Tag Archives: Mick Bates

Who is Mick Bates?

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.

Campaign Donation Summary (10/4)

Colorado does a great job of managing elections, with so much data made available to the public. Financial data is tracked via TRACER, a great website with comprehensive data on donations and expenses for campaigns. The most recent filing was due yesterday, so with this new data, here are some observations.

The fundraising leaders are clearly the three challengers; here are the fundraising totals from highest to lowest.

  • Seth Bryant: $24,975.65 raised
  • Keegan Barkley: $22,682.38 raised
  • Mike Knott: $22,613.29 raised
  • David Illingworth: $14,971.03 raised
  • Mick Bates: $10,978.24 raised
  • Cassie Kimbrell: $9,622.36 raised

Each side is running as a slate of three candidates, so another useful comparison is the total per slate. In that case, the three incumbents (Bates, Kimbrell, Illingworth) have raised $35,571.63, while the three challengers (Bryant, Knott, Barkley) have raised almost double that, $70,271.32!

The other interesting data point is the average contribution. Despite Bryant, Barkley, and Knott raising nearly twice what the incumbents (Bates, Kimbrell, Illingworth) they’re trying to defeat this election have, their average contribution was around half of the incumbents’. Here are the average contributions, again ranked from highest to lowest:

  • Mick Bates: ~$168 average contribution, from 58 individual supporters
  • David Illingworth: ~$161 average contribution, from 87 individual supporters
  • Cassie Kimbrell: ~$129 average contribution, from 66 individual supporters
  • Seth Bryant: ~$80 average contribution, from 215 individual supporters
  • Keegan Barkley: ~$77 average contribution, from 225 individual supporters
  • Mike Knott: ~$75 average contribution, from 220 individual supporters

(note – these averages are approximate and do not account for donations from the candidate themselves to their election committee)

So in summary, the three challengers (Seth Bryant, Keegan Barkley, and Mike Knott) are raising nearly double the amount of money the incumbents are, and doing so through a large number of smaller donors. The incumbents are relying on a small number of larger donors to fund their campaigns.

There are two Independent Expenditure Committees registered to support the incumbents. The only one reporting donations currently is Teller County for School Choice. They’ve raised $3,700 so far, and while they are not yet reporting any expenses, they do owe the state of Colorado $550 in late fees for not filing their reports on time (that’s 15% of their total raised so far). David Illingworth himself has racked up a large quantity of fines for late filing; we’ll dig into and summarize that at a future date (but it’s all visible on the TRACER website if you want to explore it yourself).

Numerous times, the board has declared the opposition to their actions to be the part of “a small group of radicals”. They’ve downplayed the magnitude of opposition and repeatedly talked about having widespread support. These fundraising stats do not appear to support those claims.

Ballots are mailed out around the middle of this month, and due November 7th. You can track the status of your ballot, from mailing to being accepted, at this website. VOTE!

Follow the Money – canvassing

In their latest campaign expense filings, both David Illingworth and Mick Bates list a $250 expense to Crimson Central Services in Colorado Springs, for “Canvassing Services” (you can find all this info on TRACER). Let’s dig deeper. Here’s a list of all election campaigns that had similar expenses with that company for last month:

Six expenses of the same amount for various school board campaigns in different cities…it seems likely these are for the same purpose. We at first thought this was for door knocking, as that’s the traditional definition. However, those two Canon City BOE candidates list a different purpose for their $250 expenses…one lists ‘software expense’, the other lists ‘voter data’. If you look at the past history of this particular company, they have a very large number of expenses of $1,250 for consulting and data. It seems most likely that Bates and Illingworth are paying Crimson Central Services for voter data, which is a normal thing for a candidate to seek out anyway.

Who is Crimson Central Services?

Crimson Central Services is an LLC filed in Wyoming – a state which allows LLC owners to mask the identity of their owners. But the records on Tracer list business addresses, and 6140 South Gun Club Road, Unit K6-354 in Aurora, a UPS store where I presume the 354 is a mailbox number. So, bit of a dead end there. These days though, their address is listed as 100 East Saint Vrain Stree, unit #105, in Colorado Springs. Who else is at that address? Victor’s Canvassing.

Now, Victor’s Canvassing is not a company I’d expect you to have heard of. However, they identified themselves when handing out this flyer to teachers’ homes:

The return address on that flyer (some were mailed, some delivered in person by Victor’s Canvassing) lists the Freedom Foundation in Washington…a right-wing group known for attacking unions and public education (link1, link2, link3, link4, link5…you get the idea). So, no surprise to see them involved here, and not surprising to see Bates and Illingworth using a similar canvassing company as the Freedom Foundation.

But we’re not quite done digging! Who is behind Victor’s Canvassing? The Chief Operating Officer is Daniel Fenlason:

Who is Daniel? The Truth and Liberty Coalition (the 501c(4) group established by Andrew Wommack) proudly lists him as one of their ‘Influencers‘:

So, in summary – Bates and Illingworth appear to be using the services of a canvassing company that’s closely linked to the Truth and Liberty Coalition and Andrew Wommack, as well as the Freedom Foundation.

Illingworth interviews board candidates about “Between the World and Me”

On Wednesday, the board interviewed three candidates for the vacant board seat. The video here is David Illingworth’s question, which he thinks is connected to the book “Between the World and Me” but really seems unrelated (I don’t think he actually read that book). This is the book that was removed (banned) from a high school class recently (read more about that here).

The board selected Mick Bates, the second person to be interviewed.