Yesterday’s election was tense. Most of us went to bed thinking the last update of the evening was that the three challengers all had small leads over the incumbents. A late night update at 11:06 flipped that though, showing Mick Bates leading Seth Bryant by 43 votes (4,596 to 4,553) and Cassie Kimbrell leading Mike Knott by 55 votes (4,596 to 4,541). Keegan Barkley maintains her lead over David Illingworth (4,683 to 4,444), though that lead has shrunk to 239 votes (see full results here). Teller County says, on their website, that “all eligible ballots have been received and counted.”
Given the small margins, the next step will be to wait for any ballots to be cured (like if they’re rejected due to signature mismatch). Then, as I understand the law, an automatic recount is triggered if the gap is .5% or less (Seth meets that threshold, Mike does not).
It’s Election Day! In 2021, there were 7,233 votes cast for school board, out of 15,778 eligible to vote for that. I don’t know how many eligible voters are in the district this year but expect a similar number, and I expect higher turnout than 2021 (45.84%). But this is a sort of baseline, so as votes are announced starting at 7PM, you’ll have a sense of if most of the votes have been counted yet (nothing will be announced prior to 7PM).
Every 15 minutes after polls close, the Colorado Secretary of State’s website will be updating this file, assuming the county has provided new information. The SOS’ main election results page is here with additional links to statewide elections. Teller County’s election page is here, though already they’re not updating it with total votes counted (last update was Friday), so I think the Secretary of State’s website is likely to be the best source. Also note that Teller County’s website shows there are a total of 19,763 eligible voters – that’s in the entire county, but many of those do not live in the Woodland Park RE-2 school district (in 2021, there were 21,863 eligible voters, so 72% lived in RE-2).
The voting service center is open 7-7 today at the Woodland Park Library, for in person voting or ballot drop-off.
My name is Ben Honeycutt. I became a teacher because I was driven to be someone who could be there every day for my students. I taught at Woodland Park Middle School (WPMS) for five years.
— Read on benhoneycutt.com/journals/on-the-eve-of-election-day
After being steered towards mediation by a judge overseeing the lawsuit between the WPEA and the WPSD (the judge said that portions of the policy “do have problems”, policy KDDA has been revised, and you can read the full document here. This revised policy no longer takes away teachers’ right to talk to the press about district decisions (read more about the previous policy here). It’s sad it took a lawsuit to get the district to respect their First Amendment rights to free speech, but at least in the end, those rights were preserved.
I think we’ve all received a few pieces of mail by now advertising for the incumbents…you’ll note those have been paid for by an independent expenditure (IE) committee called ‘Citizens for a Vibrant Woodland Park’. Who are they? Let’s follow the money.
The only reported donor to this group is the Western Prosperity Alliance, a Colorado non-profit formed on 6/7/2023 by Scott Gessler. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the district hired Gessler on March 27th to be another of its lawyers. Let that sink in for a minute…a Woodland Park school district attorney filed articles of incorporation for a company used to funnel money into an IE committee established to support the incumbents.
What sort of support did Western Prosperity Alliance provide? On 10/3, they provided $5,450 in ‘legal fees for Citizens for a Vibrant Woodland Park’, and also on that date paid $5,000 in ‘research and consulting fees to Bullhorn Communications‘, a Nebraska advertising firm. Finally, on 10/3, Western Prosperity Alliance donated $22,500 to Citizens for a Vibrant Woodland Park. Western Prosperity Alliance has not reported donations to any other political groups, they have only reported donations to Citizens for a Vibrant Woodland Park. Their current registered agent is “CT Corporation”; before that it was Thomas Bearden.
What can we learn about Citizens for a Vibrant Woodland Park? So far, not much. Their mailing address in Colorado Springs is shared by a couple organizations, the Colorado Liberty Alliance and also The Winter Night Club. William (Bill) Baber is the registered agent for this group; he appears to be an attorney.
Citizens For a Vibrant Woodland Park reported an expense of $3,944.65 on 10/18 for a direct mailing, followed by an expense of $4,522.96 for another direct mailing. Their next mandatory campaign finance filing is due tomorrow, October 30th.
So in summary, we don’t know much about who’s calling the shots with this group, just that one of our district’s attorneys helped start up the entity that is financing it.
Teller County for School Choice is one of a couple known Independent Expenditure Committees set up to influence this year’s school board race (there are some other groups involved but already in existence before this election cycle). These committees are what I think most people would think of as ‘dark money’ – they’re structured as a 501c(4) non-profit, allowing them to take unlimited financial contributions without having to disclose who their donors are.
But this brings us to Teller County for School Choice. On the surface it seemed like just another of these dark money groups, but I realized there’s a big difference. It’s a 501c(3) nonprofit, which meant (as I understand it at least…I’m no lawyer) it could not shield its donors’ identities. This group was started by Heather Scholz, a member of the Woodland Park school district’s District Accountability Committee (DAC) both this year and last, and a small financial supporter of Mick Bates’ campaign (she donated $50). Her group seems to have held a fundraising event at the end of August where they brought in $3,700, but it hasn’t reported any activity since – no new contributions, and no expenses. In the whole scheme of things, a seemingly small player in this election.
I find the details interesting though. Check out their donors (this is public info on TRACER):
Paul Lundeen, $100 – Brad Miller’s brother in-law. State Senator and minority leader (though he listed his employer as ‘self’ in the finance report, is it possible I have the wrong person here?).
Laura Carno, $250 – Executive director of FASTER Colorado, a group that trains armed school staffers. She’s also part of the Independence Institute.
Mark Hyatt, $2000 – Co-founder of Falcon Aerolab, which Merit Academy uses for some students as a homeschool enrichment program. Mark’s name appears many times in Merit’s original application, he played some role in helping start that.
The Open Gate LLC, $300 – the owner, Bethany Drosendahl, is the treasurer for ERBOCES (Ken Witt’s other full-time taxpayer-funded job)
Not super surprising when you consider the name of this independent expenditure committee, really. But seeing them all in one grouping like that is new to me, usually these are names you hear mentioned here or there but never with such a clear connection.
When I mentioned that Teller County for School Choice has not reported any expenses, that’s not entirely accurate. Heather Scholz failed to file the required paperwork on time, and so of the $3,700 in donor money she’s received to date, she currently owes $600 of that in late filing fees, which she has not yet paid.
While unfortunately only three school board candidates (Seth Bryant, Keegan Barkley, Mike Knott) showed up to the forum organized by Woodland Park High School students, the community turned out in large numbers and packed the large conference room of the public library. Three students read questions that had been submitted by students; you can watch a recording of the event below (the last few minutes of Seth Bryant’s closing speech were cut off due to technical issues).
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!
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.
So many people – on both sides I’m sure – were looking forward to voting on this school board race and being done with this. Ballots were mailed Monday, and started being received today. What greeted people opening their envelopes though, was this:
Not what people expected…where was the school board race? Calls to the county clerk revealed there has been a printing mistake, due to switching to a new printing service. We’re expecting a press release and/or other public announcement from the county soon to set the record straight, just know that replacement ballots should be mailed out later this week. The county’s website has an example of a sample ballot, and shows that it SHOULD look like this:
