The Aurora Sentinel: Half a spreadsheet with Colorado government records open to public scrutiny is far better than none.

State lawmakers are, finally, closer than ever to passing a measure that would modernize Colorado’s treasured open records laws, saving taxpayers money and saving time and money for those who want information from their state and local government that must be made available to them by law.

In short, it’s antiquated open-records laws leaping into the digital world. But there’s a problem.

Almost the entire state legislature agrees, publicly, that Colorado’s open records laws are an important part of the state’s transparency and good government. Having to produce records of who spent how much on what, who emailed whom, who said what during a public meeting, are all parts of keeping Colorado’s large and small governments honest and effective.

And legislators agree that open records laws only work when they’re realistic and practical. An open records law that allows a government endless months or years to produce payroll or expenditure records, or allows a government to stymie a request by charging huge fees is not an open records law at all. It’s a sham.

Colorado’s law, one of the first and, at the time, best, in the country, has slid into sham status because it doesn’t account for how records are now stored. Almost no government these days has records in manila folders stored in cabinets, yet current law doesn’t address the ease and savings in simply giving someone who requests expenditures a copy of the digital spreadsheet they’re stored in. Instead, some governments manually copy records to paper, spending hours doing it, and passing the costs along to the public, which is often newspapers acting as the watchdog for the public.

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