By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
A bill advancing in the Colorado legislature would restore public access to funeral home inspection reports with some limitations.
In 2024, as lawmakers tightened regulations on the funeral home industry in response to misconduct at several mortuaries, they also deleted a statutory provision that opened records of facility registrations and disciplinary proceedings.
The law now says that “minutes or records” concerning licensing actions are exempt from the Colorado Open Records Act and that “investigations, examinations, hearings, meetings, or proceedings” are exempt from the Colorado Open Meetings Law.
KUNC reported last spring that it “found no record of these changes being raised or discussed publicly at hearings for the bill. They were also not included in the summary of the bill.” Reporter Scott Franz discovered the statutory revisions after the state denied his request for inspection reports on some facilities in northern Colorado that had recently been disciplined.
This year’s measure, House Bill 26-1258, makes multiple additional changes to the licensure process for people in the funeral industry and adjusts the penalties for abusing a corpse. Describing the bill during a committee hearing in March, sponsoring Rep. Matt Soper, R-Delta, recounted some of “the epic cases that occurred in Colorado” such as with a Montrose funeral home and a Penrose facility “where bodies were stacked like cords of wood.”
Not mentioned during committee hearings or in the legislative summary of HB 26-1258 is that it would make reports of annual funeral home inspections subject to CORA, “excluding photographs and audio and video recordings and any information that would personally identify a deceased individual.” Other access restrictions enacted in 2024 would remain in place.
Soper told the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition that he and other sponsors of the 2024 legislation had not intended to limit public access to the inspection reports. “What we wanted were limits on things like the photos from Penrose, where the bodies were stacked. That’s really pretty sensitive, especially during the early stages of an investigation, but different from the inspection reports.”
In a follow-up article last fall, KUNC’s Franz reported that he had requested and obtained a log showing which mortuaries state inspectors had visited up to that point in 2025. But the office that regulates funeral homes denied his CORA request for the inspection report on Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, where 20 decomposing bodies were found behind a hidden door.
The KUNC stories quoted Shelia Canfield-Jones, who was told by the FBI that the Return to Nature funeral home, which operated the Penrose facility, gave her powdered concrete instead of her daughter’s cremated remains. Making inspection reports off-limits to the public was “wrong,” she told Franz. “The consumer can only be protected with the information that we receive from the people who do the inspection,” she said, adding that greater access to inspection reports and complaints “would put some kind of faith back into the system.”
HB 26-1258 passed the House in mid-March and a Senate committee later that month. It’s now in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Another measure that has passed both chambers, Senate Bill 26-105, requires county coroners to disclose online any financial interests they have in funeral homes or other death-care businesses. Davis Mortuary was co-owned by the now-former Pueblo County coroner.
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