Jason Batchelor served as Aurora’s interim city manager for most of 2023. City Council members removed the “interim” late last year and he was sworn in as city manager — which with Aurora’s form of government makes Batchelor’s role akin to that of the city’s chief executive officer. 

The Denver Gazette sat down with Batchelor Wednesday to talk about the city manager’s duties, his thoughts on the city’s recent “strong mayor” conversations and his visions for the city’s future. 

Batchelor has worked for the city of Aurora for more than 15 years, serving as the budget officer, finance director and deputy city manager. He twice handled the role as interim city manager in the past several years and has led many significant projects for the city, according to a news release.

His work experience has included overseeing various Aurora departments, including those focused on planning and development, development assistance, information technology and public safety.

Batchelor’s responsibilities include managing the city’s $1.3 billion budget, preparing and recommending the budget to the council for consideration, ensuring the policy direction set by the mayor and council is carried out, and overseeing the city’s day-to-day operations.

He also directly supervises police, fire and Aurora911 — in addition to managing overall city operations and its more than 3,400 full-time employees.

Batchelor’s salary is $330,000, according to a city spokesperson. 

Batchelor learned about city management professions early on in grad school at the University of Texas, Austin, and was immediately drawn to it, he said — enamored with the idea of providing direct services to his community.

“In this role, I’m really impacting folks’ daily lives,” he said. “I get to come to work every day and solve problems that make my community better.”

In his time as city manager so far, he’s played a big role in “pulling the team together,” he said.

“That’s all the department directors and the executive team and really starting to identify a strategic framework for the organization, trying to identify a process that helps us decide what’s important, what’s going to really impact our community and help us move forward,” Batchelor said.

He’s also focused on making Aurora an “employer of choice,” he said.

Hiring and retaining great employees is a “challenge we face day in and day out,” Batchelor said. Over the past year, the city has made significant progress — but still has work to do.

“We want folks to be excited to come work here,” he said. “We want folks to choose to come work for the city of Aurora to make a difference in this community.”

He identified the city’s other top challenges as maintaining a strong economy and providing a safe environment to the community.

Batchelor has worked under three different city managers in his time here and has learned a lot from each of them, he said. His predecessors taught him a lot about being a problem solver, a listener and a collaborator. 

Problem solving is a huge part of his job, he said, and being good at that is critical to being a good leader.

“In that problem solving, you have to listen, you have to understand what the problem is and what the constraints are, you have to understand what resources are available and properly identify underlying problems,” he said. “Then you need to convene the right people to address that problem.”

Batchelor’s role is similar to that of the CEO of a company, he said. He’s responsible for the day-to-day operations of the city and spends much of his time meeting with people to talk about operations, problems and what needs to be accomplished. 

He is also responsible for holding people accountable to getting problems solved and celebrating employees getting the work done, he said. 

In the past year, council has debated the future of its system of government, with Mayor Mike Coffman advocating for the city to switch from a “council-manager” system to a “strong mayor” system, meaning Batchelor’s position as city manager would be eliminated and the mayor would become the executive in charge of running the city. 

The move to change systems of government drew a lot of pushback from both the community and other councilmembers and the decision was moved to the 2025 ballot after proponents said they missed a deadline to put the initiative on November’s ballot. 

Batchelor said he thinks the current system is the right one for Colorado’s third most populous city at almost 400,000 residents and believes “strongly” in Aurora keeping its city manager. 

A city manager is different from a mayor in that Batchelor’s role is much less political, he said. Batchelor’s role is to stay out of the city’s politics and ensure things get done. 

“My job is to have an awareness of the politics and understand each of my elected leaders have their own political agendas and outlooks,” he said. “I try and appreciate and understand those, but I leave the politics to the politicians.”

Still, he admits the politics of City Council can oftentimes be the hardest part of his job. 

Currently, Aurora’s City Council leans heavily right, with seven conservative members and three liberal members. This can often lead to disagreement.

To a degree, that disagreement can be healthy, Batchelor said, but sometimes it goes too far and watching that can be difficult. 

His job is also intended to provide continuity and stability for the organization so that when new administrations come in, operational consistency remains.

Batchelor compared Aurora’s form of government to Denver’s, which has a “strong mayor” system, saying that when the city gets a new mayor, it also gets all new department heads, cabinet and other officials. This would not be the case in Aurora. 

“I believe in the city management profession,” Batchelor said. “I think it de-politicizes the provision of government services to make sure we’re providing efficient, effective services day in and day out.”

His favorite part of his job is working with people. 

“Getting to meet the great employees who want to do great work for the community, meeting residents who have an issue that I can help solve, working with businesses and developers to help them solve problems is the most rewarding thing for me,” Batchelor said. “It’s the people I get to work with.”