By John Laesch, Aurora mayor
The ethics ordinance that passed the Aurora City Council, July 14, is good news, but there is certainly room to continue working on better legislation. First the good news!
The ordinance limits campaign donations to $1,500 from any corporation who does business with the City of Aurora. It also increases the number of disclosure questions from three to six. The answers to those disclosure questions will be published on the City of Aurora open data portal.
It is important to realize that pay-to-play ultimately costs the taxpayers more money. Let’s examine a recent contract with Scientel Solutions, a company that has donated well over a hundred thousand dollars to the former mayor both through his campaign, and through a “shadow PAC” called “Build R Future.” Scientel also donated over $30,000 to Aurora aldermen.
The three-year contract negotiated by my administration saved $562,661 more than the contract that was in place during the previous three years to pay for the installation and maintenance on network devices (routers, switches and network hardware). This most recent contract actually allowed for more network devices and the city will own all 650 devices when the contract terminates in 2028. It would have been more expensive to strip the Scientel devices out of city buildings and move to a new vendor so we took this approach.
The concerning news following this ethics ordinance vote is that several floor maneuvers by aldermen resulted in a significantly watered down ordinance. Primarily they were able to remove the portion that banned the involvement of “Shadow PACs.”
It means that a city contractor like Scientel can still donate $24,000 or more to a Shadow PAC that can then donate that money to candidates running for office.
We will have to work hard in the coming election to be vigilant for money being donated to shadow PACs and work to fix this portion of the code after the 2027 elections.