92 search results for ""Janet Rowland""

Corruption, Crime, Dangerous Republicans, Ethics, Janet Rowland, Mesa County, Public health, Republicans violating laws, Republicans violating rules, Todd Starr

Background check: County Attorney Todd Starr

by Anne Landman • August 3, 2023 • 8 Comments

7/5/23 Sentinel article about Mesa County Attorney Todd Starr’s fraudulent action to deceive a court Trustee

People in highly-paid, taxpayer-funded jobs who also are in positions to influence Mesa County actions and policies should be background checked, especially when they start doing potentially illegal things like helping the Mesa County Commissioners dismantle of the Board of Public Health for no real reason, and in apparent violation of county policies and state law.

Mesa County Attorney Todd M. Starr certainly meets that criteria. He makes a salary of $190,800/year, not including perks and benefits, and appears to have facilitated illegal acts by the Mesa County Commissioners against the Board of Public Health.

So I decided to background check him.

Violation of state law let Rowland seize control of Mesa County Public Health Department

by Anne Landman • July 26, 2023 • 4 Comments

Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland

Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland succeeded in imposing her political will on the Mesa County Public Health Department yesterday after appointing two final conservative members to the Mesa County Board of Public Health (BOH).

Health Department employees point out Rowland made all the new appointments to the Board of Health without consulting a single person at the Health Department.

“The fact that they keep appointing people to our Board that so clearly do not support the work that we do feels like a spit in the face every time,” one employee said.

Newly-appointed Board of Public Health member is anti-vax, anti immigrant, anti-gay extremist

by Anne Landman • July 7, 2023 • 32 Comments

Stephen Daniels, an extremist and anti-vaxxer the Commissioners just appointed to be Chair of the Mesa County Board of Public Health (Photo: Facebook)

A person the Mesa County Commissioners appointed to the Board of Health yesterday, Stephen D. Daniels, is a strong supporter of anti-vax conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK), according to his social media accounts. Posts on the same sources also reveal Daniels is anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Disney, and a climate change denier who opposes Colorado’s new family and medical leave law, which gives workers paid time off to care for a new baby or a loved one who has a serious health condition.

Presidential candidate RFK, whom Daniels supports, opposes vaccines that prevent dire illnesses in children and adults, like polio, measles and smallpox. In 2017, Scientific American wrote that “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality,” and if his anti-vax advocacy “leads to even a small decline in vaccine rates across the country, it will result in the waste of untold amounts of money and in all likelihood, the preventable deaths of infants too young to be vaccinated.”

Daily Sentinel: Commissioner Rowland and County Attorney Todd Starr violated County policy for County credit card use, receipts

by Anne Landman • June 28, 2023 • 6 Comments

Lobby of the $225-$250/night Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs, where County Attorney Todd Starr used his county credit card to pay for a room, in violation of County policy which requires County employees to get a per diem instead for travel.

An Open Records Act request by Daily Sentinel reporter Charles Ashby examining expenditures by Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland and County Attorney Todd Starr over the last year found both made questionable purchases that arguably violated County policy.

Rowland and Starr charged Public Health Department Jeff Kuhr with doing the same thing, but in his case they called it a fireable offense.

County employees are not allowed to use a County credit card for out-of-town trips. Instead, they are supposed to get a per-diem (a fixed daily allowance) for their expenses.

Mesa County Commissioners avoid getting bids for $49k forensic Health Dept. audit & Dufford, Waldek law firm contract

by Anne Landman • June 26, 2023 • 6 Comments

Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland failed to get 3 bids for multi-thousand dollar contracts

Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland has cited the awarding of contracts without first getting competitive bids as reason enough to fire Mesa County Public Health Department (MCPHD) Director Jeff Kuhr:
According to an article in the 6/14/23 issue of the Daily Sentinel, titled “More turmoil on the Public Health Board,”
“At the June 5 public health meeting, [Mesa County Attorney Todd] Starr presented a largely one-sided view of a partial audit done earlier this year on the department, some of which said Kuhr hired contractors without going through a competitive bid process…” [Italicized emphasis added.] Rowland complained that awarding sole source contracts without first getting bids or going through review by County finance departments “puts the County at high risk because [the contracts don’t] go through a legal, risk or finance review.”
But she and the other Commissioners award high-dollar contracts without first getting competitive bids where such bids and oversight are merited, according to County policy.

