An initiative for the fall ballot filed Friday by the leaders of the Independence Institute and the League of Women Voters of Colorado would enshrine in the Colorado Constitution “a fundamental right to know the affairs of all levels of state and local government.”
State lawmakers are trying for the third straight year to give state and local government entities up to three calendar weeks to fulfill many Colorado Open Records Act requests.
In a letter to a lawyer for 9NEWS and Colorado Public Radio, Weld County defended a sheriff’s office requirement that records request forms be notarized.
The public hospital district in Estes Park is not required to redact privileged information from attorney billing invoices and release non-confidential portions to the Estes Valley Voice news site, a judge ruled.
Coloradans fought for press freedom and freedom of information in 2025 in settings as small as the Eastern Plains town of Bennett and as big as the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
A Larimer County District Court judge will decide whether the Colorado Open Records Act requires a public hospital district to redact privileged information from attorney billing invoices and release the public portions to the Estes Valley Voice news site.
A Weld County Sheriff’s Office requirement that records request forms be notarized “creates an arbitrary and unreasonable hurdle” and “does not serve any legitimate government interest,” a letter from an attorney for two news organizations says.
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 Colorado Court of Appeals will decide whether a judge properly ordered the state public defender to pay prison inmate Eric St. George $13,650 for its “arbitrary and capricious” denial of his request for a policy document.
The Estes Valley Voice had been in existence for just four months when it filed its first open-government lawsuit. Now 14 months since it launched in June 2024, the digital news outlet has filed — remarkably — a total of three.
