Juan Marcano
Prior offices
Aurora City Council Ward IV
Elections and appointments
Personal
Contact
Juan Marcano was a member of the Aurora City Council in Colorado, representing Ward IV. He assumed office on December 2, 2019. He left office on December 4, 2023.
Marcano ran for election for Mayor of Aurora in Colorado. He lost in the general election on November 7, 2023.
Marcano completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Juan Marcano was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. His career experience includes working as a public servant.[1]
Elections
2023
See also: Mayoral election in Aurora, Colorado (2023)
General election
Endorsements
To view Marcano's endorsements as published by their campaign, click here. Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Marcano in this election.
2019
See also: City elections in Aurora, Colorado (2019)
General election
2023
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Juan Marcano completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2023. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Marcano's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I am the son of retail workers who migrated from Puerto Rico all across the southern U.S. in search of a thriving wage. The struggles my parents went through to provide a stable living for me and my sisters are foundational to my worldview and values. Our lives changed for the better when my dad became a manager and finally earned a salary that allowed my parents to purchase a home and put down roots.
With housing stability came the ability for us to create a support network, discover our passions through athletics and arts, and build positive social capital. My parents worked hard to achieve this, but luck also played a part. Countless people work hard every day and still can't make ends meet. Allowing precarity and poverty to continue is a policy choice, and I am choosing to break that cycle.
I am running for mayor to ensure Aurorans have a city that will put the needs of working families first. The stable housing and resources that my sisters and I had shouldn't be reserved for those lucky enough to "make it” but should be the baseline for all people in a modern, moral, and wealthy society.
- A safe city. The safest communities are those with the most resources, and we need to invest heavily in our working families and our youth in order to attack the root causes of crime.
- A clean city. We need to streamline our trash hauling system to ensure our open spaces and public places are free of litter and debris, and we need to put public health and safety first by protecting our air, land, and water.
- A thriving city. We must ensure that work pays enough to live, that housing is affordable and dignified, that our infrastructure is well designed and maintained, and that we create opportunities for our community to come together and celebrate the richness of our city's diversity and talent.
Featured local question
It didn't change my approach, but it changed my priorities. Much of what I ran on was sidelined due to projected budgetary shortfalls, so most of what we did during the pandemic involved allocating federal funds to supplement our own to keep people housed, businesses open, and public services up and running to the maximum extent possible.
Featured local question
Crime rates in Aurora are currently on the decline in 6 of 7 categories year-over-year as of 9/8/23, in line with national trends. Our crime information is sourced from our police department, which tracks crime in line with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
While the trends are welcome, we're simply returning to the mean in Aurora, which is not good enough. I'd like to shift our public safety philosophy from one of only reacting to crime to actively attacking the conditions that create and feed crime at the root. This looks like making strategic investments in our high-crime areas, which we know creates real public safety. As an example, I'd like to strengthen our partnership with our school districts to create a community schools program designed to provide our residents with safe ways to recreate, learn, and build positive social capital.
Featured local question
Aurora, a city of nearly 400,000 people, does not have a downtown. I think this is endemic of the lack of vision previous governing majorities have had in our city. I am inspired by the transformations I've seen in cities like Carmel and Le Plessis-Robinson make and how they have strengthened their livability, sustainability, and character by creating their own downtown areas.
I'm committed to creating a walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income, livable downtown for Aurora.
Featured local question
A government can't be representative if resident input isn't part of the decision-making process, so public participation is critical. Aurora has historically had very little public participation, to include our municipal elections, and improving our outreach and electoral participation are both high priorities for me.
I’d like to fully fund the “City Hall to Go” proposal in order to go to where underrepresented portions of our community are at and work to bridge those gaps. I’d also like to restore our after-meeting public comment periods that were cut after the 2021 elections, and I’d like to propose a charter amendment to move our elections to even years like other local municipalities have done in order to greatly increase voter participation.
Featured local question
Public records should be readily available and produced in a timely fashion. Our City Clerk's office is committed to complying with requests, but like many aspects of the city's administration, they have long been understaffed and under resourced. I'd like to work with our City Management and our City Attorney to make our open records request fulfillment as expedient and inexpensive as possible.
Featured local question
Our city's public safety and crime approach has been reactive rather than proactive, meaning we are stuck in a posture of responding to crime rather than working to attack the conditions that create it and feed it. First responders play an important role in the public safety ecosystem, and we need to improve the menu of options for response to incidents when they do arise, such as fully funding the Aurora Mobile Response Team to have 24/7/365 city-wide coverage.
