A Delta school board candidate says he still plans to run for office after an anonymous letter to the district revealed he was a registered sex offender.
“The timing is suspect…dragging something out 20 years out of the past,” Dale Haag said today. “I’ll tell you up front, I’ve got zero to hide.”
Haag, a candidate for the Delta County Joint School District, said he was convicted in 1987 of misdemeanor assault with intent to commit sexual abuse after he touched a 19-year-old developmentally disabled woman at a Doon, Iowa group home for the disabled.
“I pinched her in the boob and patted her on the butt. It was a flirtatious situation. She knew what she was doing,” Haag said. “It was blown way out of proportion.”
The case was marginal against him at the time, he said. It was overblown because at the time he was on parole for first-degree manslaughter after he set a fire at a halfway house that killed two women in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1977, he said.
“I just wanted to damage the couch,” he said. “I left a cigarette on the couch and the next thing I know people were screaming and everything was crazy.”
John Jones, spokesman for the Delta school district, said the district received an anonymous letter last week that said Haag was a registered sex offender.
The school district’s attorney discovered that in Colorado because Haag was not convicted of sexually assaulting a child, he could legally run for the school board.
“We can’t really exclude him even if we want to,” Jones said. “Obviously it’s a controversial issue. It puts the school district between a rock and a hard place. It is very shocking and it is somewhat of an embarrassment.”
Jones said Haag faces popular incumbent Bob Tweedell, 56, a local attorney, who has been a strong board member the past four years.
Ultimately, voters will have to decide between Tweedell and Haag on Tuesday. Tweedell could not immediately be reached for comment.
Jones said he has not heard Tweedell making Haag’s record an issue, but Haag said the release of information is suspicious.
“It’s like he had this little thing in his back pocket and he’s using it now to blow me out of the water,” he said.
Haag said bad publicity can be expected when running for office and he has no intention of changing his platform of stronger discipline and increased parental involvement.
“You put yourself in the public eye,” Haag said, “and they either shoot at you or surround you and hug on you.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
