Aurora city councilwoman Molly Markert wants to see city manager George “Skip” Noe gone, and she’s willing to run for mayor to make it happen.

The Aurora city council has been locked for months in a 6-5 split over whether Noe should stay or go. Markert stands with the five-member, all-female minority pushing for his resignation. Those on the majority side who want to retain Noe include Mayor Steve Hogan, who’s seeking reelection in November.

As far as Markert is concerned, that leaves her with little choice. The 12-year councilwoman, who is term-limited, filed mayoral candidacy papers two weeks ago, saying, “I’ve got other things to do with my life, but if that’s what it takes to prove a point, I absolutely will.”

She accuses Noe of waging a power struggle against council members who have resisted his efforts to centralize control of city affairs in his office. She and other council members have criticized what they describe as his condescending, disrespectful manner, saying it has interfered with their ability to meet constituents’ needs.

“I will fall on the sword of the fact that this is about constituent services,” Markert said. “And if our constituents aren’t getting served, it’s our project, our opportunity, our responsibility to figure out how to do it right.”

The five council members who oppose Noe may be one shy of a majority, but their numbers are large enough to keep city hall in limbo through Election Day, when the voters may solve the problem by reshuffling the council. Five of the council seats and the mayor’s office are up for grabs in a race in which the city manager has already emerged as a campaign issue.

The city council has another chance to contain the damage at its April 13 meeting, which includes this year’s third executive session on Noe, but so far neither side has shown signs of budging, at least not publicly.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a compromise here,” said Colorado political analyst Floyd Ciruli. “And Ms. Markert is raising the stakes.”

Noe was out of town and unavailable for comment this week, but his supporters point out that he has already been honored for his work over the past four years in Aurora, most recently in January, when he was named Man of the Year by the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.

Two years ago, he received the City Manager of the Year Award from the Colorado City and County Management Association. The organization specifically cited his work in the aftermath of the July 2012 Aurora theater shooting in responding to the needs of victims’ families, first responders and the community.

“Tragic events like this test every skill you’ve got. Skip’s leadership through the most difficult circumstances has demonstrated the clear value of professional management in local government,” said CCCMA president and Evans city manager Aden Hogan in a June 2013 statement.

Noe isn’t an elected official, but he wields significant authority in Aurora. The city operates under the so-called “weak mayor” system of government in which the city manager is hired by the part-time council to run city operations.

Hogan, who serves as Aurora’s only full-time elected official, said the city manager issue shouldn’t be at the top of the voters’ list of concerns.

“There are so many more things going on in Aurora that deserve discussion, the direction of the city deserves discussion, and the city manager doesn’t set the direction of the city,” Hogan said. “The city council sets the direction of the city. And so if someone doesn’t like what is happening, they need to be pointing their finger in the right place because the city manager is an employee who does what he is instructed to do by a majority of council.”

Not that Hogan hasn’t occasionally tangled with Noe. Like a majority of the council, the mayor supported giving Noe a raise in December, the same pay hike received by other city employees, but that doesn’t mean there’s never any tension.

Is Noe condescending? “I’ve not seen that with anyone else,” Hogan said. “He and I have, as you would expect over time with two full-time people who are trying to work through what needs to be done with the city — he and I have had a couple of points where we had some disagreement. We worked them out.”

Aurora councilman Bob Roth declined to comment on the executive session discussions, but said he was satisfied with the city manager’s performance.

“I’ll tell you from my perspective that I believe that Skip is doing a very good job at the function he was hired to do, which was to run a city of 340,000 people with 2,700 employees,” Roth said. “I think from the standpoint of what he was hired to do, the day-to-day management of the city, he’s doing a very good job and that’s about as much as I want to say.”

If Noe becomes a campaign issue, “I am more than happy to stand on the record of all the votes that I’ve made, including my stance on our city manager’s position,” Roth said.

The stand-off has been cast as a battle of the sexes, given that all five council members opposing Noe are women and five of his six supporters are men. Councilwoman Sally Mounier told the Denver Post in February that, “He treats us like we’re hysterical females and we should sit down and take three Midol.”

Markert said she finds the “portrayal of it as a woman’s issue is almost as demeaning as the concept itself.” Her problems with Noe began about two years ago when he told council members that “all requests will go through my office,” she said.

Instead of complying, Markert said she and other council members representing four of the six wards continued to contact city department officials on their own.

“Myself and a couple of the others said, ‘Well, I’m not going to do it that way.’ And so our stuff doesn’t get attended to,” Markert said. “Because we’re not playing by his process. And yet he works for us. He doesn’t get to call the shots on how we work with him. We’re the council members. We hire him.”

She said the feud with Noe has hurt her constituents. When she refers people to the city manager, she said, “The constituent comes back to me and says, ‘He didn’t even listen. He played with his phone the whole time. He got up after five minutes and said he had to go.’ Over and over again.”

“Council as a group will support something that is of benefit to one of the four wards, and it accidentally never happens. ‘I don’t know, it got lost, I don’t know,’” Markert said.

The division went public after councilwoman Barb Cleland attempted to initiate a vote of no confidence against Noe at the Jan. 27 council meeting. The six-member majority thwarted the vote, but the council agreed to meet on the issue in executive session.

At the March 30 executive session, several councilwomen walked out about 15 minutes before the rest of the members.

“I’d say Skip will have his job for however long he wants it,” Mounier told the Aurora Sentinel afterward. “There’s no resolution. We went as far as we could go, and there was no point in going any further.”

Roth was more optimistic. “I would say that during our last executive session, I felt like we were making some progress, but that progress didn’t end up in any kind of resolution that everybody was happy with, and so we’re going to continue the conversation,” he said.

In addition to performance issues, the council must also wrestle with the legal and financial implications of dismissing the city manager. The former city manager of Corpus Christi, Texas, Noe was hired to run Aurora city hall in December 2010 and earns $196,764 a year.

“There may be some legal issues here, as to what they’re going to compensate this guy,” Ciruli said. “One assumes that this is not easy to do. One doesn’t do these jobs any more without considerable protection. They may have some delicate negotiations right now.”

Hogan said that Noe doesn’t have a contract for a certain number of years, adding that he “serves as the pleasure of the city council.”

As far as Markert is concerned, the “gracious” thing for Noe to do would be to resign. “[W]e’re not happy with how the city’s working. So the credible thing to do to reestablish respect and rapport is to say, ‘Clearly, I’m the problem. I don’t think I’m the problem, but clearly I’m the problem, so I’m going to get out of the way and let you all figure it out,’” Markert said.

Hogan wants to see the council members work out the problem together, preferably not in public but in executive session. In the meantime, he says, the rift between Noe and council members hasn’t affected how the city operates.

“There’s no suggestion that the city isn’t operating. In fact, if you ask some of the council members who are not comfortable with the manager, they will candidly say they like the way things are going, they just don’t like their relationship with him,” Hogan said. “So this really is more of a personal relationship thing than it is anything else, and to get it fixed, it has to start with council members getting back together and talking to each other.”

But Markert wants to see Hogan do more. “I’m at the point of thinking, ‘You know, the mayor should be exerting some leadership here.’”

“He’s the leader of the council as well as the leader of the city. And in my opinion, [he should] look at the cards on the table and say, ‘Well, this isn’t working. What are we going to do to make it work?’” she said. “And I wish him well, because I don’t see a simple resolution with one group or the other saying, ‘Oh, well, never mind, it didn’t really matter.’ It really does matter.”