The safest communities in our country are those with the most resources. The inverse is also true. In Aurora, our socioeconomic vulnerability index, child opportunity deficit index, and crime maps all show the same hotspots. This divestment has been ongoing for decades, and I am committed to redirecting investment to these parts of our city in the form of stable housing, creating a community schools program, setting wages that allow individuals and families to thrive, improving the built environment, creating more opportunities for recreation, and providing other amenities that strengthen the social fabric of the community.
We can do so much better than resign ourselves to following national trends -- we can be a model for Colorado and for the nation on how to create a truly safe community. Featured local question
I came into political activism in Aurora combating gentrification and displacement at Denver Meadows, which was a mobile home park that once housed over 100 families. The mobile home park was closed, the land was sold, and most of the residents ended up evicted because their homes were too old to relocate. There were no protections for the residents, and the city committed a paltry sum to help the remaining folks relocate after tremendous public pressure. This experience is foundational to the kinds of development agreements we need in place when public participation becomes part of a development.
We will need to redevelop parts of our city in order to build safer infrastructure, more housing, strengthen our economy, and reduce dependency on cars, but protecting our existing residents and businesses from displacement needs to be top priority as we embark on this journey. We can accomplish this through development agreements that require public dollars be used to create affordability, and that any residents or businesses that are displaced get the right of first return once the development is habitable.
Featured local question
By creating a robust community outreach and engagement strategy, to include a fully-funded "City Hall to Go" program. We have an incredibly diverse population in Aurora, with 20% of our residents being born outside of the United States. We haven't done the best job of reaching out to the entirety of our population, and that is something I intend to change. Updating our city’s Comprehensive Plan and Economic Development Strategy will be the first major public outreach initiative of my term as mayor, and the outreach process for this will far exceed what we’ve done in the past.
Featured local question
City management has been supportive of making our public safety agencies more efficient, and I'd like to continue to diversify our response to emergencies in the city.
A top priority for me is to fully fund the Aurora Mobile Response Team, allowing them to have 24/7/365 city-wide coverage. This will be a tremendous relief for the Aurora Police Department, freeing up officers to patrol for street racing, reckless driving, and other urgent incidents.
I'm also in favor of bringing our ambulance service in-house under Aurora Fire Rescue. The city currently has a private, for-profit ambulance service that leaves residents with huge bills, but Aurora Fire Rescue's paramedics do the lion's share of the work on each call. I do not believe our residents should ever face a financial disincentive to calling for help when they need it.
I'd also like to see the city invest in more fire stations. Our response times have suffered due to suburban sprawl, and our budget hasn't kept up with Aurora Fire Rescue's needs for renovations and new stations. Featured local question
Our air quality has been on the decline in Aurora and the Front Range due to the externalities generated by the oil and gas industry, followed closely by exhaust and tire dust from commuter vehicles. I'm committed to protecting our residents from oil and gas development coming close to their homes and businesses, and to reducing car dependency through revising our land use and pattern of development.
Featured local question
Aurora must become a livable city, meaning we must move away from unsustainable, car-dependent suburban sprawl and towards a mixed-use, multimodal development and redevelopment. We’ll do this by revising our development and land use policy, and using incentives to provide affordable housing and commercial spaces in these projects. This kind of intentional placemaking will also serve as natural transportation hubs, which will foster the expansion of bus rapid transit services and improve mobility for all users -- pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists.
Featured local question
I'd like to expand the department's Community Service Response Team so that residents can get faster response for non-injury crashes and the like while freeing up law enforcement to handle more serious matters. I'd also like to see more civilian detectives to follow up on and investigate crimes with the goal of improving our clearance rates for cases, which are currently very poor.
I'd also like to see the the Police Area Representative (PAR) program become foundational to the department. The PAR program was innovative when it was created in the 1980s, and many other agencies have emulated it in some form since it came into being, but it has never really been a priority for our department. I'd like to work with department leadership and city management to refocus how we handle patrol through PAR, putting our officers on the ground in our community where they can build trust and strong relationships with our residents.
Featured local question
Cities in Colorado don't have health departments, so Aurora worked with Tri-County Health to protect our residents during the pandemic. We were supportive of the CDC guidelines around masking and social distancing, and stood up our own relief programs for residents and businesses to keep folks housed and keep the doors open.
Once vaccines began to roll out, I worked with two health equity providers in Aurora to set up a series of equity clinics at the Stampede (a huge country western dance hall) to vaccinate our residents as quickly as possible.
