October 31, 2024 03:28 PM UTC

Mayor Mike's Aurora Empire Crumbling From The Inside?

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Aurora Sentinel’s Susan Greene reports, all is not well on the Republican-controlled Aurora City Council, crafted over the course of years by former GOP congressman Mike Coffman but now beset with infighting centering on one particularly vociferous council member whose recent fame has come at a terrible cost for the rest of the city:

[Danielle] Jurinsky is the bar owner and at-large council member behind the false, election-season narrative that Venezuelan gang members have overrun parts of the city. She has a history of testy, sometimes profane rhetoric, and deemed by some as bullying.

At issue most recently is a string of text messages she sent to four of her conservative council allies — council members Françoise Bergan, Stephanie Hancock, Steve Sundberg and Dustin Zvonek — in advance of a meeting earlier this month. The texts were obtained by the Sentinel.

Jurinsky was angry about Bergan’s proposal to continue levying Aurora’s employee tax, which Jurinsky had worked to abolish as part of a campaign promise…

Reader discretion advised:

Councilor Danielle Jurinsky has received more press exposure this year than at any time since being elected to office, almost entirely related to the wildly exaggerated claims that the city of Aurora has been “taken over” by migrant gangs that Jurinsky has promoted since the summer despite pushback from Aurora police and Mayor Coffman himself. Under pressure, Jurinsky signed a joint statement with Coffman grudgingly admitting that the allegations were “overstated,” but immediately afterward went right back to spreading the false story–including at an appearance at Trump’s rally (barely) in the city early this month.

The fractured relationships among the Republican majority on the Aurora City Council are believed to be a factor in the recent resignation of the city’s mayor pro tempore Dustin “Mini Mike” Zvonek, who accepted a full-time job with Josh Penry’s Elon Musk-scamming family of companies rather than finish out his term. Zvonek, who served as Coffman’s aide in Congress, isn’t as crucial to Coffman now that he has a GOP majority, and working for Penry above the exploited canvasser level pays well,  but we also wouldn’t be sad about losing a job where colleagues subject you to this kind of extreme verbal abuse.

As for Jurinsky, her stabs at a higher profile this year have been in clear aspiration of higher office once she’s done on the Aurora City Council. While Jurinsky may have earned some chits in the MAGA political world, this kind of troubling inability to work well with colleagues has a way of self-limiting one’s upward career mobility.

Not in every case (see: Donald Trump). But few have Trump’s inexplicable redeeming charm.