An edition of the Littleton Independent
WEEK OF JANUARY 23, 2025
VOLUME 24 | ISSUE 8
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18th Judicial District Attorney Amy Padden takes the helm Democratic DA has a new approach for district, which now covers only Arapahoe County BY NINA JOSS NJOSS@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Outside of the South Suburban Parks and Recreation building in Centennial last July.
FILE PHOTO
South Suburban starts to record its meetings
Residents had requested action for more than a year BY NINA JOSS NJOSS@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
After more than a year of several residents requesting more meeting accessibility from South Suburban Parks and Recreation District, the district has started recording and posting its board meetings online. The district joins other local governmental organizations — including Littleton, Englewood, Arapahoe County and others — in posting recordings of its meetings online to make information more accessible to residents. For resident Elizabeth Watson, the decision is a “wonderful” development. “The public should be involved in the maintenance and operations of their taxpayer-funded facilities,” she said. “This is just a great opportunity for the public to be more aware of what is going on.” Starting in September 2024, the district
began recording and posting video and audio from its meetings on its website. The publicly elected board’s main meetings, where official action takes place, are held at 7 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month, unless otherwise noted on the district’s meeting webpage. The videos are also available on the meeting webpage where agendas can be found, at https://tinyurl.com/SSPRDmeetings. Leading up to the decision to start recording meetings, South Suburban Board Chair Pam Eller said, the district did not feel like it had the proper technology to record meetings. After residents continued pushing for recordings, the district decided to purchase new microphones and begin recording. “The people who were asking made very good points — that it’s hard to get to a meeting at six o’clock in the middle of the week,” Eller said. “Our district is fairly large, so people coming from the west side … it’s not just a hop and skip. We all agreed — staff and the board — that it was a reasonable request.” She said Executive Director Rob Hanna and the board wanted to make sure
VOICES: 10 | LIFE: 12 | CALENDAR: 15
the product was good before they started recording and posting the meetings. “We didn’t want to put something out there that was just a frustration to people because they couldn’t hear,” she said. She said recording the meetings also takes “a fair bit of staff time” because a staff member reviews each video to ensure the subtitles are correct to meet Americans with Disabilities Act standards. The district’s December monthly report says the district’s information technology director, Mike MacLennan, is considering hiring a contractor to manage writing the subtitles. “Having a contractor will also get us on a standard schedule where we can let people know when a meeting is expected to be uploaded to (the meeting website), rather than the current schedule of ‘as soon as Mike has time,’” the report states. Eller said the board’s goal going forward is for the recordings to be posted no later than the Tuesday after a meeting, and she imagines this gap will lessen SEE MEETINGS, P14
After many years of being overseen by Republicans, the district attorney’s office in the 18th Judicial District now has a Democrat at its helm. Newly elected 18th Judicial District Attorney Amy Padden, a Democrat, won the November race for the seat against Republican former DA Carol Chambers. Padden started her new job on Jan. 14 and says she is lookPadden ing forward to representing Arapahoe County residents and promoting community safety. “We’re going to continue to prosecute crimes — that’s our job,” she said. “We’re going to continue to promote community safety, but I have different ways of going about that than most Republicans do.” Until now, the 18th Judicial District has encompassed Arapahoe County along with Republican-leaning Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties. As the result of the Colorado General Assembly’s decision to split the district — creating the new 23rd Judicial District to include the other three counties — the 18th Judicial District now only covers Arapahoe County, which leans Democratic. “It’s been a long time since the DA that Arapahoe County voted for was actually the DA,” Padden said. For example, when Padden ran for the seat in 2020, she won Arapahoe County by 15 percentage points, according to county voting results. But, because of the voting results from the other three counties, Republican John Kellner won the race by less than half of a percentage point, according to data from the Secretary of State. “We’ve had Republican DAs that, frankly, haven’t represented Arapahoe County’s values,” Padden said. “I’m really looking forward to doing that.” Prosecution, rehabilitation and prevention
As the district attorney, Padden will be in charge of prosecuting criminal cases SEE PADDEN, P5
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