By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
The cost to obtain administrative records of the state’s judicial branch will increase if the Colorado Supreme Court accepts the recommendations of its Public Access Committee.
The committee, which is comprised mostly of judges and staff from various judicial branch offices, voted this week to align fees in P.A.I.R.R. 2, its administrative records policy, with those in the Colorado Open Records Act.
That means judicial agencies could charge up to $41.37 an hour — rather than the current $30 an hour — to process records requests after an initial free hour. CORA’s maximum hourly rate for research, retrieval and redaction, which is adjusted for inflation every five years, rose to $41.37 on July 1, 2024.
The proposed new language in P.A.I.R.R. 2 also allows the charging of 25 cents per page for “documents produced in a hard-copy format.” That provision aligns with a 2023 CORA amendment prohibiting government entities from charging requesters a per-page fee to provide records in digital formats such as PDFs.
During the Public Access Committee’s Oct. 7 meeting, one committee member argued for keeping a per-page fee for PDFs.
“I still like the fee, and I know it’s for a bad reason, but we get so many P.A.I.R.R. 2 requests where the cost can be a deterrent — to keep our frequent filers from inundating us with P.A.I.R.R. 2 requests,” she said.
“I don’t think the intention is to discourage people from making requests,” responded Teri Morrison, legal counsel for the state court administrator’s office. “I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t know that we can put that in policy.”
The new language also allows judicial branch records custodians to require a deposit from requesters “before performing any services necessary to respond to a request.”
P.A.I.R.R. 2, which stands for Rule 2. Public Access to Administrative Records, has been in place since 2015. The Supreme Court adopted the policy after two high-court rulings determined that judicial branch agencies are not covered by CORA.
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