The election of Durango City councilors Dave Woodruff and Kip Koso to mayor and mayor pro tem on Tuesday was all but a foregone conclusion – or so it might have seemed to someone familiar with Durango’s rotational mayor system.
Mayor Gilda Yazzie subverted expectations when she nominated Councilor Jessika Loyer for mayor pro tem instead of Koso, receiving pushback from Koso and Councilor Shirley Gonzales and leaving some residents in attendance confused.
During an intermission between the swearing in of Woodruff and Loyer, a resident in attendance approached Woodruff and said he’s disappointed in him.
Koso, who was traveling out of state, attended the meeting virtually.
During a short but heated discussion on the dais, councilors called Koso’s leadership and trustworthiness into question.
Loyer said the mayor and mayor pro tem positions are not just ceremonial roles – they require leadership, the ability to build consensus and to support city staff within the city’s council-manager form of government while upholding the city charter.
She said City Council best functions when there is trust among city staff, councilors and the community, and leadership on City Council requires “the ability to collaborate and find common ground, to respect the boundaries of the council-manager structure.”
Koso said he was “sidelined” and “blindsided,” calling the development “ridiculous.”
“There’s obviously been some conversations around this. I would ask council why, if they felt there’s a competence issue or an inability for me to take on the role for mayor pro tem, that some conversation didn’t happen with me prior to this meeting,” he said. “… Building trust through conversation and compromise is not anything that I have not been doing.”
He said he was elected to City Council last year with 25% more votes than the next highest vote-getter, a clear indication voters want him in a leadership role.
In Durango, City Council traditionally selects the mayor and mayor pro tem based on who received the highest number of votes in their election to City Council. City Attorney Mark Morgan said the city charter does not require councilors to follow a specific process for mayoral elections, only that a new mayor and mayor pro tem are elected by City Council each year.
The roles of mayor and mayor pro tem are also largely honorary. Mayors lead council meetings and often attend public-facing events like ribbon-cuttings, and mayor pro tems step up to take the mayor’s place when he or she is absent. They have no special authorities other councilors lack, other than the responsibility of leading meetings.
With Yazzie and Loyer having already served one-year terms as mayor, Woodruff was next in line. Koso, who received the highest number of votes in the April 2025 election, was next in rotation after Woodruff – per the informal rotating mayor system.
Former city officials said they’d never seen City Council steer away from the mayoral tradition like it did on Tuesday. Morgan said it has been more than 25 years since they bucked the trend, based on his research.
In an interview during an intermission of the regular meeting on Tuesday, Yazzie provided a short explanation of her decision that raised more questions than answers.
When asked what led her to nominate Loyer over Koso, she offered a one-word answer: “Leadership.”
When asked what makes her more comfortable with Loyer as mayor pro tem, she said she’s worked with Loyer and Woodruff for several years and she knows they possess the leadership and broad knowledge of city functions to navigate issues such as a citizens initiative seeking to ban law enforcement officers’ use of masks to conceal their identities.
She said she has less confidence in Koso and declined to elaborate.
“It’s confidential,” she said.
In an interview, Loyer said Yazzie approached her several weeks ago and asked if she would accept the mayor pro tem nomination if Yazzie proposed it, and Loyer told her she would do what is best for the city.
She said that was the only conversation she had on the subject, and she didn’t know whether Yazzie would make the nomination at Tuesday’s meeting.
Loyer said Koso has gone behind City Council’s and the city manager’s backs in the past.
She said she stopped having one-on-one meetings with Koso after she learned he was also meeting one-on-one with other councilors. That created a situation too close to a possible violation of open meetings law for her comfort, she said.
Koso said in an interview his one-on-one meetings with councilors aren’t intended to solicit votes or determine support for one issue or another; rather, they are simply to discuss issues more in depth.
Loyer said Koso has gone around the city manager to meet with staff members directly, which is outside of a councilor’s purview. Councilors can be intimidating and make staff uncomfortable.
“It’s fair to say that I’ve been corrected a couple times,” Koso said. “The last time was when I reached out to what I thought was an (information technology) professional.”
Koso said he contacted an IT employee with the city because he thought that was the proper contact for the issue he had.
He said he understands the city charter is built to prevent councilors from giving orders to staff, and he is “completely comfortable” with that.
It took some getting used to when he started his term, Koso said, and sometimes it’s “arduous” to go through the city manager to talk to department heads – but he accepts the process laid out in the charter.
It’s also his job as a councilor to collect as much information as he can and to ask questions of subject experts, he said.
He has run into staff members at events or around town and asked them questions before, he said, but he wasn’t trying to direct anybody. Nor was he trying to be secretive.
“We are a small town. I run into staff all the time. I don’t hold them to a wall and question them,” he said.
Woodruff said he didn’t support Loyer for mayor pro tem to throw anyone under the bus, and he’s also not bound to any one person or tradition.
“I’m loyal to the community. I voted in a way that – in that moment – I felt was the option that was best (going) forward,” he said.
That does not mean he would not support Koso for mayor pro tem or mayor in the future, he said.
“There were some things that I think gave us pause on who was best to lead the council coming into 26-27,” he said.
He said he is excited to serve as mayor and to serve the community as best he can.
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