Technique: escalating documented process failures into unproven crimes
Versions of this claim circulate in community threads: the 2018 measures were passed for one purpose and spent "counter to the TABOR law," and the people responsible "need prosecuted." One common version says the district "asked for $33 million to create a spending control board specifically."
Start with what's simply wrong. The 2018 5A override did not ask for $33 million "to create a spending control board." It asked for $33 million a year for programs — compensation, safety and mental health, career-tech, classroom materials, early childhood — and its ballot language also promised a Citizens' Financial Oversight Advisory Committee to review that spending. The committee is the part that never happened (see What Actually Checks Out): independent reporting established that the district, in its own words, "lost track" of the promise while collecting roughly a quarter-billion dollars, and convened a replacement committee only in spring 2026 after press coverage.
What TABOR actually governs here. Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (Article X, Section 20) requires voter approval for tax increases. Both 2018 measures were voter-approved revenue changes — that is what the ballot language's "collected and spent as a voter-approved revenue change under Article X, Section 20" formula does. Whether money was later spent as promised is a real question, but it is a ballot-language-compliance question, not a TABOR-violation one, and blurring the two is how a documented oversight failure inflates into a constitutional crime.
What the only independent review found. On the bond (5B), the district-commissioned Moss Adams evaluation tested exactly this question — sampled expenditures reconciled against the ballot language — and concluded that through June 30, 2021, "bond proceeds were used only for listed purposes under Ballot Measure 5B," with two caveats it stated plainly: roughly $5 million in administrative allocations that no board-approved policy defined well enough to fully validate, and two sampled expenditures (both board-approved property purchases) lacking approval paperwork on the expenditure itself. It also found "no evidence of fraud," per contemporaneous reporting. The 2018 override (5A) never got an equivalent independent review — that absence is the documented scandal — but an unaudited promise is not the same thing as proven misspending.
And the enforcement record. We found no TABOR lawsuit, no district attorney action, no state enforcement proceeding, and no adverse legal finding of any kind concerning how either 2018 measure was spent. Anyone asserting illegality is asserting something no court, auditor, or prosecutor has found.
The honest version of this grievance is strong enough. The district promised an oversight committee and never seated it; promised an annual independent bond audit and never commissioned one (see The 2021 Recommendations); revised the voters' project budgets after the election without documentation (see The Two Flipbooks). Those are documented, damning, and fair game in this election. "They broke the law and should be prosecuted" is none of those things — it is the documented record with an undocumented felony grafted on top.