House whistleblower protection bill advances
A bill safeguarding Colorado whistleblowers cleared the House Local Government Committee with amendments and moments of emotionally powerful testimony.
Colorado Legislature
Proposed school board ethics commission would hear open-meetings, open-records complaints
A proposed new ethics commission would add some “teeth” to the Colorado Open Records Act and the Sunshine Law, at least for the governing boards of local school districts and charter schools.
Parents to lawmakers: Open records of nonprofits serving people with disabilities
Twenty Colorado nonprofits that spend public dollars to serve people with developmental and intellectual disabilities should be required like government agencies to provide detailed financial records and other information on request, parents and advocates told state lawmakers.
Colorado legislators move to formalize open-data program in Secretary of State’s office
Colorado lawmakers are taking steps to formalize a 2½-year-old pilot program that encourages state government agencies to “streamline access to public data” by making datasets available online in machine-readable formats.
Colorado lawmakers seek to boost whistleblower protections
State lawmakers introduced three bills in the opening weeks of the 2016 legislative session intended to safeguard Colorado whistleblowers.
Rocky Mountain Human Services: No plans to fight open-records bill
Rocky Mountain Human Services has “no intention” of opposing a bill that would open its records and those of 19 other Colorado nonprofits serving people with disabilities, the embattled agency’s interim executive director told a meeting of family members and service providers.
Databases, nonprofit records, wage theft transparency on legislature’s 2016 agenda
Colorado lawmakers will consider at least four measures to expand public access to information during the legislature’s 2016 session, which convenes Jan. 13.
CFOIC looks back: Transparency highlights and lowlights in 2015
The private emails flap was one of many transparency-related stories we highlighted in 2015 or broke ourselves.
A 21st-century open-records law for Colorado
If you’re lucky, you’ll have no problem getting public information in a format that allows for searching, sorting and aggregating. Too often, however, database records are released in a format that makes analysis difficult, or they’re not released at all.
Proposed 2016 bill would open records of nonprofits serving people with disabilities
Prompted by the recent financial troubles of a nonprofit that serves people with disabilities, a state lawmaker plans 2016 legislation to open the records of all such agencies in Colorado that receive more than half their funds from public sources.