Colorado lawmakers did the right thing for government transparency last week.
First in a vote of 43-19, representatives in the Colorado House voted to increase transparency of municipal courts, and then three lawmakers on a Senate committee voted against a bill that would have allowed local governments and state agencies to delay releasing records to the public for weeks.
Coloradans know that defending access to open records is critical to ensuring government transparency and holding elected officials accountable for their actions and decisions. House Bill 1134, which still must pass the Senate, would prohibit municipal courts that refuse to keep records of their proceedings from putting people in jail. The bill also increases transparency in municipal courts, including requiring that hearings be open to the public.
The Denver Postap reporting highlighted the gaps of transparency and accountability in municipal courts, and we are thrilled to see Rep. Javier Mabry and Rep. Elizabeth Velasco taking action. The Post found that despite a law being passed in 2023, many courtrooms were not livestreaming their procedures and some judges were defiantly refusing to livestream their hearings.
House Bill 1134 would be a step in the right direction for municipal court transparency.
We also would like to take a moment to thank the bipartisan group of senators — Katie Wallace, Tom Sullivan and Lynda Zamora Wilson — for voting against Senate Bill 107 in committee on Thursday.
Similar legislation was vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis last year in a strong defense of the public’s right to know.
While we agree that the bill’s sponsors – Sen. Cathy Kipp and Sen. Janice Rice – had honorable intentions when they began drafting this legislation, the final product would have slowed access to records and created difficult to enforce carveouts for private companies likely to profit off the data requested.
Providing the public with information about operations, deliberations, contracts and final decisions is a core function of government not a nuisance to be dealt with, and most records in Colorado exist electronically and are easily accessed and provided to the public with minimal cost in a matter of minutes.
Current law and case law requires that records be provided to the public within three business days of a request. Senate Bill 107 would have increased that amount of time to five business days.
If there are extenuating circumstances, a government agency can request an extension and deliver records within 10 business days, and Senate Bill 107 would have increased that time period to 15 working days. Three weeks is a long time to wait for records, especially if a vote or government decision is occurring soon on an issue.
Colorado law already has a heavy mechanism in place to deter unreasonable requests – what we would consider drag nets cast so wide and broad as to be nearly impossible to fulfill in three business days. That tool is that governments are allowed to charge a fee for records retrieval. The more unruly a request the more time a request will take to fulfill and the more money it will cost the requester. This tool is sometimes abused by local governments and is quite effective at preventing access to public records, as the maximum rate that can be charged is $41.37 per hour.
While The Denver Post has long supported legislation that would reduce that rate to something more reasonable, we will settle this year for the Colorado General Assembly not making people wait even longer for records they often pay quite a bit of money to see.
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