Government employee records in Colorado: What’s confidential, what’s not?
Colorado’s open-records law is clear: A government employee’s personnel file is off limits to the public. But which records, exactly, are part of that confidential file?
Colorado’s open-records law is clear: A government employee’s personnel file is off limits to the public. But which records, exactly, are part of that confidential file?
Records showing a public school teacher’s request for sick leave are not part of a teacher’s confidential personnel file and must be disclosed to the public, if requested, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled.
An attorney for the Jefferson County Education Association argued that a district court judge erred in ruling that teacher sick-leave records do not qualify as personnel information that must be withheld from the public.
The Colorado Supreme Court let stand an appellate court ruling that reinstated a citizen’s lawsuit against Arvada for violating the Colorado Sunshine Law.
Despite a 2012 Sunshine Law amendment that bans the use of secret ballots to make most decisions, some municipal governments in Colorado have continued to fill city council vacancies by voting anonymously.
An Arvada resident who sued his city for using secret ballots to fill a council vacancy can indeed show that he was injured by the closed-door process, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday in overturning a district judge’s decision to dismiss the case.
State lawmakers defeated a bill that would have made the State Public Defender’s Office subject to the Colorado Open Records Act, preferring to let the Colorado Judicial Branch write its own rules for releasing administrative records for that agency and other agencies under its control.
Successfully challenging a denial of public records entitles you to some portion of your attorneys’ fees even if it was a records custodian who initiated the court action, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and two other organizations argued in a friend-of-the-court brief.
A recent Court of Appeals decision upheld a 2003 ruling on how much governments in Colorado can charge to research and retrieve records.