Some Aurora officials are looking to reduce or even remove a requirement that the city’s department leaders live in Aurora.
Those officials, such as Michele Clark, Aurora’s chief human resources officer, say the rule restricts an already small applicant pool for the jobs and even perpetuates a lack of staff diversity.
Other officials, such as Ald. Shweta Baid, 10th Ward, however, say they want to make sure their leaders know the ins and outs of the city.
The proposed change to the residency requirement, which was before the City Council in August but was sent back to committee for further review, would allow city department heads to live in surrounding municipalities.
The proposal was debated for nearly an hour Tuesday at a City Council Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee meeting, where several aldermen and city officials proposed eliminating the residency requirement entirely. That would change the current language in the proposal that would require department heads to live in a nearby town.
“I don’t think your address dictates how committed or invested you are into the community,” Clark said Tuesday.
The measure was held at the committee level and is set to be discussed again at the panel’s next meeting on Oct. 20.
Officials in favor of completely removing the requirement said residency in Aurora could be listed instead as a preference on job applications. This change would take the measure a step further than a similar ordinance approved by the city in September that allows the city’s police and fire chiefs to live in any municipality within 15 miles of Aurora, instead of having to live within the city limits.
Ald. Daniel Barreiro, 1st Ward, said Tuesday that some sort of residency requirement makes sense for police and fire chiefs, as they need to respond to emergencies quickly, but he said that standard does not make sense for other officials, especially as the city has already removed the requirement for the rest of its employees.
“We are limiting ourselves on the best people that we can hire,” said Barreiro. “It’s not necessary because they are not public safety and shouldn’t be held to the same standard.”
As a former city worker, Barreiro argued that removing the requirement is crucial to addressing what he said has been a recent pattern of high turnover among city department heads. He said he worked under four different department leaders in the five years he worked for the city’s Human Resources Department.
Barreiro also previously told The Beacon-News that residency requirements are hard to enforce. Currently around 53% of city department heads live in the city and around 29% of city employees live in Aurora, according to a statement from city officials.
Barreiro said he remembers the “mass exodus” of city staff members moving away when Aurora lifted its residency requirement for full-time staff years ago.
“We’re requiring for them to move when there’s no assurance that they’re going to be here after they made that hard decision and uprooted their families,” he said of department heads.
Clark said that removing the requirement could help the city find the best candidates for highly-specialized roles and also speed up the hiring process. For example, she said, 66% of candidates that have applied this year for full-time city positions live outside of Aurora.
“The role that chiefs or department heads play, those are very specialized positions … we’re just saying we want to be able to cast the widest net possible,” said Clark.
Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, has also stated support for removing the residency rule. He called the requirement “archaic” at a City Council meeting in August and previously told The Beacon-News that the proposed measure could help fill the fire chief vacancy by removing some barriers.
“We always want the best, and anybody that lives outside the city that’s raised their family somewhere and is part of the fabric of that community, shame on us for making them move in when they could do their job just as well living there,” he said.
But Baid said she would like the city’s leaders to have knowledge of Aurora. She proposed an amendment that would require Aurora department heads to have two years of work experience with the city. Baid said the requirement could help the city’s employees move up through the ranks.
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“I strongly feel people who are going for leadership positions, they should have some kind of connection to the city,” said Baid. “This is one way we can make sure that they are of the culture and know the city.”
Ald. Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward expressed a similar sentiment when the measure came before City Council in August. He said he felt it is important for senior municipal staff to maintain a direct and active presence in the local community, a sentiment he said council members and residents have told him they support.
But Clark said Tuesday that the city could benefit from a change, and she worried Baid’s amendment could perpetuate a lack of diversity among city staff. Currently, she said, around 25% of the city’s employees are women, whereas women make up around 47% of the country’s work force, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re a heavily male-dominated organization,” she said. “If we started recruiting or just promoting from within those senior levels, we would be perpetuating that imbalance.”
The city has gone back and forth about requiring city employees and department heads to live in the city since as early as 1993 when the city scrapped the residency requirement for full-time employees.
Proponents of a residency requirement have argued in the past that response times and public safety could be improved if public safety officers lived closer to Aurora. In 1997, mayoral candidate Ron Harris went as far as linking the lack of residency requirements for city employees to the city’s increasing crime rate at the time.
Just last year, a measure was passed in Aurora saying the residency requirement does not apply to department heads that are required to have a professional license or are required to have specialized training or knowledge.