read more ...

From The Washington Post: Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) will push the state legislature next year to publish details of every dollar earmarked for public education, a move he says would create the country’s most transparent spending system. “So far, no state’s ever had total transparency on how their tax dollars are spent to every school,” Hickenlooper said in a recent interview. “So you can create a Web site where every dollar to every school every day is tracked. How much goes to the teacher, how much goes to their pension, how much goes to the bureaucracy, how much goes ...

From The Denver Post: Upcoming hearings about whether the gunman in the Aurora theater shooting will undergo additional psychiatric evaluation will be closed to the public, victims and media, the judge overseeing the case ruled Friday. Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour granted defense attorneys' request to close the hearings, which have been scheduled for Jan. 27-30. During those hearings, attorneys are expected to argue over whether James Holmes should undergo another psychiatric evaluation. The hearings are significant because they are expected to reveal what doctors at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo concluded about Holmes' mental state ...

From The Denver Post: The Jefferson County school board's new majority may have skirted a law that requires them to conduct business openly by hiring an attorney without a public interview process, according to an open government expert. Thomas Kelley, a lawyer for the Colorado Press Association and The Denver Post, said the board's 3-2 decision last week to hire Colorado Springs-based law firm Miller Sparks LLC may have violated the state's open meetings act, which requires board members to conduct business in public. "It's not all that common for a board of a public entity to, by itself, conduct ...

From The Denver Post:  Well, that didn't take long. Just a few weeks after being sworn in, the new conservative majority on the Jefferson County school board has already caused a stir, and not in a good way. The board majority is suspected of running roughshod over Colorado's open meetings laws when it hired a board attorney out of the blue at a meeting last week. The bizarre part of the whole scenario is that Ken Witt, Julie Williams and John Newkirk have the votes, quite frankly, to do what they want. Why would it even be necessary to thumb ...

From The Denver Post: Colorado operates with a disturbing lack of transparency when it comes to information about child abuse investigations. That needs to change if there is to be continued progress in improving a system that has seen scores of children diein recent years after they had contact with social services. State and national disclosure laws should be revised to require the release of basic information about investigations. Confidentiality laws were enacted with the idea of protecting the privacy of children and families. However, the result is a system that is almost impossible for outsiders to examine and critique ...

From The Coloradoan (Fort Collins):  History’s recollection of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s legacy remains to be written, but it’s certain to have some gaps. A technological crash swallowed the calendar entries from Hickenlooper’s first eight months in office. “A server crash in 2011 caused information to be erased from the Governor’s calendar for the days of January 1, 2011 to August 31, 2011,” Ben Figa, deputy legal counsel to the governor, wrote in response to a request for copies of the entries. All that remains of the governor’s calendar from that time are his standing daily appointments — meetings with cabinet ...

Press release from MLRC and NFOIC: By Amaris Elliott-Engel, MLRC Legal Fellow NFOIC’s third biennial joint study with the New York-based Media Law Resource Center (MLRC) showed a continuation of trends that are troubling to open govern ...

From Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition: By Jeffrey A. Roberts, CFOIC Executive Director Buried in Tuesday’s Colorado election results was a measure approved by Littleton residents that severely restricts the City Council’ ...

From Tennessee Coalition for Open Government: Does the public have a right to know about the drugs used to execute death row inmates? This question has been raised in recent months in court in at least three states, two of which recently enact ...