State lawmakers want to adjust a 2023 juvenile privacy law that recently forced Colorado’s judicial branch to restrict attorneys’ access to criminal court records, also creating delays in processing document requests from journalists and the public.
Certain records about a June 2023 cyberattack at the Colorado Department of Higher Education are subject to CORA’s deliberative process privilege and can’t be disclosed to a requester, a judge decided.
A Pagosa Springs lawyer who routinely sues school boards around the state for violations of the open meetings law is defending his role as a “private attorney general” in a case now before Colorado’s second-highest court.
Colorado lawmakers’ use of an anonymous private survey to prioritize bills impacting the state budget “thwarts the entire purpose” of the Colorado Open Meetings Law because it shields the public “from knowledge that it would otherwise be entitled to know,” a judge found.
The state’s highest court should reaffirm that people who sue state and local government entities are still entitled to obtain public records from those entities by using the Colorado Open Records Act, the ACLU of Colorado and the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition say in a new court filing.
The Colorado Department of Human Services wants the state’s highest court to review a recent appellate court opinion that could force the disclosure of aggregate statistics about child-abuse hotline calls made from licensed residential care facilities.
Several key rulings in 2023 showed why courts matter so much for enforcing and interpreting Colorado’s open government laws.
Because of a 2023 law that protects the privacy of juveniles, the Colorado Judicial Department plans to limit attorneys’ access to criminal court records and clerks may take longer to process document requests from journalists and the public.
Lawmakers did not, however, tackle the No. 1 barrier to obtaining public records in Colorado — exorbitant fees. And that problem will only get worse on July 1, 2024, when inflation boosts the maximum-allowable hourly rate to process CORA requests from $33.58 to a whopping $40 or $41.
In a victory for the Aurora Sentinel, the Colorado Court of Appeals reversed a district court ruling and ordered Aurora to publicly release the recording of an executive session in which city council members ended censure proceedings against a fellow councilor.
