This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
An attempt by state lawmakers to increase wait times for the production of public records has died — for the third year in a row.
This time, the bill didn’t make it out of its first Senate committee hearing.
“When governments start hiding or even appearing to hide, it's a bad thing,” said State Sen. Katie Wallace, D-Longmont, chair of the State, Veterans, & Military Affairs Committee.
Wallace told the bill’s sponsors that she admired their intentions, which included trying to limit some of the burden on local governments dealing with an increase in requests for public records.
“But for me, in this day and age, I'm simply not willing to even appear in any way to prevent transparency for the people. Throughout my years of government service, I've seen the light that the people and the press can shed on the inner workings of government and on elected officials,” said Wallace before casting the deciding “no” vote.
The bill would have extended wait times for records from three to five working days, and extensions for extenuating circumstances from seven to 10 working days.
Since the 2024 session, State Sen. Cathy Kipp, D-Ft. Collins, has pushed to modify the Colorado Open Records Act, commonly referred to as CORA, by increasing the number of days that governments have to respond to records requests from the public and from businesses that seek to profit from the data.
Joining her in support of the legislation was a coalition of local governments from Jefferson County to school districts to the Colorado Municipal League. They all have complained that critical services are being overrun and slowed down by the public seeking government documents.
But reporting from CPR News in 2024 found that the roots of the legislation are more complex than that. Parents in the Poudre Valley School District believe it was an effort to stop them from finding out details about things like child abuse at the hands of school employees.
Media groups testified in opposition to the bill, noting that there are already significant obstacles to obtaining open records, including exorbitant costs, delays and denials. Opposition also came from individual members of the public and the League of Women Voters.
Eric Maxfield, an attorney and a board member of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, told lawmakers on Thursday that delays in fulfilling open records requests are common and often not related to a records custodian’s workload.
“Over the past seven years, hundreds of times I have fielded complaints and many, many dozens have involved what appears to be intentional delay, and it tends to be where there is a controversial issue,” Maxfield said.
Some records requests are big and complex and can be onerous on a small government agency, but Matt Sebastian, the managing editor of The Denver Post, said governments are delaying even the smallest, most targeted records requests.
“What I'm talking about though is something we see pretty routinely, which is when a very specific document is requested, a report, an email, a letter, something maybe that was referenced at a public meeting, the reporter will ask for a copy. They're told to file a CORA [request],” Sebastian said. “Then it takes the full three days or longer if they decide to give themselves an extension.”
Local government officials told a different story: one of overwhelming requests. Jefferson County Attorney Kym Sorrells said the number of CORA requests there has grown from 217 in 2019 to 792 in 2025.
“When we have to process this level of CORA requests, it means our people have to take time away from their other job responsibilities in the county, such as doing the contracts for road and bridge or for public health, very important aspects of our local government work,” Sorrells said.
An attorney from Denver Public Schools, Lauren Parsons, testified that the media files 19% of all records requests to her school district, and those requests are often targeted and relatively easy to fulfill — the rest come from businesses and parents.
“These requests, often from law firms for pretrial discovery or parents, can produce hundreds or thousands of documents and emails and require significant staff time diverted from their regular duties,” said Parsons, who added that DPS spent more than 2,500 hours of staff time last year responding to records requests that must be stripped of any protected information on students.
There are limited options for the public or a member of the media to challenge a denied or delayed records request, without taking the government agency to court.
Sen. Kipp told lawmakers that if the state had money, she would sponsor a bill that creates an ombudsman office in the Attorney General’s office to mediate records disputes.
“But we don't have the resources to do this,” Kipp said. “So what this bill does is try to give concessions to both sides and provide fixes and accountability to make this process easier to navigate.”
The bill included a provision that would have provided a free hour of research and retrieval time for each calendar day the response was late, and would have required governments to allow credit cards to pay for the records.
Still, those concessions were not enough to win over opponents of extending the deadlines for responding to records requests.
“I can order a banana on my phone from here, and it'll be waiting for me by the time I get home,” said Chuck Murphy, investigative editor at CPR News. “But somehow this legislation presumes that governments simply can't function that way and are incapable of embracing all the technologies that make our lives faster and easier.”
Last year, Governor Polis vetoed a similar bill from Kipp, partly citing the carve-outs for media, which would have shielded them from delays in producing public records when requested. Polis said it was fraught with challenges for records custodians, trying to decide who is and isn’t a member of the media. He also said in his veto letter that he was for more transparency not less.
This time the bill didn’t make it past its first hurdle, a Senate committee hearing.
Jessica Fenske, a libertarian activist with a large social media following for her Forest Mommy accounts, urged lawmakers to vote “no” on the bill, again.
“It's funny how this keeps coming up, almost like you guys are the vexatious ones when you keep bringing this bill forward.”
Editor’s Note: Colorado Public Radio leadership involved in lobbying on this bill did not review this story before publication and had no editorial influence on it.
