Tara Menza
From Ballotpedia
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Tara Menza (Republican Party) ran for election to the Colorado House of Representatives to represent District 11. She lost in the general election on November 8, 2022.
Menza completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Tara Menza was born in Wisconsin. Menza attended Pensacola Junior College. Her career experience includes working as a stay at home mom, an intellectual property manager for an engineering firm, in sales, and as a doula for military spouses. Menza has been affiliated with the League of Women Voters of Boulder County, Boulder Republican Women, and Longmont Republican Women, for which she served as president.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: Colorado House of Representatives elections, 2022
General election
General election for Colorado House of Representatives District 11
Incumbent Karen McCormick defeated Tara Menza in the general election for Colorado House of Representatives District 11 on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Karen McCormick (D)  | 69.7 | 26,855 |
 | Tara Menza (R) | 30.3 | 11,657 | |
| Total votes: 38,512 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 11
Incumbent Karen McCormick advanced from the Democratic primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 11 on June 28, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Karen McCormick | 100.0 | 11,578 |
| Total votes: 11,578 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 11
Tara Menza advanced from the Republican primary for Colorado House of Representatives District 11 on June 28, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Tara Menza | 100.0 | 5,098 |
| Total votes: 5,098 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2022
Video for Ballotpedia
| Video submitted to Ballotpedia Released August 24, 2022 |
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Tara Menza completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Menza's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Tara was raised in the south and now calls Longmont home. She grew up with a mother impacted by addiction and knows firsthand the challenges poverty and substance abuse have on families and children. Tara is a mom to 6 children. She and her husband have a small start-up aerospace company and Tara substitute teaches. She is passionate about helping people. Her work experience includes sales, administration in a hospital cardiac pulmonary unit, and managing intellectual property for an engineering firm. She was a single mother until she met her current husband, Matt, a retired Naval combat aviator from Colorado. They have been married for 16 years. She was again a solo parent while he was deployed to Afghanistan for a year. As a military spouse, Tara volunteered as a doula and mentored incoming military wives. Tara hopes to take her passion for advocacy and action to the state legislature where she can make a difference in today’s divisive political culture. Her ability to objectively consider different opinions, beliefs, and motivations can unite people from different backgrounds and bring balance back to Colorado’s politics. She enjoys mountain biking, skiing, hiking, and the incredible food and wine of Colorado.
- Tara will take crime seriously with the goal of getting drugs off our streets and ensuring hardened criminals are fully prosecuted while seeking solutions to address root causes of rising crime, such as mental health and addiction.
- Tara's legislative fiscal goals will be to help keep costs low for citizens, their families, and local small businesses. She will work to ensure homeowners and renters don’t get pushed out of their communities due to regulations and high taxes.
- Tara will support legislation for school choice, homeschool protections, parental rights, and more transparency in Colorado's state education curriculum. Children belong to their parents, not the government and the state’s policies need to focus on education, nothing else.
Tara is passionate about education and keeping costs down for Colorado families. She also wants to protect the freedoms and fundamental rights of all. She wants to ensure parents have a voice in their children’s education and they can dictate how that education fits their family’s needs. She supports homeschooling, school choice, curriculum transparency, and parental involvement.
Tara is also passionate about making sure Colorado families can afford to stay and live in Colorado. Currently, inflation is making it harder and harder for families to pay for essentials such as gas and groceries and to stay in their homes. Tara wants to look at options to help keep costs down while supporting small businesses by keeping them open and maintaining high employment rates where employees can live in the same communities they work.
I look up to my grandmother because I admire her ability to maintain her positive approach to life despite so many hardships. She is generous and caring towards everyone she meets and strives to help others as much as she can. She has an incredible way of making anyone she comes into contact with feel valued, heard, and loved. I want to follow her example because, in a world where everyone and everything is so divisive, I want everyone I come into contact with to feel heard and valued and I want to unite our community through kindness and compassion.
An elected official should not be beholden to their party, but to the constituents they represent. They need to have integrity and courage to stand up against agendas and ideology, and do the right thing for the people in the communities they represent. Elected officials are called public servants and it's time we see more serving from them.
I am pragmatic, tenacious, a careful listener and I am able to create cohesive teams to solve problems. I have the integrity and courage to stand up and do the right thing for the constituents. I am empathetic to contrary sides of conflict and issues and believe cooperation and relationships build success, unity and community. I am a compassionate leader who believes everyone can bring something valuable to the table. I believe in empowering individuals to believe in themselves and make the world a better place.
My favorite book is 1776 by David McCullough, because I love American history and George Washington is my favorite historical person.
"Fancy Like" Walker Hayes
We are a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. I do not believe a person should have previous experience in government or politics in order to be a state legislator. Everyone has a unique story and their own set of life skills that can be used as experience in politics. We should make an effort to elect more ordinary non politically entrenched citizens in order to have a more balanced political landscape that represents the voice of the people.
