outreach would have and replacing it with that hard 'You have to move within 72 hours,'" says Councilman Juan Marcano, a Democrat who represents parts of central-west Aurora. "What the mayor is really doing here is just codifying our existing practices, which is basically just enshrining our status quo in law, with the exception of speeding up the rates at which we do the sweeps."