KUNC radio (Greeley): Advocates say Senate Bill 40 does something simple: It brings the Colorado Open Records Act into the 21st century by requiring state agencies to provide information in a digital format — such as a database or a spreadsheet — where feasible.

“These are the people’s records. We are the custodians, we are the stewards of these records,” said Democratic Sen. John Kefalas of Fort Collins. He’s the main sponsor of the bill.

For some, the issue is more complicated.

A similar measure proposed last year failed amid concerns about costs and privacy, such as how to handle sensitive personal information that could be contained within a file. For the last year, a bipartisan group has worked on ways to address those issues.

“Too often we in government don’t make information easily accessible to people,” said Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams, who was part of the working group. “This bill makes it easier for Coloradans to get the documents in a format that they can use. And it’s not always for government to say, ‘Oh, I don’t like what you might do with that information.’ It is the public’s data.”

The proposal comes with many stipulations in which digital records aren’t required — if it’s not technologically possible, if private information can’t be removed, if special programming is required or if it could cause safety or security problems. Still, some remain wary of releasing information digitally, including many schools, colleges and even water districts.

“You create a situation where an entity could go out and look for multiple weak points in the system, and attack them,” said Doug Kemper, the executive director of Colorado Water Congress, a statewide water advocacy group. He worries that the bill would put the state’s water infrastructure at risk.

Others fear agency staffers could make mistakes and accidentally release confidential private data that is not subject to open records law, such as health information.

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