By Jacob Richards
Published with permission from The Revolutionist
Mesa County Commissioners are prepared to take another big step Tuesday towards their goal of packing the Mesa County Public Library (MCPL) Board of Trustees with MAGA-adjacent Christian ideologues and culture warriors.
On the consent agenda (meaning there will be no discussion) is an item appointing Lisa Fry and Rosanne Croft to the seats currently held by the Board President Sue Conry and Alice Dow. Both Conry and Dow submitted letters of intent to serve a second five year term, and only found out they were not going to be reappointed Friday via email, about the same time Mesa county posted the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.
Dow and Conry were invited to submit a letter of intent to serve a second term in the early fall and then heard nothing until yesterday. Critics and sources close to this story say that the process has lacked all semblance of transparency.
Conry and Dow are both professional, experienced pillars in our community with a track record of principled, steady leadership, and they are being replaced by right-wing ideologues with little applicable experience.
The MCPL system has an annual budget of over ten-million dollars and 100 employees.
So who are they seeking to put on the board?
Lisa Fry is the co-host of the Mesa County Compass, a local right-wing podcast focused on local politics and long-form interviews with local leaders. Fry was also a co-founder of Colorado Christian University’s Grand Junction Campus.
She was the co-organizer of a September 17 Constitution Day event held in the children’s area of the Main Branch of the MCPL, which raised eyebrows, since only library sponsored events generally take place in that area. The event was not a library sponsored event, but rather it was hosted by an informal group of homeschool advocates.
A video of the event, posted by Fry’s podcast, gives credence to the fears that it was a Trojan horse to push for a right-wing take over of our library system.
Jason Bias was dressed up in colonial garb, serving as a greeter. Bias is the former president of CMU-TPUSA, and known bigot who regularly shares neo-nazi memes on social media.
In one clip, an unnamed woman can be seen talking to around two dozen young children, saying, “If you don’t have a way to protect yourself against the government, then the government can start saying ‘well you can’t say this; you can’t say that,’ and if they take away the things we are allowed to say then they have total power over us. So you kinda need the 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms, to back up the first.”
“I would love to see agendas stop being pushed on our children. Multiple times I’ve come to the library and there’s been books that were front facing and like pushed in my children’s face… and it’s not material I’d like my children to read.” said one unnamed participant interviewed on the Mesa County Compass. She continued “There was a story time we came to… and story time was about two moms building a treehouse for their kids, and we have not been back since.”
Another inaccurately complained that the library did not have any resources that promote a patriotic history of the United States.
According to Fry’s podcast, the event was co-organized in part by Katy Vandervelt, a recent appointee to the MCPL Board of Trustees. She is a stay-at-home mom and Children’s Director at the River of Life Church in Grand Junction.
Rosanne Croft, the other potential appointee, is a Christian author who has penned a number of Christian romance novels.
In a June 2023 letter to the editor about the D51 School Board, Croft wrote: “We continue to need good leadership to help our children through this ‘woke’ minefield. Basic education is no longer, stable or sensible, being replaced with cultural ideas that have nothing to do with reading, writing and math. The result? Mental illness…”
According to the agenda item, Croft “has extensive experience working in libraries, with training in library system processes. She holds a B.A. from the University of Minnesota,” but does not elaborate further. The same agenda item also lists Fry is the owner of Aspen Grove Enterprises, a business that folded according to secretary of state’s documents in 2020.
In April of 2025, a controversial piece of art that depicted Donald Trump with a Hitler mustache galvanized our local MAGA-adjacent culture warriors to target the Mesa County Public Library system and specifically Michelle Boisvenue-Fox, the executive director.
Boisvenue-Fox is well-liked by the community and staff and has been described as a fierce defender of inclusivity and an advocate for all kinds of groups of people in the Grand Valley.
Since the controversial Trump/Hitler art piece, the library has been inundated with ‘Removal Requests’ for books specifically from national ‘removal lists’ that groups such as Moms for Liberty have published.
The seven-person board of trustees handles the budget and finances as well as the hiring and firing of the executive director.
If the appointments of Fry and Croft go through on Tuesday, they will put the Mesa County Public Library that we all know and love in jeopardy to moral crusaders who believe in the bible more than they believe in the freedom of speech.
Mesa County Board of County Commissioners are taking a page out of neighboring Garfield County’s playbook who started a process back in 2022 of making the county’s library system the front-line in the culture wars.
“Vacancies began to open. Adding insult to injury, as trustees came up for reappointment, they were asked to re-apply for the position, and were ultimately not reappointed. The [Garfield County] BOCC was on its way to stacking the library board. The BOCC took up the cause of followers of right-wing agendas. The BOCC’s goal became: one, to remove the library board president and two, to fire the executive director,” wrote Jocelyn Durrance, a now-former Garfield County Public Library Board of Trustee member who is now an organizer with Protect Our GarCo Libraries community group, in an op-ed in The Sopris Sun.
This anti-book movement locally is just part and parcel to a push by conservatives across the state to make libraries the new battlefield in the culture wars.
We should heed the warnings.
Read the writing on the wall and show up in support of our libraries as an inclusive and welcoming space for all residents. We citizens of Mesa County, us lovers of the library, and all advocates of free speech for all need to organize to fight this right-wing push to extend their culture war to the sacred shelves of our local library.
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Call to Action:
Tuesday, December 16th, 9am
Mesa County Board of County Commissioners Administrative Hearing Public Comment
544 Rood Avenue
Come Make Public Comment
* Support of Current Board Members Alice Dow and Sue Conry.
* Question the lack of transparent process.
* Question Fry and Croft’s lack of experience.
* Express support for MCPL executive director Michele Boisvenue-Fox.
* Demand Non-partisan trustees committed to serving all residents of Mesa County regardless of race, class, gender identity, disability, or who they love.
* Ask that they remove it from the consent agenda for full discussion.
Agenda and Rules of Decorum:
Board of Commissioners Administrative Hearing – 12/16/2025 9:00:00 AM – OnBase Agenda Online
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Why not simply re-appoint Ms. Dow and Ms. Conry? They’ve done a terrific job guiding our library: providing excellent online access to so many resources, superb multi-faceted no-cost lectures, and in-person programming and activities for adults, teens, and children . . .
Seems to me that this smacks of political intrusion into something that should be open to our entire community’s opinion; and perhaps especially to those of us who are registered as library patrons / members?
What might I be missing here? Even though I have a suspicion . . .
MC voters only a few weeks ago voted out two ultra dulltra righties from our school board. Commissioners are obviously not “reading the room.” They will do this at their own political peril.
Well stated, Vicki. Mesa County is not white “christian” nationalist country.