The pathological meanderings of a small man, hurt to his core by a strong woman
At the Park County Board of County Commissioners’ meeting of August 11, 2026, Dave Wissel, District 3 Commissioner, and his sycophant enablers, District 1 Commissioner Amy “Um” Mitchell and District 2 Commissioner Jason “Go along, to get along” Gemmer, approved a change to an already finalized Board of Equalization decision signed and sealed the week before. Wissel introduced the change (listed on the agenda as item V) after apparently agonizing over the finalized hearing and decision, which he voted to affirm on August 4, 2026. He publicly admits that, in the interim between the final CBOE decision and the August 11, 2026 BOCC meeting, he unilaterally researched and gathered new evidence supporting his decision to change the final CBOE decision. Wissel therefore became a biased advocate for the petitioner, a clear deviation from the intent and purpose of quasi-judicial proceedings.
Anyone who has occasionally perused this blog will know that Dave Wissel harbors a dangerously unhealthy animus toward the Park County Assessor, Monica Jones. He’s banished his better angels (if he has any) as he finishes out his one and only term as commissioner with a vicious Last Hurrah aimed at Jones for her deadly, mortal sin of stripping him of his elected position as assessor in 2018, the position he had held for 38 years. If, by God, there is one last thing he wants to accomplish before he ends his 42 years of feeding at the public trough, it is to destroy Monica Jones, who, in the 2018 Republican primary for assessor, ended his hold on that office, beating him by 21 votes.
Getting back to the MAGA-centric BOCC changing an already adjudicated Board of Equalization decision, several important points must be considered before we decide if what the BOCC did was illegal, unethical, or a purely malevolent manifestation of Wissel’s dangerously out-of-balance pathology when it comes to Monica Jones.
Colorado Revised Statutes 39-1-101 to 39-8-109 provide the legal requirements for County Boards of Equalization.
There are no statutory references that allow a county board of commissioners, or a county board of commissioners acting as the board of equalization, to modify a county board of equalization’s final decision a week after it was made. Nor is there any statutory reference disallowing such an act.
The rub, of course, is that when a board of county commissioners acts as a county board of equalization, it necessarily takes off its legislative hat and puts on its quasi-judicial hat. Park County Board of Equalization hearings are quasi-judicial proceedings, a fact unquestionably supported by the applicable statutes and abundant case law.
What Wissel and his fellow commissioners did on August 11, 2026, would, I believe, be viewed by any competent court, including the Colorado Supreme Court, as contrary to the quasi-judicial nature of Board of Equalization proceedings. Wissel and his fellow commissioners made their decision without the essential quasi-judicial components required for it to be legal.
Simply stated, what Wissel and his cohorts did is akin to judging a horse race, identifying the winner according to established evidentiary protocols (it crossed the line first), and placing the flowered victory wreath around the horse’s neck, then, a week later, declaring another horse won the race by reviewing data supporting the other horse should have won the race.
Ex parte is a Latin phrase used in judicial proceedings to mean that only one side of the two (or more) parties involved is privy to some information or discussion, which is not shared with the other party or parties involved. The equity of any quasi-judicial decision necessarily depends on both sides being equally privy to any/all information the other side possesses.
In this case, Assessor Jones was not able to counter the ex parte information upon which Wissel unilaterally based his reconsideration of the final CBOE decision with her contrary evidence. Further, Wissel’s unilateral accumulation of data on behalf of the petitioner, which he used to justify the change to the final decision, reeks of a premeditated, intentional abrogation of the core principle of CBOE hearings: The county commissioners acting in their role as the board of equalization must have no bias for either side; the assessor or the petitioner. They must make their decision based on the evidence presented at the hearing.
This is clearly juicy fodder for any attorney to dig into. I’m sure there’s at least one attorney who will. As for Park County’s Legal Counsel, John Evans, I can only assume he gave Wissel the okey-dokey to do what he did.
“Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.” –Jeremy Bentham
