Tension boiled over at the Aurora City council meeting on Monday, when two items — a call for a “cease-fire” in Gaza and efforts to undo the request for proposals to examine the potential effects of privatizing the city’s public defender’s office — were removed from the agenda.

Councilmember Alison Coombs, who had championed the “cease-fire” call, pulled it from the agenda at the beginning of the meeting “after discussion with the community members who reached out on behalf of the ceasefire resolution.”

Abdul Karim Khan, a healthcare worker in Aurora and among those who showed up to speak on the resolution, asked the council to imagine Aurora being under attack like Gaza is.

“I don’t want to use my hard earned tax dollars that I raised saving lives here to be used to terrorize and murder men, women and children over there,” Khan said. “Let us all unite on the guiding principle of healthcare workers to do no harm. That is the bare minimum and that is what the cease-fire in Gaza will accomplish.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Mike Coffman said he did not want to keep hashing out an issue that he doesn’t believe affects the city of Aurora directly.

“I introduced a resolution earlier saying that we will focus on the business at hand that we have jurisdiction on, and that we will not do things that waste time that we have no control over as a local government,” Coffman said.

Councilmember Curtis Gardner then proposed excluding both the “cease-fire” resolution and a second resolution to end the request for proposal (RFP) in the city’s efforts to figure out the financial impact of privatizing its public defender’s office. 

In January, the city sent out the RFP to determine the costs and potential benefits, of contracting out for public defense services, with an eye toward privatizing the city’s in-house public defender’s office.

The question of whether to privatize the office has been going on since last year, with proposals due in early March, at which point council will decide whether to move forward with privatization.

The council voted in favor of removing the item from the agenda following a recess, as audience members began chanting “cease-fire now.”

Following the recess, Coombs requested that the people who came to testify on the RFP item get the time to speak anyway, a request the rest of the council rejected.

Councilmember Curtis Gardner said the issue had been “debated to death” and that speakers on the issue would have plenty of time to speak in future meetings on the topic.

“We are in the process of doing an RFP. There’s going to be plenty of opportunity in the future for these speakers to comment,” Gardner said. “There’s really no reason other than political grandstanding, frankly, for the sponsor to have put this item on the agenda.”

Councilmember Crystal Murillo argued that the idea behind Coombs’ resolution was to “call into question” the process used to examine the issue. 

“I don’t agree that we should be limiting public comment in the way that we have,” Murillo added. “That’s just chipping away at the public’s ability to have input in our city government and I just keep seeing this trend. We’ve called for the question. We’ve ended debate. When does it stop?”

Meanwhile, a measure to condemn “dine and dash” crimes — in ways similar to retail theft — drew several public comments instead about the public defender issue. 

Aurora’s Chief Public Defender Elizabeth Cadiz said the entire meeting “couldn’t be any more ironic.”

“It’s not fiscally responsible when you are clearly trying to outsource right now a public defender’s office to combat the increase in costs associated with your previous mandatory minimum sentencing,” Cadiz said. “I can’t talk about why that reasoning is otherwise flawed and clearly indicates a disregard for the constitutional rights of individuals who do have a presumption of innocence or how it encourages this idea that perhaps we could save money if more people take pleas.”