Dave Edwards, former mayor pro tem of Palisade, is running for Mesa County Treasurer

Dave Edwards of Palisade announced he is running for Mesa County Treasurer as a Democratic candidate. Dave filed a candidate affidavit and committee registration with the Colorado Secretary of State to run for Treasurer on March 17, 2026. He is serving as his own registered agent.

Dave has lived in Palisade since 2008. He’s served on the Palisade Town Council, is former Mayor Pro Tem of Palisade, a retired accountant and volunteers with Catholic Outreach in their soup kitchen. He was President of the Palisade Irrigation Pipes & Laterals and the 5-2-1 Stormwater Authority. His is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and an attorney and he has over 50 years of dedicated civic service. Dave’s professional background is in healthcare finance as a Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He has a Juris Doctor (JD) degree in law and an LLM, or Master of Law degree, a graduate degree in the field of law. He ran for Mesa County Commissioner in 2020. Click this link to watch a short video of Dave’s candidate speech from when he ran for  commissioner in 2020 against Janet Rowland.

As a former county commissioner candidate, his main areas of concern were about poverty in Mesa County, the struggles of a declining middle class, homelessness and people in Mesa County who are struggling to obtain the basic necessities. Dave is also interested in food insecurity, child care and public health.

Experience in finance and the ability to read and understand laws are important to the office of Treasurer.

Mesa County citizens would be well-served by electing a candidate as Treasurer who has the ability to read and understand laws and who has a deep background in financial management, as Dave does.

The duties of a county Treasurer include mailing tax notices, collecting and depositing tax payments, managing delinquent taxes and conducting tax lien sales. A County Treasurer serves as the custodian for all County funds, keeps detailed records of all income and expenditures, invests county funds according to state statute, and reports on finance to the county commissioners and state auditors.

The sole Republican candidate for Mesa County Treasurer is Greg Haitz, who has no background in finance or law.

Haitz is a chiropractor with a track record of charlatanism and fraud, who has put considerable effort into advancing conspiracy theories detrimental to public health.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Haitz led the troublesome group “Stop The Mandate GJ” that picketed hospitals, promoted anti-vaccine rhetoric and heckled the Mesa County Commissioners relentlessly over vaccine mandates for health care workers, even though the Commissioners had repeatedly told the group they had no control over these mandates.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitz stoked fear of Covid vaccines as a way to increase sales of his own proprietary-branded supplements that he fraudulently advertised as protective against Covid-19. After he was called out on the deceptive nature of the ad, Haitz scrubbed the fraudulent claims from his website.

In 2023, Haitz promoted a “dangerous” and “reckless” weight-loss program on his business website, RimRockWellness.com.

“Dangerous” and “reckless” were the words the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to warn people about the type of proprietary weight loss program Haitz was promoting for $199, which he called the “HCG Wellness Diet Program.” His program used Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone derived from the uteruses of pregnant women, for weight loss.

HCG is a prescription drug used to treat female infertility and other medical conditions. It is not approved for use without a prescription for any purpose, and is expressly not approved for weight loss. The FDA further warned, “If you have HCG products for weight loss, quit using it, throw it out, and stop following the dieting instructions.” At the time, the Mayo Clinic warned that “Companies that sell over-the-counter HCG weight-loss products are breaking the law.”

Mesa County would do well to avoid electing known fraudsters to public office, and particularly to the office that has control over County funds.

We have a chance this year to elect an honest, qualified candidate as Treasurer, someone with a long, distinguished track record of honest public service. Let’s learn from our huge, costly, years-long mistake of electing hyper-ideological candidates like Tina Peters and all the trouble and that got our County into, and start figuring out who the good, honest, well-grounded, experienced and truly qualified candidates are.