The Aurora City Council once again failed to fill its Ward Two vacancy Monday after nearly 100 rounds of voting over eight hours resulted in ties.

After 3 a.m., the council postponed the decision to Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Monday’s marathon meeting came after the council failed to fill the vacancy during its last two meetings on July 12 and June 28. The meetings saw 38 and 14 rounds of tied votes respectively.

In each meeting, council members Alison Coombs, Allison Hiltz, Angela Lawson, Juan Marcano and Crystal Murillo voted for Democratic candidate Ryan Ross, while Francoise Bergan, Marsha Berzins, Curtis Gardner, Dave Gruber and Mayor Mike Coffman voted for Republican candidate Steve Sundberg.

Throughout the meetings, the only thing both sides of council have agreed on is that they do not like the way the appointment has gone.

“We are looking so unprofessional,” Berzins said Monday. “I’m getting emails going, ‘y’all are being so childish.’ This is embarrassing. This is really embarrassing.”

“I completely agree,” Marcano said in response. “I think it is embarrassing to try to use a vacancy to flip a majority on council.”

In the end, Coombs and Marcano voted with the Sundberg supporters to postpone the meeting after previous attempts failed on party lines. Coombs and Marcano agreed under the condition that the city attorney’s office get a third-party opinion on whether failing to fill the vacancy violates the city charter.

Aurora City Council again delays vote to fill Ward 2 vacancy after 38 rounds of tied votes

The council-appointed city attorney Dan Brotzman has repeatedly said not filling the seat would violate the charter. some Republican council members disagreed with Brotzman’s interpretation, since the charter requires a majority vote and they cannot come to a majority. The charter lacks guidelines for how to handle tie votes.

If the council fails to fill the vacancy by midnight Thursday, they will have automatically violated the city charter by passing the deadline for appointment: 45 days since the previous council member’s departure.

Brotzman said the city attorney’s office likely wouldn’t serve the council with criminal charges for violating the charter, but the council could be subject to civil suit.

Of the nearly 100 rounds of voting Monday, only one was on a motion to appoint Sundberg and around a dozen were to take breaks or table the meeting — the rest were motions to appoint Ross.

The council members who support Sundberg appeared to have given up on his appointment, only requesting motions to postpone the meeting until Thursday or after the November election once their first motion to appoint him failed with the same 5-5 tie.

“What are we doing here? This is our third night of doing this,” Berzins said. “We can’t come up with six votes, so I think we need to turn it over to the voters.”

Westminster City Council turned an open council seat over for a public vote earlier this month when it failed to decide who would fill its vacancy after 99 rounds of voting. That may not be an option in Aurora, which has no provision for the move in its charter.

Aurora police officers wanted for alleged assault, failing to intervene

“I agree with the spirit of the proposal, but we’d basically be saying we’re going to intentionally violate the charter,” Marcano said. “I don’t think we should be setting the precedent that the charter doesn’t matter, and I also don’t think we should be setting the precedent that a ward can go without a ward council member.”

At one point Monday, Gruber asked the city attorney what would happen if five council members just left the meeting. Brotzman said the council would lose quorum and the meeting would be forced to end without a decision.

The Ward Two council seat was left vacant after Councilwoman Nicole Johnston resigned in June to start a new job. Johnston is a progressive Democrat, part of a wave of new candidates that transformed the historically conservative council to a relatively even split — with five members leaning right and five leaning left.

In each meeting, most of the council’s debate has centered on whether or not the candidate who is selected to fill the vacancy needs to politically align with Johnston.

On Monday, Marcano asked the Republican council members whether they’d support the council appointing a left-leaning replacement for them if they couldn’t finish their terms. Gruber said he thinks Marcano would “put in a Socialist as fast as you possibly could.”

“I think we should honor the will of the voters in the last election and actually appoint someone who closest shares the values of the person who had that seat,” Marcano said. “That’s my pledge to you and to the rest of our colleagues. That’s what I would do, and I would expect the same of y’all.”

Aurora mayor to propose camping ban to address homelessness in city

Sundberg is running to represent Ward Two in the general election in November. Some council members said appointing him to the temporary vacancy would offer an unfair advantage over other candidates.

Without Johnston, the council has three Republican members (Gruber, Berzins and Bergan), four Democratic members (Hiltz, Murillo, Marcano and Coombs) and two unaffiliated members (Gardner, who loosely identifies as libertarian, and Lawson, a former Republican).

Because of the council’s current split, the candidate who fills the Ward Two vacancy has the potential to make or break key council proposals in the near future including Coffman’s proposed urban camping ban that  is due for an August vote.

During candidate interviews last month, Ross opposed the measure and Sundberg supported it. Johnston was a vocal opponent of the proposed camping ban.

Sundberg is the manager and operator of the family-owned bar and grill Legends of Aurora and has served on several local nonprofit boards.

Ross is a community activist serving as CEO of the Urban Leadership Foundation of Colorado and associate vice chancellor for student affairs, equity and inclusion of the Colorado Community College System.