The first time I heard of Mick Bates was on January 25th of this year, when he was one of three people the board interviewed to fill a seat left vacant by Chris Austin’s resignation in December (you can watch Bates’ interview here). He struck me as a likable guy, the sort who would make for a good neighbor in these parts. After being chosen to be the new board director, Bates proceeded to vote in unison with the board consistently…never offering a dissenting opinion, just going along with the majority. I decided I should learn more about Mick Bates, since he’s one of the three up for re-election this November. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Mick Bates is a graduate of the 2015 class of the Leadership Program of the Rockies, a sort of social club for people identifying with far-right philosophies. Among the 63 other graduates that year are a couple names that should sound familiar – Bryce Carlson (partner in Brad Miller’s law firm) and our superintendent, Ken Witt. Other graduates of this program you’ve probably heard of are Brad Miller, Curt Grina, Tim Farmer, Jimmy Sengenberger, Dan Williams, Trevor Miller.
Mick’s local influence grew in the following years, and he became the chair of the Teller County Republican Central Committee. Then in one of the candidate forums last week, we listened to Mick Bates take credit for helping to engineer the political takeover of our district back in 2021:
I noticed that we hadn’t had School Board elections no one had been challenged for 11 or 12 years and so I engaged in a process to put together a group of candidates um primarily conservative candidates Dave was one of the original candidates we interviewed people put the best people forward that we could and at the time we elected a uh we had there were four seats open and we won four of four seats
10/9/2023 candidate forum
The conservative slate Bates helped get elected didn’t last long; director Gary Brovetto resigned in the spring of 2022. The board chose Cassie Kimbrell to take that seat.
According to the public information website TRACER, on September 5th of 2022, Mick Bates donated $500 to the campaign of board director David Illingworth (though he had not announced an intention to run for re-election, with the election being more than a year away still). That same day, Jameson Dion donated $1,000 to Illingworth (Dion is a very vocal board supporter on social media). No explanation was given (or required) for these off-cycle donations.
September saw more controversial decisions by the board with the their decision to dismiss the SAC and DAC committees which had just completed their training, and put in place their own selections. The board proceeded to announce a plan to hire an interim superintendent to replace Del Garrick and Tina Cassens, long-time district administrators who had been made co-superintendents just that August and by all accounts had been doing a great job. The one member of the board NOT part of that slate, Chris Austin, resigned in early December. The board chose only one person to interview for the interim superintendent position, Ken Witt, and hired him at the end of December.
In January, the board interviewed Mick Bates and two others to fill the seat vacated by Austin. As you know, Mick Bates was chosen; it’s worth watching the board’s brief discussion about which candidate to choose…there wasn’t any discussion, they all had their minds made up already. We did learn a little about Bates’ religious perspective in this interview, where among other things, he said this:
…this separation of church and state has been around a long time but it’s backwards it was intended to keep the state out of religion not religion out of the state…we’re a Judeo-Christian country…
Since the January interview, we didn’t really hear much from Bates. He didn’t say much in meetings, didn’t offer a dissenting view, just voted along with the rest of the board. In August, with his re-election campaign heating up, he did propose a meager 15 minute increase in the public comment period in board meetings (which has proven insufficient, as the 10/11 board meeting showed).
Now that the campaigns are in full force, we’re hearing a lot more from Bates. With the district scheduling a forum at the same date and time as the Chamber of Commerce candidate forum, Mick Bates reached out to someone named Bill, asking him to write a piece for the Courier about these forums. He helped get this slate in place and bring all these changes to our district; it was clear he didn’t want to give that up so quickly:
We just need to get ahead of this and go on offense like we discussed, We want to create the narrative!
Mick Bates, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1isY_qIF2bo5xximIACN3Gr1wneaRb6zx/view
Prior to the start of the 10/11 meeting, Bates came outside to address one of the dozens of people locked out of this meeting (the board refused to move it to a larger venue)…you can watch that below:
I’ve come to realize my initial impression of Mick Bates was not correct. He’s been involved with orchestrating this far-right takeover of our school district from the beginning. Despite the division it has fostered in this community, Bates is working hard to not lose control of what he’s helped build.
Mick Bates is running against Seth Bryant for that school board seat.