A plea was made to the Commerce City Council meeting Monday night to provide training for those tasked with advising the council on development within the city. The city’s Planning Commission, according to one of its members, Dennis Cammack, has not been able to live up to the task its members have been appointed to do.

“I don’t know that we have served the council in the way that we are really required to,” Cammack told council members. The solution begins with training, and more specifically, by a third-party provider.

Although swearing in city council members following an election is mostly a formality, it also can signal a turning point if some new faces join the dais as they did in Commerce City. Three new members, including Commerce City’s new mayor, took the oath of office Monday alongside three returning incumbents after winning election in November. …

…What the incumbents and the newcomers have in common is a chance to hit the reset button at City Hall. As we noted here recently, that means all members committing to moving past the sideshows that frequently have distracted the council and bogged it down. New and returning council members alike should be open to the expertise offered by their full-time staff at City Hall, and avoid needless conflict with each other.

Some new faces, including a new mayor, have joined the City Council following last week’s election — but they’ll confront some of the same old basic challenges. And foremost among those challenges at City Hall, moving forward, is whether new and returning council members will be able to work together to enhance the quality of life in Commerce City.

That will require moving past the sideshows that frequently have distracted the council and bogged it down; heeding more of the solid advice offered by the policy experts on the City Hall staff, and avoiding needless conflict.

The need for more affordable housing has been cited as a top concern in just about every public opinion survey along the Front Range for several years now. The affordable-housing shortage is as critical in Commerce City as it is anywhere in the metro area.

So, why would three Commerce City Council members vote against a planned affordable-housing development that will provide 60 new apartment units to tenants of modest means? It remains far from clear what prompted council members Susan Noble, Kristi Douglas and Jennifer Allen-Thomas — who chaired the Oct. 2 council meeting as mayor pro tem — to cast “no” votes.

Last week’s 6-1 vote by the City Council against costly new regulations on rental housing seemed like an easy enough call. But it left one council member out on a limb as the sole supporter of the measure. 

It was a lonely place to be for at-large City Councilwoman Kristi Douglas. She went down with the ship at the Oct. 9 council meeting as a diehard for the unsuccessful proposal. Opponents said it would have backfired on the city’s apartment tenants and other renters. Instead of making rental housing safer, as Douglas claimed, the policy would raise the rent.

Most of the council got it.

“If this was to pass, rents would go up, and you would force a lot of people out onto the streets,” fellow council member Sean Ford admonished.

Four candidates — including two incumbents — are running for the two at-large seats on the mail ballot this fall. Voters will vote for two of the candidates; the two receiving the most votes will fill the two seats. Here’s a look at the four contenders in the order in which they appear on the ballot. 

Two candidates are seeking the Ward IV seat on City Council on this fall’s ballot — the seat’s incumbent and a challenger, who drew the top ballot line in the race. Let’s look at the Ward IV contenders in the order in which they appear on the ballot.

An Adams County judge has appointed a neutral third party to manage the finances of two Commerce City metro districts after their boards failed to make payments towards the millions of dollars of debt they accrued for the construction of the districts’ infrastructure and amenities.

The districts’ resident-controlled boards, which appear to have relied on advice from their recently hired financial and legal advisers – CPA Charles Wolfersberger and lawyer, Paul Rufien – also refused to cover day-to-day expenses as required by a 2016 agreement, according to court documents.

Two candidates are seeking the Ward III City Council seat, pitting the seat’s incumbent — who was appointed earlier this year to fill a vacancy — against a challenger. Let’s look at the Ward III hopefuls in the order in which they appear on the fall ballot.

Our City Council is considering a new policy to register rental properties — like a similar law that’s on the books next door in Denver. It’s intended to hold landlords more accountable, but it also stands to backfire on the housing market in our community if it isn’t at least fine-tuned.

A former City Council member — Rene’ Bullock, who now heads the Commerce City Chamber of Commerce and is running for mayor — brought the issue to the public’s attention in an opinion piece he wrote for Wednesday’s Denver Gazette. Bullock maintains that the proposed ordinance, called Rental Registration Ordinance 2541, “was designed initially to target multi-family housing but in practice will increase rental home prices and create onerous burdens for property owners of single-family rental homes.” He argues the ordinance as drafted will, “lead to costs that will be passed on to tenants who will be forced to pay higher rent.”

Two candidates are seeking the Ward II City Council seat — which is currently held by one of them. As in our candidate profile for mayor, let’s look at the Ward 2 hopefuls in the order in which they appear on the fall ballot.

Following up on our recent peek at City Council and mayoral candidates and their contributors, we’ll offer profiles of each of the candidates this week — starting today with the mayor’s race.

We’ll feature the hopefuls in each race in the order in which they’ll appear on the ballot.

In Commerce City’s 2023 race for mayor, three candidates will vie for an open seat being vacated by current Mayor Benjamin Huseman, who is not seeking re-election.

Here’s your chance to put politicians in the hot seat. The citizens of Commerce City will get to meet, greet — and grill — the candidates for mayor and five other City Council seats on the fall ballot at a Sept. 29 candidate forum open to the public.

If you wish to praise the council for any particular reason — or if you’d rather ask them what they’ve actually accomplished since the last election — show up at Fire Station #8, Friday the 29th, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

MAYOR

FOUR-YEAR TERM

(Vote for One)

Steve Douglas

René Bullock

Joseph Dreiling

We’re now past the Aug. 28 for City Council hopefuls to file their nomination petitions to appear on this fall’s ballot. We’re also just a day shy of the Sept. 8 deadline to register as a write-in candidate, for those who missed the regular ballot deadline. Six seats — including the mayor’s —on our city’s nine-member council will be decided on the ballot.

So, let’s take a look at who’s running — and get a glimpse at the support base for those candidates who have received campaign contributions they had to report in their early filings. We’ve linked to each candidate’s filing affidavit for easy access to the city’s website, where there’s further information on the candidates.

Just the other day, Eye On Commerce City took stock of the city’s struggling school district, Adams 14, and noted how much work lies ahead as it tries to close the achievement gap with other, higher-performing districts. 

Only a few days later, the gap got bigger.

Annual statewide student achievement tests that are used to measure how well Colorado’s schools are preparing our kids — more or less flunked Adams 14. The Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS, test scores revealed our city’s district ranked near the bottom — of the entire state.

A 40-minute-plus debate at last week’s City Council meeting over a planned road crossing — and whether it should reference “golf carts” among its anticipated users — has drawn a rebuke from some Commerce City citizens. After we reported on the time-consuming tangent off the council agenda at its Aug. 21 meeting, readers — including a former council member — pushed back hard. Most weren’t too kind to the council.

A bad case of analysis paralysis? Or, maybe it was just plain dysfunction on display at Monday’s City Council meeting. It got bogged down for 40-plus minutes as some council members got hung up on the description of a planned pedestrian road crossing. Not the crossing itself — the description.

The time might have been better spent addressing citizens’ concerns raised earlier in the meeting about the city’s widespread problems with homelessness along streets, parking lots and other public places. (Council members sat silently through that one.)

The Colorado Department of Transportation is engaging in outreach to the north Denver metro area — including Commerce City — as it paves the way for long-overdue improvements to the I-270 corridor.

To say Adams 14 schools have faced challenges in recent years is an understatement.

Our city’s academically struggling school district lost its accreditation last year by order of the State Board of Education — a rare occurrence for any of the state’s 178 school districts. Even after accreditation was restored later in the year, the district remained under orders to reorganize. And that’s not to mention the years of legal wrangling between the district and the state board over the state’s actions.