Two new members of the Yuma School District-1 Board of Education unofficially have been elected.
The ballots will not be completely canvassed and official results determined until later this month.
Initial results from Tuesday’s mail-in election showed Heath Roundtree with 818 votes and Tyson Brown 649 (as of the 9:50 p.m. update on Yuma County’s election website). Ronella Noble had 612 votes and Callie Kuntz, DVM, 433.
If the results stand up, Roundtree and Brown will replace outgoing board members Duane Brown and Thomas Holtorf later this year. Roundtree and Brown are lifelong Yuma-area residents who graduated from Yuma High School and returned after college.
The Yuma-1 election was all there was locally for Yuma-area electors.
However, the eastern side of the county had board of education and city council races to determine. (The City of Yuma council election will move to the November window beginning in 2025, with one more April election coming up in 2024.)
Wray RD-2 had four candidates vying for three openings. The early results showed Grant Bledsoe, Martin Buoy and Melanie Godsey claiming those spots, with Kristen Schaffner coming in fourth. There were two candidates for two seats for a two-year term, Maggie Bowman and Nancy Helling.
The Wray City Council had five candidates for four seats. Nicole Ann Smith, Brad Rockwell, Benjamin Gardner, and Chad Deyle appear to have been elected, with Mercedes C.C. Quezada coming in fifth.
There also were Haxtun and Holyoke school board elections for some Yuma County residents as those school districts extend into the far north side of the county.
As for the statewide ballot issues, Proposition HH was losing badly in Yuma County with 79.89 percent of the votes against. It failed statewide. It was a complicated property tax relief measure.
Proposition II was winning in Yuma County with 56.77 percent of the votes in favor. It calls for the state to keep all taxes on tobacco and nicotine sales to invest more than $23 million into the voluntary Colorado preschool program, and make it widely available for free, rather then refund revenues to wholesalers and distributors.
