Important campaign finance research and analysis of the District 1 Mesa County Commissioner race between challenger Tom Acker and incumbent Cody Davis.
Important campaign finance research and analysis of the District 1 Mesa County Commissioner race between challenger Tom Acker and incumbent Cody Davis.
Mesa County Ballot Issue 1B asks voters if the County can keep almost $11.5 million that’s already been paid in taxes, use it to maintain roads and bridges and raise the TABOR limit in the future so they can keep more tax money. So Ballot issue 1B asks Mesa County voters to let County government avoid complying with the state’s TABOR law.
Colorado’s TABOR (Taxpayer Bill Of Rights) law says state and local government can keep and spend only a specific amount of money based on their prior fiscal year’s revenue, an amount called the TABOR limit. If they collect money above that amount, it must be refunded to the taxpayers. The TABOR limit can only be adjusted according to a “population plus inflation” formula. The intent of the law, which was promoted by Republicans, was to constrain government to keep it from growing, a long-held conservative ideal.
Retired CMU Professor Dr. Tom Acker is running for the District 1 Commissioner seat, against Cody Davis
If you need a breather from Mesa County Republicans who use their elected offices to violate morals and ethics, deny reality and promote conspiracies, commit felonies, engage in religious grandstanding, double-dip, violate state laws, mindlessly spout racist tropes in public hearings, say things that draw national embarrassment onto our community, engage in cronyism, compromise voting equipment, take credit for the contributions of others and spend hundreds of thousands in taxpayers funds on exacting revenge on people they take a personal dislike to — if you want to consider electing people with integrity for a change, then come and hear what Tom Acker, the only Democrat running for Mesa County Commissioner has to say.
Dr. Acker is a retired Colorado Mesa University professor Emeritus who taught Spanish at CMU for two decades. He is running against Cody Davis for the District 1 county commissioner seat.
On January 9, Mesa County Commissioners Janet Rowland, Cody Davis and Bobbie Daniel voted to put a moratorium on large-scale solar development in the County supposedly to take time to address the community’s growing concerns over these developments. Citizens are worried that the current county Land Development Code (LDC) contains no provisions protecting agricultural and irrigated land, wildlife, water sheds and view sheds from these developments, as well as no requirements for fire protection, buffers, setbacks or plans to decommission these installations that will assure solar plants that get destroyed by inclement weather or live out their expected life spans are cleaned up in a way that minimizes environmental harm and expense to local taxpayers.
A Democrat has joined the race against Cody Davis for Mesa County Commissioner. Tom Acker is currently the only Democrat running for local office in Mesa County.
Acker was a professor of Spanish language at CMU for two decades. He is now a retired professor emeritus, an honorary title conferred upon him for his distinguished service to the academic community. He is a founding member of the award-winning Hispanic Affairs Project.
Originally from the east coast, in the 1980s Acker worked with refugees from the Mariel Boatlift, after over 125,000 Cubans piled into boats and headed for Florida after the Cuban government announced that anyone who wanted to leave the country was free to do so.
While he lived in Pennsylvania, Acker worked with a federally-funded agency to help farmers interact with agriculture workers.
Swelling clay soils can triple their volume when they get wet, causing them to exert tremendous force on a home’s foundation, and hence damage, if no measures are taken to mitigate the potential damage. Clay soils are very common across Mesa County. [Click photo to enlarge for better view.] (Photo: Colorado Geological Survey)
Michael A. Berry, the professional engineer who authored the report, recommended three types of foundations that would better protect the structure from “heave related movements” than a typical shallow foundation, but also admitted such foundations are “usually cost prohibitive.”
The home on Horseshoe Drive in Fruita that is at the heart of the lawsuit against Cody Davis and his company, Chronos Builders. (Photo: Mesa County Assessor)
Update 1/19/24@10:44 a.m. — This article has been updated to include links to the full Huddleston Berry soils report (pdf) that Davis is alleged to have withheld from the Ryans while they were buying the home, and the full affidavit of Barbara Ann Ryan (pdf) in the case.
Update: Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis announced Jan. 16 that he was running to be county commissioner again in 2024.
Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis, and his construction company, Chronos Builders, LLC, were slapped with a lawsuit by an older couple on August 19, 2022 alleging Davis concealed information about expansive clay soils under their new home, and saying he chose an inferior foundation he knew could fail protect the home from damage caused by ground movement from the clay soils. The lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $100,000 (pdf).
Davis filed a response on September 6, 2022 (pdf) categorically denying all of the charges in the Ryans’ suit.
To be fair, Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis (R) probably had no idea what he was saying when he said it, but it was highly offensive.
23 minutes or so into the Commissioners’ meeting on December 12, 2023 to approve the annual budget (video), Commissioner Davis discusses how difficult it is for him to understand the budgeting process and said,
“If I didn’t have help sometimes, reading this budget I’d feel like a knuckle-dragging Mongoloid.”
He was apparently unaware that “knuckle-dragging Mongoloid” is a highly offensive term.
For a long time the term “Mongoloid” was a pejorative term used to refer to people affected by Down Syndrome. It is also a racist term used to refer to people of Asian descent.