Colorado Politics: Last week, a district court judge in Denver ruled Colorado’s General Assembly violated the state’s Open Meetings Law by engaging in a series of meetings through an intermediary — a private company that manages what’s called “quadratic voting” — and thereby engaged in an unlawful gathering of two or more of its members to discuss public business. This process of sequential meetings by less than a quorum of a public body has been referred to as “serial meetings,” a form of artifice or chicanery employed deliberately to evade the open meetings law.

Last week’s ruling was the second by a trial court judge in this state finding such shenanigans violated our state’s Open Meetings Law. Last June, a judge in Douglas County ruled the board of education broke the law when four of its members deliberately convened a series of one-on-one phone conversations in which they discussed terminating the superintendent’s contract (and which they also decided to do outside of public view). That court wrote “circumventing the statute by a series of private one-on-one meetings at which public business is discussed and/or decisions reached is a violation of the purpose of the statute, not just its spirit.”

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