Colorado’s No. 3 city might contract out its public defender office to attorneys in private practice, a move that could save local taxpayers $1 million a year by some estimates. It’s almost half the $2.2 million Aurora City Hall city now spends annually representing indigent criminal suspects.
And there’s another potential dividend to the pending proposal under consideration by the Aurora City Council and championed by council member Dustin Zvonek: It would ensure Aurora taxpayers are only providing legal representation to suspects who can’t foot the bill — not subsidizing their daily lives.
It’s an issue with implications beyond Aurora city limits.
An enlightening Gazette report this week compared and contrasted how Colorado’s three biggest cities — Denver, Colorado Springs and Aurora — provide lawyers to those of meager means facing petty offenses in municipal court. What emerged in the coverage is how the two cities that staff their own public defender offices have wound up assisting clients through the “life situations” that purportedly got them in trouble with the law.