Who Is Tim Dietz? The Republican for Douglas County Treasurer

There is a sentence on Tim Dietz's campaign site that no consultant wrote for him: "The Treasurer doesn't get to be creative with your money. The whole job is to be right, be on time, and be boring."

That is an unusual thing to run on, and against the county's own description of the office, it is accurate. Here is the rest of him.

What the job actually is

Start here, because the office is invisible until it is not. Per the county, the treasurer's office bills and collects property taxes using the assessor's valuations and the mill levies set by roughly 300 taxing authorities, then apportions and disburses the money back out to them. The school district is usually about half of a given bill. It also runs all banking relationships, takes nearly all county deposits, and manages the county's investment portfolio "in accordance with Colorado State Statutes and the Douglas County Investment Policy with the focus being safety and liquidity before yield."

The treasurer is also the county's Public Trustee, handling releases and foreclosures of deeds of trust under Title 38. The county's biography of the sitting treasurer confirms one person holds both jobs.

One honest note on the vacancy. Gill was elected to a second term in November 2022 and his term runs to January 2027, but neither the county's elected officials page nor his county biography says whether he is term limited or simply not running. His name is not on the sample ballot, and we are not going to guess at the reason.

The record he can point at

Dietz is the sitting District 6 member of the Castle Rock Town Council, representing southern Castle Rock. The Town's directory says he was first elected in 2020 and that his term expires in 2028. He was re-elected in November 2024 with 5,133 votes, 60.54 percent, over Kevin McHugh and Karen KJ Lindberg Jefferson.

He is council liaison to six bodies, among them the Parks and Recreation Commission, the Youth Commission and the Election Commission. His campaign claims two specific things from that record: that he was instrumental in getting the Crystal Valley Interchange built after years of delay, and that he championed the creation of the Castle Rock Youth Commission.

What his site does not say

It never names an employer. The about page says he "has spent his career making executive-level financial decisions, managing budgets, leading organizations, and making the tough financial calls that keep operations running and dollars accounted for," and then moves on. No company, no job title, no dates, no degree, and the Town directory entry does not fill the gap.

There are also no endorsements listed anywhere on the site, and no Ballotpedia page for him. For a candidate asking to be trusted with the county's portfolio, the resume is the part a voter cannot check.

The plan, which is unusually specific

Where the biography is thin, the policy pages are the opposite. Each of his three priorities gets a page of five numbered commitments tracking the mechanics of the office.

On investments he adopts the county's own ordering, "safety first, liquidity second, and yield third," and proposes a laddered portfolio structured so maturities come due when the districts are owed. On distributions he treats the statutory tenth of the month as a product rather than a target. On returns he wants the county's yield reported next to an honest benchmark of the conservative instruments the office is allowed to use.

On transparency his framing is that the records are already public and that is not the same as findable: "You shouldn't have to know somebody to find out what happened to your money. If it takes a records request, we've already failed." He promises one plain-English annual report and a one business day response standard.

"Every one of these files is somebody's home." Dietz, on the tax lien sale and the Public Trustee.

The hard part of the office

His stewardship page refuses the easy promise. The statutes on delinquent taxes and foreclosure "aren't the Treasurer's to suspend," it says, "and a candidate who implies otherwise is either confused about the office or willing to mislead you to win it."

What he commits to instead is a lien sale run in the open with no preferential access, delinquency notices in plain language, and active promotion of the relief programs: the senior and disabled veteran exemptions through the assessor, the state deferral program the treasurer's office administers, and the county's tax work-off program. He notes the deferral is a loan recorded against the property, not forgiveness.

How he got here

The June 30 primary was the only contested treasurer race on either ballot. Dietz took 29,262 votes to Meghann Silverthorn's 18,539 in the final official results, a 22-point win. On election night, with partial returns, Colorado Community Media had it 26,747 to 17,098. Dan Smith ran unopposed and drew 41,629 votes.

The money is small in both directions. Through the report covering the period ending July 30, Dietz had raised $7,385, spent $7,767.61, taken $3,210.06 in loans and held $2,827.45.

More: the Dietz vs Smith race page, the ballot guide, and every race and measure on your ballot. We do not endorse candidates. Campaigns can send corrections to hello@discoverdougco.com.