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The Denver school board voted Thursday to hire an outside law firm to represent it in legal matters involving the superintendent, whom the board is responsible for hiring, firing, and evaluating.

The vote comes at a tense time for Superintendent Alex Marrero and the school board, who met recently behind closed doors to discuss their working relationship.

The board will hire the firm Holland & Knight, which has locations across the country, including in Denver. The board could also ask the firm to conduct investigations or offer a second opinion on complex matters previously reviewed by the school district’s lawyers.

A contract hasn’t been finalized. But board member Kimberlee Sia said at the meeting that the cost was below the $250,000 threshold that requires the district to put a contract out for bid.

The district put out a request for proposals anyway, Sia said. But no law firms responded.

Instead, Sia said she reached out to firms to ask if they would be interested in the job. Of the two that responded, she and board President Xóchitl Gaytán chose Holland & Knight, Sia said.

The board voted unanimously to hire the firm without any substantive discussion.

The topic has generated debate in the past. Sia first proposed a policy on when and how the board should hire an outside lawyer in June 2025. Her thinking, she said, was to avoid conflicts of interest regarding the superintendent’s contract and performance evaluation.

Instead of having the school district’s general counsel represent both the board and the superintendent, Sia proposed each side should hire its own external attorney.

Gaytán pushed back on the proposal, arguing that it could displace Denver Public Schools General Counsel Aaron Thompson and policy governance attorney Marcus Johnson, both of whom are people of color. She noted that Marrero is also a person of color.

The board passed a slimmed-down version of Sia’s proposal in October. Gaytán was the sole no vote. The policy, called Governance Process Policy 18, says the board’s outside lawyer should report directly to the board president, who is currently Gaytán.

Marrero has expressed concerns about the arrangement. In a June 8 letter in which he outlined how he believes the board is overstepping its bounds, the superintendent wrote that he was “compelled to reiterate concerns regarding any efforts to create structures that function as a parallel legal advisory system separate from the District’s General Counsel.”

He wrote that such a move could “risk creating perceptions of retaliation, undermine established reporting structures, and further complicate governance responsibilities.”

The relationship between Marrero and the board has grown more tense since Marrero applied for an open position in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. He didn’t get the job.

Marrero and the board met in a three-hour closed-door session late last month to discuss the superintendent’s concerns and his contract, which says he’s entitled to a year’s salary if the board terminates him without cause. Marrero earned $346,529 this past school year. The two sides emerged from that meeting pledging to continue to work together.

An attempt by some board members to call a subsequent meeting to discuss Marrero’s employment didn’t garner enough support to be scheduled, the Denver Post reported.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

For firefighters, trust matters more than almost anything. When we run into burning buildings, we put our safety and our lives on the line. We need to trust those who say they’ll back us up. Unfortunately, Colorado’s statewide firefighters’ union has lost Denver firefighters’ trust.

As the president and secretary-treasurer of Denver Fire Fighters, IAFF Local 858, we lead the local union representing more than 1,000 city firefighters and EMS personnel. About two years ago, with the support of our members, Local 858’s executive board ended our local union’s payments to the state union, Colorado Professional Fire Fighters (CPFF), along with its affiliation with that union.

But state union officials have refused to acknowledge that we are no longer affiliated with them. And this spring, the state union raised the stakes by sending Denver firefighters a massive bill for roughly $400,000 in dues we don’t believe we owe.

That’s why, this week, we took the state union to court. We want to affirm Local 858’s separation from the state union and establish that we don’t have to pay a union we don’t belong to. The truth is, leaving the state union wasn’t an easy decision. Local 858 was one of its founding members. So how did we get to a point where one union is suing the other?

Denver firefighters union sues state union over attempt to leave

For decades, Local 858 regularly sent a portion of firefighters’ dues to the state union in support of its mission “to protect and advance the rights, interests, and well-being of our members.” As by far the largest of the 67 firefighter locals affiliated with CPFF, we were paying the state union nearly $250,000 in annual dues.

That’s a lot of money. And we realized we weren’t getting much in return. We came to believe Denver firefighters’ dues, not our “rights, interests, and well-being,” were the state union’s real priority.

For example, if delegate votes in the state union reflected membership, Local 858 would have about 20 votes. Instead, the state union caps every local at 12 delegates. We were paying dues as the biggest local in Colorado without being heard as the biggest local in Colorado.

That felt like taxation without representation.

Our members also had questions about the state union’s credit card charges, expensive dinners, and other spending that did not look like it had anything to do with serving Denver firefighters. Yet for too long, we felt the state union’s officials obscured much of its finances and made it difficult for members to find out where our money was going.

With our members’ concerns becoming harder to ignore, Local 858’s executive board voted in late 2024 to suspend dues payments to the state union. Nearly 60% percent of participating members later confirmed our decision in a vote about disaffiliation.

To complicate matters, a third union is involved. Local 858 left the state union but remains affiliated with the International Association of Fire Fighters, the union that represents firefighters across North America.

International union officials sided with the state union and claimed we had not followed the proper process to disaffiliate. We disagreed but held another vote this past spring to reaffirm our decision, hoping it would satisfy them.

This time, 70 percent of participating members voted to leave the state union. As elected officers, we took oaths to abide by the majority–in this case an overwhelming majority.
But that still wasn’t good enough for the state and international unions.

Local 858 has jumped through their hoops even after making our decision clear, but they insist that we remain bound to the state union. And in May, the state union sent us a nearly $400,000 bill for more than a year and a half of dues we don’t believe we should have to pay.