Colorado ramped up funeral home inspections this year after several cases of misconduct involving fake ashes and hidden bodies.
A log KUNC news requested and obtained last week shows inspectors have visited at least 166 mortuaries so far this year, with an average pace of 21 inspections per month.
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To put the pace in perspective, at least 22 mortuaries were inspected last month compared to just five at the same time last year.
But state regulators are continuing to keep the contents of the dozens of new inspection reports a secret from the public.
The office that regulates Colorado funeral homes last week denied KUNC’s open records request for the inspection report from the Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, where inspectors say they found more than 20 hidden bodies on Aug. 20.
Transparency advocates and a victim of recent funeral home misconduct say the state’s new policy to withhold inspection reports prevents accountability and transparency and should be reversed.
“How many more of these problems are we going to have? It seems it keeps continuing,” Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition director Jeff Roberts said Thursday. “I would think the public would be interested in learning more about these places taking care of people’s remains.”
Gov. Jared Polis signed a law last year deleting a statute that previously said records of funeral homes’ registrations and disciplinary proceedings must be open to public inspection. The law tightened regulations on the industry, but it also exempted records of funeral home “licensing actions” from the Colorado Open Records Act. The changes in records policy weren't discussed publicly when the bill was being considered, and lawmakers who sponsored the measure couldn’t explain to KUNC last spring why they made them.
Asked Thursday whether Gov. Polis thinks the public should have access to the reports from funeral home inspectors, a spokesperson for his office said, “I'm not sure we'll have much more to add beyond what (state regulators) have shared.”
As the records denials continue, the public is prevented from learning what problems inspectors are finding and why some facilities are being disciplined.
That includes the Kibbey-Fishburn Funeral Home in Loveland.
The funeral home received a letter of reprimand from state regulators on July 30, stating, “This letter is based both on your failure to respond to the Director and on concerns identified during an inspection which occurred on November 20, 2024.”
But the letter does not detail what ‘concerns’ inspectors found, and state regulators denied KUNC’s request for the inspection report of the facility referenced in the letter of reprimand.
Kibbey-Fishburn Funeral Home owner Michael Blundell did not return a message from KUNC News on Friday morning seeking to learn more about the concerns from state regulators.
And a spokesperson for state regulators said the “underlying documentation leading to this public action - including complaint information - is unavailable” because of the changes lawmakers made last year.
Shelia Canfield-Jones, who said the FBI informed her in 2023 that the Return to Nature funeral home in southern Colorado gave her powdered concrete instead of her daughter’s cremated remains, said this week there should be more transparency around inspections and disciplinary actions, not less.
“The consumer can only be protected with the information that we receive from the people who do the inspection,” she said.
And transparency advocate Jeff Roberts said he remains ‘puzzled’ by the lack of an explanation so far from state lawmakers as to why their bill exempted certain funeral home disciplinary records from the public.
“These were open records, and the legislature took that away,” he said. “And we’ve never gotten an explanation as to why that was. It almost seemed like the sponsors didn’t know it either.”
A KUNC analysis of funeral home disciplinary records shows at least 14 facilities have been disciplined for alleged code violations since July of last year when lawmakers started mandating regular inspections.
In all but two cases, the mortuaries received letters of admonition as punishment instead of any action being taken on their license.
The alleged violations that resulted in the letters ranged from improperly storing remains to failing to include language in contracts that would let consumers know how they could file a complaint against the facility.
Lee Rasizer, a spokesperson for the agency regulating funeral homes, said the decision on how to discipline a facility "is dependent on the totality of circumstances surrounding a violation, and considers whether the infraction is something that can be readily corrected, is a repeat occurrence, and/or something that could cause harm to the public in some way.
Rasizer added that the director of the Division of Professions and Occupations decides whether violations are severe enough to warrant disciplinary action.
Meanwhile, Shelia Canfield-Jones, who was a victim of funeral home misconduct, said providing the public more access to inspection reports and complaints “would put some kind of faith back into the system.”
“You can affect thousands of people because you abuse a body,” she said. “We need protection, and to know that we can go in there confidently into a funeral home and know that it's going to be taken care of the proper way.”
