Public officials often use various means to skirt transparency, and thus accountability. Sometimes the motive is to fend off political opponents. Sometimes it’s because of some notion that too much transparency is the enemy of efficiency. Som ...

From The Colorado Independent:  DENVER — This lawmaker is exchanging late-night texts with a pot-industry lobbyist. That lawmaker is instant-chatting from his Gmail account with an insurance industry executive. And in New Jersey, a governor’s staffer sends a message to a Port Authority pal asking him to shut down four lanes of traffic and cause an historic and eventually notorious bottleneck. The thinking behind open records law is that the public should enjoy access to those kinds of communications, because they clearly form part of the record of how our democracy works. But communication in the digital age happens at ...

From The Denver Post:  The disregard that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell showed for Colorado's open meetings laws this week in barring reporters from an event in Craig is astonishing. Jewell was in Colorado to encourage collaboration between conservationists, landowners and government in protecting the greater sage grouse. She toured a ranch with Gov. John Hickenlooper and others, an event reporters could attend. When the entourage moved to an American Legion hall for a meeting — which had been advertised as an open-to-the-public workshop of the Moffatt County Commission — reporters were kept out. Jewell's spokesman said the meeting "was closed ...

From The Denver Post: Five of the state's largest school districts have investigated more than 400 threats by students this school year and put 40 of them at the highest levels of concern, according to records obtained by The Denver Post. But more than a month after the fatal shootings at Arapahoe High School, administrators at Littleton Public Schools still won't say whether a threat made by gunman Karl Pierson in September prompted the district's highest security response. In the noon hour on Dec. 13, Pierson, a senior at Arapahoe, entered the school through a door that was propped open ...

From The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction): Apparently, Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell believes the laws of Colorado can be ignored when she and her Washington, D.C., retinue arrive in town — that our laws don’t apply to Beltway bigwigs. That’s the only message one can glean from Jewell’s refusal to allow a reporter from the Craig Daily Press to attend a meeting Tuesday in Craig that included Jewell, three Moffat County commissioners, Gov. John Hickenlooper and other officials. Because the three commissioners were present, the gathering clearly qualified as a public meeting under Colorado’s Open Meetings Law, and therefore should ...

From the Craig Daily Press:  The Craig Daily Press recently looked into a possible violation of Colorado Sunshine Law following a meeting about sage grouse conservation. The meeting, which took place at American Legion Post 62 following Tuesday’s tour of Moffat County land by Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and United States Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, was closed off to Daily Press government reporter Erin Fenner. Fenner said she was “under the impression” the meeting was open to the public and was therefore open to the press. A man present whom Fenner believed to be representing Sec. Jewell told ...

Sunshine Law violation shows need for legal certainty Even the most well intended government negotiations can run afoul of Florida's tough Sunshine Law, as the city of Jacksonville discovered in a court ruling last week. read more ...

Daily News - A position we often take on the Editorial Page is that Washington has some of the strongest state laws in the nation protecting openness and transparency in government processes and decision-making and that those laws should be honored a ...

Gov. Dennis Daugaard and Attorney General Marty Jackley will not reprise last year’s largely ineffective efforts to increase public access to government records. South Dakota lawmakers shot down five of the eight open government bills Daugaard ...

Governments and citizens across the country and around the world are demonstrating the powerful benefits that can be created by making government data available and accessible to the public. We see it in the form of increased fiancial transparency ...