When you build relationships, you find common ground. When you find common ground, you begin to truly represent the community and the constituents. It is extremely important to build relationships with other legislators in order to find common ground to legislate for the community. When you unite the community through shared values by finding common ground with other legislators, you can begin to build the government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
As a mom to 5 children at home, I would want to join the Education Committee. I want to be an integral part of the legislation that will directly affect my own children while advocating for all of the children in HD11 and Colorado. As a former military spouse, I would also want to be part of the State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. As someone who has been part of the healthcare field and a huge supporter of mental health services and an advocate for better mental health resources in Colorado, I would also want to be part of the Public and Behavioral Health and Human Services Committee.
I would like to motivate other people, people like you and me, to get involved in community politics and run for office. I would hope to do my job as Representative to the best of my ability and eventually be able to see another community member elected who believes in representing the HD11 community as a voice for all the people.
I heard from a single mom with 2 small children asking for help. She had no friends or family, worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week, and was penniless. She was desperate to feed and diaper her babies, and she was at a loss with what to do for essentials because of inflation. Stories like these further my desire to advocate for the people in my community and state.
Most of my 6 year olds jokes are the best!
The legislature should definitely oversee the use of emergency powers. Without oversight, the emergency power declarations can result in severe abuse of power and government over reach. Emergency declarations, especially by a governor, should be limited to a specific amount of time and after which any continuing emergency powers duration must be voted on by the elected representatives and senators of the state. Additionally, a blanket non terminating or unlimited emergency powers declaration allows elected officials to abrogate their basic responsibilities of representing the people through leadership, compromise and critical thinking, the traits required for our elected officials to show results and solutions during challenging times. Continuing emergency powers simply allows decree through a single person's signature and this is contrary to our fundamental rights as citizens.
Compromise is absolutely necessary for policymaking because the beauty of representing constituents is their diverse political beliefs. A state representative should not marginalize constituents because they are from another party nor should that representative vote strictly down party lines to represent their party instead of their constituents. When making policy, a representative should advocate for the shared values of the constituents in the community by giving them a voice no matter what side of the political spectrum they belong to. If a representative can compromise for policymaking then everyone involved has a stake in the claim which can produce a desired outcome for everyone.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2022 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on August 31, 2022
Current members of the Colorado House of Representatives
Leadership
Speaker of the House:Julie McCluskie
Majority Leader:Monica Duran
Representatives
District 1
Javier Mabrey (D)
District 2
Steven Woodrow (D)
District 3
Meg Froelich (D)
District 4
Cecelia Espenoza (D)
District 5
Alex Valdez (D)
District 6
Sean Camacho (D)
District 7
Jennifer Bacon (D)
District 8
District 9
Emily Sirota (D)
District 10
Junie Joseph (D)
District 11
Karen McCormick (D)
District 12
Kyle Brown (D)
District 13
Julie McCluskie (D)
District 14
Ava Flanell (R)
District 15
Scott Bottoms (R)
District 16
Rebecca Keltie (R)
District 17
Regina English (D)
District 18
Amy Paschal (D)
District 19
Dan Woog (R)
District 20
Jarvis Caldwell (R)
District 21
Mary Bradfield (R)
District 22
Kenneth DeGraaf (R)
District 23
Monica Duran (D)
District 24
Lisa Feret (D)
District 25
Tammy Story (D)
District 26
Meghan Lukens (D)
District 27
Brianna Titone (D)
District 28
Sheila Lieder (D)
District 29
Shannon Bird (D)
District 30
Rebekah Stewart (D)
District 31
Jacque Phillips (D)
District 32
Manny Rutinel (D)
District 33
District 34
Jenny Willford (D)
District 35
Lorena Garcia (D)
District 36
Michael Carter (D)
District 37
Chad Clifford (D)
District 38
Gretchen Rydin (D)
District 39
Brandi Bradley (R)
District 40
Naquetta Ricks (D)
District 41
Jamie Jackson (D)
District 42
Mandy Lindsay (D)
District 43
Robert Marshall (D)
District 44
Anthony Hartsook (R)
District 45
Max Brooks (R)
District 46
Tisha Mauro (D)
District 47
Ty Winter (R)
District 48
Carlos Barron (R)
District 49
Lesley Smith (D)
District 50
Ryan Gonzalez (R)
District 51
Ron Weinberg (R)
District 52
Yara Zokaie (D)
District 53
District 54
Matt Soper (R)
District 55
Rick Taggart (R)
District 56
Chris Richardson (R)
District 57
District 58
Larry Suckla (R)
District 59
Katie Stewart (D)
District 60
Stephanie Luck (R)
District 61
Eliza Hamrick (D)
District 62
Matthew Martinez (D)
District 63
Dusty Johnson (R)
District 64
Scott Slaugh (R)
District 65
Lori Sander (R)
Democratic Party (43)
Republican Party (22)