Victor Yahn, newly-appointed member of the Mesa County Board of Public Health, resigns after less than 2 weeks

by Anne Landman • June 13, 2023 • 18 Comments

Yahn

Vitor Yahn, one of the people Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland appointed to the Mesa County Board of Public Health on an interim basis after the original Board resigned en masse, has himself resigned from the Board.

The entire original Board of Health resigned after Rowland pressured them relentlessly to fire Health Department Director Jeff Kuhr, and they refused, and Rowland threatened to fire them all. It was questionable whether the move would have been legal, but the Board resigned rather than face a hearing with a predetermined outcome.

Rowland has been accusing Dr. Kuhr of financial wrongdoing for months, but Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein investigated Dr. Kuhr and found insufficient evidence that Kuhr engaged in any financial wrongdoing, or acted to benefit himself in any way.

The Commissioners’ glaring double standard: Jeff Kuhr vs. Tina Peters

by Anne Landman • June 13, 2023 • 5 Comments

Daily Sentinel editorial from Thursday, August 26, 2021, questioning why the Commissioners have not demanded Tina Peters resign as County Clerk

Janet Rowland and the County Commissioners have been working hard and spending tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to try to push Mesa County Public Health Department Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr out of his position, even though District Attorney Dan Rubinstein found insufficient evidence Kuhr had engaged in any financial impropriety and Kuhr had committed no prosecutable offense.

But where were Janet and the County Commissioners during the Tina Peters debacle?

Why didn’t the Commissioners demand Peters resign at any time during her term as Clerk, in light of all her horrific incompetence, the crimes to which she admitted, her blatant ethics violations and her extreme cost to County taxpayers?

The complaint against Mesa County employee Lisa Mills that led the Social Work Board to sanction her

by Anne Landman • June 9, 2023 • 9 Comments

Lisa Rickerd Mills, Behavioral Health Strategies Manager for Mesa County, who reports directly to Commissioner Janet Rowland and who appears to have been the person who prompted Rowland to start attacking Dr. Jeff Kuhr, longtime Director of the Mesa County Public Health Department (Photo: Facebook)

Lisa Rickard Mills is Behavioral Health Strategies Manager for Mesa County, reports to Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland and is administering programs funded with $1 million in combined grants from the Colorado Department of Human Services Office of Behavioral Health, St. Mary’s Hospital and the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office.

According to text messages (pdf) obtained between Janet Rowland and Mills, Mills also appears to have been instrumental in prompting Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland to start her recent attacks Mesa County Public Health Department Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr.

Mills is a Licensed Social Worker (LSW) with the State of Colorado. Public records show that in 2020 she was sanctioned by the state Board of Social Work Examiners.

The Mesa County employee behind the effort to fire Public Health Department Director Jeff Kuhr

by Anne Landman • June 4, 2023 • 13 Comments

Lisa Rickerd Mills (Photo: Facebook)

Lisa Mills is a behavioral health strategies manager for Mesa County’s Department of Health and Human Services and by all indications seems to be a key figure in the County’s recent ongoing, unhinged efforts to take down Dr. Jeff Kuhr as longtime Director of the Mesa County Public Health Department (MCPHD).

County teeing up new Public Health Board members to fire Dr. Jeff Kuhr as longtime Director of Mesa County Public Health Dept., despite being told there is “insufficient evidence” of wrongdoing

by Anne Landman • June 3, 2023 • 8 Comments

Jeff Kuhr won plaudits for helping Mesa County get through the Covid-19 pandemic.

If Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland gets her way, the new, temporary members recently intstalled on the Mesa County Board of Public Health (BOPH) will do the Commissioners’ bidding and fire longtime Mesa County Health Department Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr, even though there is insufficient evidence of any financial wrongdoing by Kuhr and even though a large majority of the local public thinks the county commissioners are engaging in a blatant overreach of their authority.

Can the Board of Mesa County Commissioners sink any lower?

by Anne Landman • June 1, 2023 • 7 Comments

The Board of Mesa County Commissioners (BOCC) have been in full attack mode against Mesa County Public Health Department Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr for months. All their efforts to remove him have been shown to be without foundation. (L-R: Bobbie Daniel, Cody Davis and Janet Rowland). Photo: Mesa County

EDITORIAL from the June 1, 2023 edition of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Reprinted in full, with permission. Link to original editorial is here.

This editorial explains what’s been going on with the Commissioners’ months-long, defamatory attack on Mesa County Public Health Director Jeff Kuhr.

Can the BOCC sink any lower?

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

— Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy during hearings in 1954 on whether communism infiltrated the U.S. armed forces.

