Judge rules for Boulder County in lawsuit over Colorado Open Records Act

Daily Camera (Boulder): A Boulder District judge has ruled against a Gunbarrel resident who had alleged in a lawsuit that the Boulder County commissioners and their staff violated the Colorado Open Records Act.

In a written ruling filed on Monday, District Judge Thomas Mulvahill concluded that Boulder County’s denial of Kristin Bjornsen’s requests to inspect certain documents — and the county’s redacting, or blacking out, of some information in the documents it did provide her — “was proper” under parts of the state’s open-records law allowing government to exclude certain documents from public scrutiny.

“We’re really happy” with the ruling, Board of County Commissioners Chairwoman Deb Garner said on Tuesday.

Bjornsen said in an email that “I am pretty disillusioned and sad right now.”

She said one of the questions remaining about Boulder County government after the judge’s decision is: “How much do we value real, actual transparency?

“To me, the county’s transparency is like a brick wall with a painted window: It looks transparent until you walk smack into it.”

Mulvahill had ruled in October that, despite a separate set of allegations in the lawsuit Bjornsen originally filed in February, the county commissioners had not violated Colorado’s open meetings law.

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