1 week Ago
On Thursday, April 17, Gov. Jared Polis vetoed his first bill of the 2025 legislative session. With the Democrat trifecta fully entrenched in Colorado, vetoes are rather rare, but Polis’ rejection of Senate Bill 77 was the right move for transparency.
And now it is time for the Legislature to let this problematic bill die. Senate Bill 77 is likely not a piece of legislation that many have heard of. It does not concern a hot-button topic — like guns or housing or NIL contracts — and it hasn’t created much partisan controversy.
But, SB 77, the Modifications to Colorado Open Records Act , innocuous as it may seem, is a bill that could erode government transparency and further obfuscate public records. Ostensibly, SB 77 is about giving government records custodians more time to process Colorado Open Records Act requests. The bill would give custodians five working days, rather than three, to fulfill CORA requests and an additional 10 working days, rather than seven, if “extenuating circumstances” exist.
The bill also stipulates that if a request could be determined to have been made for financial gain, governments could take up to 30 working days to fulfill the request, and they could charge “the reasonable cost” associated with the request, rather than the maximum hourly CORA rate. These changes would only apply to the general public, as SB 77 includes an exemption for journalists, with the idea being that journalists are more practiced at submitting requests and thus their requests aren’t as burdensome as those made by the general public. But, as journalists, we still take issue with SB 77.
According to Sen. Cathy Kipp , the Fort Collins Democrat who introduced the bill, records custodians are “essentially drowning in CORA requests, and this just provides that little bit of relief.” This, of course, is a real issue.
But SB 77 is an utterly backward way of addressing it. As the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition put it in its letter to Gov. Polis urging a veto of the bill, “SB 25-077 essentially gives records custodians an excuse to further delay providing public records within a reasonable period of time.
” The letter continued, “We know from the freedom-of-information hotline we’ve run for the past 12 years that government entities often miss the statutory deadlines, and there’s not much that Coloradans can do about it. Colorado’s Court of Appeals recently ruled that the same language in the Judicial Department’s CORA-like policy is not enforceable even when deadlines are missed by months.” In other words, records custodians may be “drowning” in requests, but some are already missing deadlines by months.
How will adding a few additional days help anything? A serious solution would be one focused on providing records custodians with the resources necessary to complete requests on time, whether that is additional staffing, better records storage or a more efficient retrieval and review process. Adding a longer wait to records requests, though, is only half the issue with SB 77. The other half is the cost that will be associated with that additional time.
Last July, CORA’s maximum research-and-retrieval rate jumped to $41.37 an hour. That hourly rate means records can already be prohibitively expensive.
But increasing the deadline to retrieve records means that records are going to get even more expensive. Adding additional working days — or weeks — could mean some records see a huge increase in cost. We also find it problematic that records custodians will be responsible for determining if someone is pursuing a record for financial gain.
What happens when an incorrect determination is made and someone’s request mistakenly takes 30 working days to fulfill and costs thousands of dollars? Similarly, creating a carve-out for journalists essentially creates two classes of records requestors. Yes, journalists are working on the public’s behalf, but the public itself should be just as entitled to receive public records in as timely a fashion as a journalist. Citizens should not be punished because they are not as proficient at requesting records as journalists.
All of which is to say that we are grateful to Polis for seeing the flaws in this bill and rightfully vetoing it. “I acknowledge CORA can be improved, and the bill includes some narrowly tailored common-sense reforms,” the governor wrote in his veto letter . “While I would support these types of narrowly scoped adjustments to CORA, I cannot do so in the context of the broader, more significant problems SB25-077 would have on transparency and the State’s open records structure.
” We agree that CORA could be improved. (What piece of legislation couldn’t be?) But SB 77 is not the bill to do it. On issues big and small, we must remember that the government is doing our bidding with our money.
We deserve to be able to throw open the curtains and let the sun shine. Since Polis’ veto, lawmakers have been discussing a potential override. The last time a veto was overridden in Colorado was in 2007 — let’s keep it that way.
As the legislative session is wrapping up, now is the time to contact our state representatives and senators and tell them SB 77 is not the bill we need for transparency in Colorado. If governments around the state are struggling to adequately address the volume of records requests, the answer is not to give them more time, it is to help provide them with resources to meet their current deadlines. It is time our lawmakers recognize this.
It is not easy to make and retain and recall documents and records. It takes time and it takes resources and it takes people, and all of these things cost money. But when it comes to government bodies, public records must be public in all senses of the word.
— Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board.