Mesa County commissioners are in the midst of a relentless campaign to remove Dr. Jeff Kuhr from his position as executive director of Mesa County Public Health.

They’ve tried every trick in the book, some a little more unseemly than others, but none as low as the character assassination they’ve planted in the public record that unfairly swipes at Kuhr’s reputation without giving him an opportunity to defend himself.

Commissioners are acting much like the disgraced Sen. McCarthy, whose role in the Army-McCarthy hearings was described as “judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one,” by Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold.

Mesa County Commissioners working to seize control of Mesa County Board of Public Health

by Anne Landman • May 19, 2023 • 34 Comments

MCPHD Director Jeff Kuhr, Ph.D. won plaudits for helping Mesa County get through the Covid-19 pandemic

Mesa County Public Health Department (MCPHD) Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr has been under attack by the Mesa County Commissioners, who for some reason have been working for months to generate credible reasons to fire him. Commissioner Janet Rowland in particular has targeted Kuhr, accusing him of financial impropriety and grievous errors in MCPHD’s procurement processes. The Commissioners have ordered the Mesa County Board of Public Health to fire Kuhr, but they refused, saying there is no actual evidence that he’s intentionally done anything wrong. Not only that, but the State of Colorado rates MCPHD as having the lowest possible financial risk (pdf) in its compliance with federal and state contracts, making it clear that the state trusts MCPHD, but our right wing commissioners don’t. (This financial risk rating is done every three years, but the state skipped it during the pandemic. The MCPHD is currently undergoing this analysis again.)

Mesa County Commissioners give Republican commissioner candidate Bobbie Daniel a huge advantage using taxpayer-funded resources

by Anne Landman • October 12, 2022 • 11 Comments

Election denier Bobbie Daniel (R), Republican running for County Commissioner, with her friend Tina Peters in 2018, before Tina was elected Clerk and was indicted on multiple felonies related to election tampering.

On Wednesday, October 12, 2022, in its opinion section the Daily Sentinel endorsed Republican election denier Bobbie Daniel for County Commissioner, saying she was “prepared to step in ready to work on day one.” But the Sentinel failed to ask the big question of how it happened that Daniel had become so prepped for the position.

It happened because Daniel has been groomed for months, maybe years, for the job by sitting Republican Mesa County commissioners, who have been using taxpayer-funded resources and taxpayer-funded County time to make sure Daniel gets a huge leg-up over her opponent in the race.

Commissioner candidate Bobbie Daniel cares about “overburdening taxpayers.” So what does she think of the massive expenditure her pal Tina Peters has cost Mesa County taxpayers?

by Anne Landman • October 1, 2022 • 2 Comments

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, now indicted on multiple felonies related to election tampering, with her friend Bobbie Daniel, who endorsed Tina for Clerk in 2018. Daniel is now is running for Mesa County Commissioner. More of the same GOP insanity in County government?

Republican Mesa County Commissioner candidate Bobbie Daniel says on Instagram that she’ll be fiscally responsible, that she cares about “overburdening taxpayers” and keeping local government stable.

Well if all that’s true, Daniel owes it to county taxpayers to say what she thinks of the $1.5 million and counting that County taxpayers have been forced to pay for the antics of her pal Tina Peters, whom Daniel endorsed for Clerk back in 2018. Why hasn’t Daniel condemned Peters’ antics and the massive expenditure Peters has cost county taxpayers so far? And why hasn’t Daniel apologized for her grievous mistake of endorsing Tina?

Daniel has been mum on the subject so far.

Maybe that’s because Daniel assured voters in 2018 Tina had lots of experience and “we’d be in really good hands” if she was elected Clerk and Recorder. Well we trusted Daniel and now we’ve see how THAT turned out. And we won’t even mention the 574 legitimately-cast ballots that Tina lost in 2019 and never counted, that kicked off her nightmarish term as clerk.

Despite proof there was no fraud in the 2020 election, Bobbie Daniel remains an election denier. Does someone who believes a lie like this deserve a seat on the County Commission?

Maybe it’s because Daniel herself is an election denier who is trying hard to keep it under wraps before the election this November. Word is also out ***Rumor-ALERT***Rumor-ALERT*** that sitting County Commissioner Janet Rowland ordered Daniel to keep her crazy election denialist beliefs out of her campaign for commissioner, since election deniers have been harassing the sitting commissioners for over a year now.