All of this was done through the lens of protecting public health and safety. I believe we were successful on all fronts, and we kept people housed, businesses open, and provided thousands of vaccines during the worst of the pandemic as a result. Local government as the place where we address the social (political) determinants of health. To make Aurora the safe, clean, and thriving city we all know it can be, I'll be focusing on increasing wages, building affordable housing, creating an equitable economic development plan, improving the quality and accessibility of our built environment, partnering with our school districts to provide more resources for our youth and families, and investing in community-centered placemaking to create space for the arts and cultural exchange.
In politics, Bernie Sanders. As mayor of Burlington, VT, Sanders and his progressive colleagues instituted a number of reforms and directed investment and development in a way that put the needs of residents first and foremost. Nearly 40 years later, these policies are still providing benefits to the people of Burlington, from the Lake Champlain waterfront open space to the community land trust that guarantees permanently affordable housing and commercial space to the people of the city. I believe his administration is a prime example of what forward-thinking local leaders can do to benefit their community long after they leave office.
Curiosity, courage, communicativeness, candor, and a strong moral compass.
A robust social housing and permanent supportive housing program that reduces homelessness to functional zero, the development of a walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income downtown, and the development of a performing arts center.
The beginning of the Gulf War. I was 5 years old, and I remember my grandmother worrying that the end times had begun as we watched news footage of missiles streaking through the night sky.
My first job was working retail at GameStop through my high school’s “Co-Op” program which allowed students to earn credits for working a part-time job. I held that job for two years and went from entry level to being a third key.
We have the best food scene in Colorado, hands down. I believe this is one of the best ways to understand how lucky our city is to be so diverse.
Water conservation, land use reform, and tackling our capital infrastructure maintenance backlog.
Partnership and open communication to best serve our shared constituency. There are many policy areas and issues that the city needs support from the state to tackle, including housing, homelessness, HOA oversight, and infrastructure upgrades. I am grateful to have a good working relationship with Aurora's delegation to the state legislature and I believe that we'll be able to accomplish a lot for our residents over my term.
You can find a link to the full list below.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Note: Community Questions were submitted by the public and chosen for inclusion by a volunteer advisory board. The chosen questions were modified by staff to adhere to Ballotpedia’s neutrality standards. To learn more about Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection Expansion Project, click here.
2019
Juan Marcano completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2019. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Marcano's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Aggressively working to address our housing affordability crisis, working with my colleagues to set up public enterprises to diversify the city's revenue sources, and becoming a smart city so we can address traffic and other issues through the use of modern technology.
Affordable housing, electoral reform, campaign finance reform, municipal broadband, municipal banking, community-led planning.
Bernie Sanders. As mayor of Burlington, VT, Sanders and his alderman allies instituted a number of reforms and directed investment and development in a way that benefited the public. Nearly 40 years later, these policies are still providing benefits to the people of Burlington, from the Lake Champlain waterfront open space to the community land trust that guarantees permanently affordable housing and commercial space to the people of the city.
Star Trek: The Next Generation has had a strong influence on my world view. I believe that as a species we should be striving to move beyond our current paradigm and pursuing greater levels of cooperation, learning, and advancement. I believe that this is possible with the level of technological advancement and development our society has achieved, and that change can be catalyzed at the municipal level.
Listening more than they speak, transparency, honesty, empathy, good judgment, and commitment to justice.
I work well in team settings, I am a capable researcher, a fast learner, and have a strong moral compass that puts people before profit.
Listening to and advocating for their constituency, being a good steward of taxpayer dollars, and ensuring the city plans for the future.
Creating permanently affordable housing on a community land trust, becoming the largest city in the state to have a publicly owned broadband service, and being the largest city in the state to use ranked choice voting for municipal elections.
The beginning of the Gulf War. I was 5 years old, and I remember my grandmother worrying that the end times had begun as we watched news footage of missiles streaking through the night sky.
I worked at GameStop. I held that job for two years, and during that time I learned valuable lessons about listening to people's wants and needs and the value of service.
Ride the Fence by The Coup.
Home-rule cities in Colorado have a tremendous amount of legislative power to shape their destinies and address so many of the issues working people face in our state. In Aurora, our city council has historically lacked the courage and political will to wield this power in a fashion that helps our working- and middle-class families. I believe our city council should be advocates for their constituency, and if elected I plan to carry my work as a community advocate into office.
Servant leadership, curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.
I believe it is helpful, but not necessary. In 2017, we elected three progressive women who had never held elected office to city council and they have been instrumental in changing the dialogue in our city from one that favors out of state developers and special interests to one that focuses on the issues important to every day Aurorans. Elevating the voices of people outside of the political establishment is important if our goals are to serve the needs of working people.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
External links
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 9, 2023
