Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Aurora City Council held a full-day budget workshop on Saturday, October 3, 2026, to review proposed departmental budgets for fiscal year 2027, discuss cuts, and consider additions. Key topics included a contentious $2 million reduction to the court system, public safety technology (Flock cameras, drones, mobile response teams), and proposals to add or cut staff. The council also discussed furlough days and data discrepancies between the court and public defender systems.
City Council for Saturday October 3rd, 2026 is called the order. Would the clerk please call the roll? Here. Councilmember Andrews. Do we have the joint? Councilmember again. Here. Mayor from Tim Coombs. Councilmember Gardner. Councilmember Acock. Councilmember Horton. Here. Councilmember Jackson. Here. Councilmember Lawton. Here. Councilmember. Okay. Councilmember Wiles. Here. Item number two. So we're up for the budget rules for the day. So good morning. Council members, uh, staff, thanks, uh fellow appointees. Thanks, everybody, for being here. Uh it is the most magical Saturday of the year. Yeah. Um at least we'll have to. All right, yeah. So thanks everybody for being here. So again, for budget rules, um, as a refresher, and again, these are your rules. Uh so you you can change them, but typically the way we've done this is um we we will we set the agenda to go department by department. Um we will uh have that department director or department representative stand up. Uh if there's any questions, uh you all can ask questions, have discussion. Um, and then if there's any changes that anybody wants to make to that departmental budget, um ads, cuts, changes, um, we we do that. Um, you know, you you all can uh make that proposal, and then um what happens is what we typically done is we need um as a show of consensus, we need five people total that would like to see that idea go on the board. And you'll see here we have the butcher paper uh at the front of the room. Um Greg and staff are prepared. So when we get um an idea, um first thing we do is put a cost to that. So if somebody says I want to add a staff member or I want to do something, um we'll we'll ask budget um to confirm that number, or if you have a number of uh a flat number that you want to use, um you can include that in the motion. Um and then um so if there's five folks that want to do it, we will put it uh on those um uh poster boards. Uh the reason we have this different poster boards is we try and track you know, are there different funds? We will also track um uh whether it's an ongoing cost or a one-time cost uh or an ongoing savings or a one-time savings, and then we will also um track are there uh FTE associated with that. So we'll track the details of it, and then um it'll go on the board. Uh and that's sort of we'll keep a running list of all that. We will go through all of the departments. The plan right now is to start with uh the council uh appointees and and commission appointees. Uh then we'll go uh by DCM group, so we would start with uh Roberto Benegas's, you'll see his departments.