Pueblo County School District 70 parent Chris Sutton filed a formal criminal complaint (pdf) with the Colorado state Attorney General’s Office February 22, 2026, against attorney Brad Miller of the Miller Farmer Law firm for public corruption and bribery.
Sutton is asking the CO AG to conduct a full criminal investigation into an alleged “pay-to-play” bribery scheme carried out by Education Re-envisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services (ERBOCES), ERBOCES’s legal counsel, Brad Miller and Pueblo County School District 70 Board of Education Director Anne Ochs, who abruptly resigned from the D-70 School Board in the wake of a public Christian School controversy instigated by Miller with the intent of spurring a legal test case against the school.
Miller Farmer Law is based in Colorado Springs.
The complaint alleges Miller tacitly offered Ochs a lucrative, six-figure employment contract (pdf) with ERBOCES that included health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, a $500 monthly travel stipend, $100/month cell phone benefit and more, in exchange for Ochs fast-tracking a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to create the “Riverstone Academy,” a publicly-funded K-5 elementary school with a “Christian foundation.” The controversial school was billed as the first publicly-funded Christian school in Colorado, which would be illegal under Colorado’s Constitution:
Article IX, Section 7 of Colorado’s Constitution, titled, “Aid to Private Schools, Churches, Sectarian Purpose, Forbidden” specifically bars public funding for “any sectarian purpose” or for supporting schools controlled by religious entities.
Ochs did not disclose the job offer with ERBOCES, nor her acceptance of it, prior to using her position on the school board to advance the controversial school.
Miller is known for approaching conservative-leaning school boards, getting himself hired as their legal advisor and then convincing the board members to adopt controversial and discriminatory culture war-related policies — like library book bans, discriminatory rules against transgender students and publicly-funded Christian schools — with the goal drawing lawsuits against the school districts that could become Supreme Court test cases that could result in rulings favorable to Christian nationalist right wing causes. School districts that fall into Miller’s plots end up mired in lawsuits, drawing adverse national attention to themselves and expending their financial resources on legal quagmires instead of on students and education — all at the expense of taxpayers.
Miller works with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal advocacy group that works to push Christianity into public schools and government. The ADF is the group behind the Supreme Court’s Dodds decision that ended Constitutional protections for abortion.
ERBOCES is an offshoot of the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES — groups the Colorado legislature originally created to make it easier for school districts to band together to offer services to students that they can’t afford to provide on their own. The legislative intent of creating BOCES was to allow school districts to “pool resources for things like special education services, career and technical education, early intervention services, gifted and talented programming, and teacher training,” according to a 2/27/26 article in Chalkbeat Colorado.
But ERBOCES has a fundamentally different mission.
ERBOCES was billed as a “specialized, entrepreneurial arm of the broader Colorado BOCES system, focused on educational choice and innovative school models,” but it functions as a public school authorizer, thus drawing the attention of Brad Miller and the ADF.
After D-51 School Board member Andrea Haitz became School Board President in 2021, she tried to get Brad Miller hired on as D51’s legal counsel. During that time, Miller coached Haitz on how to avoid the Request For Proposal (RFP)
process, which would have let the D-51 School Board members compare the legal costs of different law firms prior to hiring Miller. In the end though, instead of hiring Miller, District 51 hired Tammy Eret as in-house counsel.
Supporting documentation accompanying the criminal complaint:
— Text of criminal complaint (pdf) submitted to Colorado State Attorney General;
— D-70 School Board minutes from June 24, 2025 (pdf) showing the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) approving the controversial Riverstone School for 5 years was placed on the consent agenda, where it would get no public discussion;
— Signed employment contract offered to Anne Ochs (pdf). Ochs signed the contract on June 9, 2025.
— Copy of June 4, 2025 email from Ochs to Brad Miller with copy to D70 Superintendent Ronda Rein about Riverstone School being a test case for the U.S. Supreme Court (not yet officially authenticated):
— Minutes of August 12, 2025 ERBOCES Board meeting minutes in which approval for the Riverstone Academy is recommended, without disclosure that it is to be a Christian public school. (After clicking the link, click on document image to get larger, more legible copy)
Notes: Chris Sutton, who submitted the complaint, is a resident of Pueblo west, a 90% disabled veteran of the Afghanistan war and a parent with several children in the D-70 school system.
–The building originally intended to house the Riverstone School was closed on January 30, 2026, as a result of health and safety code violations.
UPDATE: 12:17 p.m. Monday, Mar. 2, 2026 – The Attorney General made clear his concerns to Chris Sutton and confirmed that the Pueblo County District Attorney has jurisdiction over this case. The Pueblo County Sheriff’s office is currently investigating the case. Here is confirmation, provided by Sutton:
