Rose Pugliese is back and running for Mesa County Treasurer

Rose Pugliese is back and she just can’t seem to stay off the public dole. Now she’s running for Mesa County Treasurer.

The above photo, which demonstrates poor judgment on a multi-million-dollar scale, should be enough to put all Mesa County voters off of voting for Rose Pugliese for anything, ever. Based on her ill-fated 2018 endorsement of Tina Peters alone, she should be drop-kicked out of Colorado politics forever.

But just in case exhibiting incredibly expensive and terrible poor judgment isn’t enough to disqualify her from holding public office in Mesa County again, other reasons to be concerned about Pugliese include using county money for overtly religious purposes, repeating lies and spewing disinformation and using her position to favor specific individuals:

Promoting Christianity using taxpayer money

In 2017, Pugliese voted with Commissioners John Justman and Scott McInnis to enter into a contract (pdf) to pay $57,360 in taxpayer funds to Project 1.27, a Christian ministry that works through churches to recruit Christian foster and adoptive families, to assure children are “cared for within Christian communities.”

Coincidentally at the time Pugliese’s friend Janet Rowland was employed as the national director of Project 1.27.

Project 1.27 engages in  “[foster] training with a solid Christian perspective,” and provides training to “Christian parents wishing to foster and adopt.” The group’s website makes no mention of recruiting families belonging to any other religion, or families of no religion.

The county’s contract required 20 hours per month be spent on “faith-based recruitment.”

This use of taxpayer money to promote Christianity was a clear violation of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Repeating lies and spewing disinformation

In April of 2020,  the Daily Sentinel outed Rose Pugliese for spreading false information on social media that was put out by Colorado Counties, Inc.

Pugliese wrongly claimed that Governor Jared Polis was intentionally withholding federal funds intended for local governments under the Coronavirus relief bill approved by Congress in March of 2020, and that he was going to use those badly-needed funds to balance the state’s budget, forsaking people in rural Colorado who desperately needed the funds.

But Pugliese failed to read the bill.

The bill that Congress, including the Republican-led Senate, had approved had actually designated relief funds only to state and local governments that served populations of over 500,000 people, so many small rural towns and counties did not qualify for the funds.

The County was poorly managed during Pugliese’s tenure on the County Commission

An August 28, 2016 column in the Daily Sentinel by the Operations Manager of the Elections Division at the County Clerk’s office revealed how poorly run the county was during Pugliese’s tenure as Commissioner.

As Commissioner, Pugliese bent the rules to accommodate a favored individual

In 2017, as County Commissioner, Pugliese and Mesa County’s other two Republican County Commissioners, John Justman and Scott McInnis, publicly admonished a Collbran landowner for violating the law by hosting commercial events on his property for years without the required permits, and then all three of them rewarded him by making his activities legal and letting him proceed as he had been, despite repeated complaints from his neighbors, who together had lodged seven formal complaints against the landowner in just 2015 alone.

Read more information about Rose Pugliese’s past political tenure in Mesa County here.