Maybe it’s because Tina alleged that “a county commissioner candidate” — whom we all know could ONLY have been Bobbie Daniel — was among those who attended a post-Mesa County election-equipment breach dinner with Conan Hayes, the professional election denier Tina smuggled into the Clerk’s office to make copies of the voting machines’ hard drives. Other attendees Tina alleged were at that dinner were Sherronna Bishop, who may have helped engineer the whole Mesa County election breach, and House Rep. Lauren Boebert, a strong supporter of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Whatever the reason Daniel has been quiet about the amount of money taxpayers have been forced to spend on her pal Tina’s behavior, Daniel needs to come out and acknowledge she was wrong in endorsing Tina and apologize for helping put County voters through hell as a result of her terrible judgment.

Daniel’s Instagram post where she claims to be fiscally responsible and care about the stability of County government. So what does Daniel think of what her friend Tina has cost taxpayers so far? Voters deserve an answer to that question.

Conservatives, Crazy Republicans, Dangerous Republicans, Embarrassing Republicans, Ethics, Extremism, Generic idiocy, Lies, Mesa County Republican Party, Republican lies, Weird Grand Junction Stuff

Mesa County GOP Chair lies to public, saying there was no insurrection and many Capitol invasion leaders were FBI

by Anne Landman • October 27, 2021 • 12 Comments

Kevin McCarney, Chair of the Mesa County Republican Party, writes in a Facebook comment that a Reuters article last August reported that there “was no insurrection” and many leaders of the attack on the Capitol were “actually FBI informants.” The Reuters article contains no such information.

Mesa County GOP Chair Kevin McCarney [Photo from video on AmericasMom.net]

Ever wonder how so many Mesa County citizens became SO deluded that now big groups of them like “Stand for the Constitution” and “Mesa County Concerned Citizen” actually believe wacky claims like Vitamin C and Ivermectin cure Covid-19, everyone who disagrees with them is a Communist, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold destroyed election records and Democrats are pedophiles?

A big factor in this mass-delusion of the local electorate is the Mesa County Republican Party, which has developed a reputation for spreading hoaxes and misinformation and omitting key information.

Court legally bars Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters & Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley from any involvement in the November elections

by Anne Landman • October 13, 2021 • 2 Comments

A District Court Judge today legally barred Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters from running elections in the county. Despite her refusal to faithfully carry out the duties of her elected office, displaying an overt political bias in regard to whom she believes should and should not win elections in Mesa County and her bizarre antics promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud, Peters will keep getting her taxpayer-funded salary and can only be removed from office by resigning or through a recall election.

Mesa County District Court Judge Valerie Robison today issued an injunction officially preventing embattled Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and her hand-picked Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley from having any involvement with the November elections. The ruling officially removed Peters as Designated Election Official and installed former Secretary of State Wayne Williams in that position. It also confirmed Sheila Riener as the Election Supervisor.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit brought against Peters and Knisley by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. The suit was joined by Mesa County Commissioners Janet Rowland, Cody Davis and Scott McInnis, who were listed in the suit as intervenors.

D-51 School Board candidate Voter Guide for the 11/2/2021 election

by Anne Landman • September 22, 2021 • 72 Comments

NOTE: This article is longer than usual owing to the number of people running, the amount of information available on them and the need to put the practical meaning of Chamber endorsements in context so people can accurately grasp their significance. One photo in this article may be unsuitable for kids. Below is a brief summary of my vote recommendations for school board, if you don’t have time to read the whole article immediately:

Recommended Votes:

District C – Trish Mahre

District D – Nick Allan

District E – David Combs

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Following are summaries of the candidates running for District 51 School Board in the upcoming November 2 election. Sources of information included the candidates’ publicly available campaign and work websites, their campaign and personal social media, and other primary and authoritative online resources, including minutes of District 51 Board meetings and the website of Mesa County Libraries.

Mesa County Commissioners approve extended contract with Dominion Voting Systems

by Anne Landman • August 24, 2021 • 0 Comments

Commissioner Janet Rowland gives angry audience a dose of reality, and votes to do the right thing

Screen shot of Zoom of today’s meeting, with chat box, while County Commissioner Scott McInnis was speaking. He was wearing a pink shirt.

The Mesa County Commissioners voted unanimously this afternoon to extend the County’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems so they could get new voting equipment for no up-front cost from Dominion. The Commissioners voted to maintain the County’s contract with the company until 2029, and agreed to make progressively higher payments to the company throughout that time. The County needed new voting equipment to replace the equipment decertified by the Colorado Secretary of State because Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was unable to prove the equipment had been kept secure and had not been compromised.

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