Estes Park Trail-Gazette: There seems to be a misconception on the part of public officials in the Estes Valley that the Trail-Gazette is unfamiliar with what local government is legally required to disclose to the public under laws including the Colorado Open Records Act and Sunshine Laws. As trained journalists, we are well aware of what these laws entitle the public to and what they do not. The point the Trail-Gazette has been and will continue to make is that each one of the elected officials ran on a platform of complete transparency and, ‘always being willing to share their opinion, whether it was popular or not.’  This implies an active transparency approach rather than merely the passive approach that only follows state law.

That has not only not been the way our leaders have acted once the public bestowed the honor of electing them to office, in fact, they have run quite the opposite way. The last election coincided so closely with the COVID-19 pandemic it is hard to tell if any of our local politicians ever had any intentions of keeping their word or just used the pandemic as an excuse for inaction and silence in the wake of the Coronavirus, when their local community and businesses needed them the most.

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