By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
A blank check to pay for court records. Digging through recycling bins for public documents. A poem about a $250,000 request for prison records.
Journalists and members of the public passionately and creatively aired their grievances about open government (or the lack thereof) Friday evening for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition’s Sunshine Week transparency slam at the Denver Press Club.
Because it was March 14 — Pi Day — the winners received pies from Denver’s Legacy Pies (apple caramel crisp, tart cherry and mixed berry).
Chris Vanderveen, investigative reporter for 9NEWS, emceed. Judging the slammers were: Steve Zansberg, FOI attorney and CFOIC’s president; Rachael Johnson, Colorado Local Legal Initiative attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; Eric Maxfield, FOI attorney and CFOIC board member; Katy Donnelly, FOI attorney; and Mary Dulacki, chief compliance officer for the Denver Department of Public Safety.
Rae Ellen Bichell, Colorado correspondent for KFF Health News, won first prize. The runner ups were former RTD board member Natalie Menten, Loveland resident Gail Randall and Estes Valley Voice editor Patti Brown. Randall talked about living in a news desert — “local officials know they can get away with just about anything.” Brown discussed successfully suing a fire district for a Colorado Open Meetings Law violation within six months of starting her news organization.
Bichell described asking for 15 pages from a court clerk in Elbert County. The response: “Before documents can be returned, payment is required. Please provide a blank check.”
“Which I needed to mail to them,” she added. “I’m a millennial. I don’t mail things. I don’t have stamps. Seriously, that was my first thought. And then I talked to an older colleague who was like, I think you should be more worried about the blank check.”
Then she got a similar response from the Gilpin Combined Courts: “You’ll want to leave the amount of the check blank,” it said. “We will fill that in once the records are prepared.”
Menten titled her three-minute poem, “The Green Bin Files,” recounting her midnight “treasure hunts” for documents in her city government’s recycling bins several years ago and that time a security guard asked what she was up to.
“Basically, I was getting up in the middle of the night once a week to go to my local city’s recycling bin, to be able to grab boxes and boxes and boxes of paper out of their recycling bins and stash them in my minivan — because those are open records going to the recycling and that’s my information. And one night, a guard caught me. But it turned out all fine.”
Estes Valley Voice reporter Lincoln Roch read a poem written by The Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul, who couldn’t be there in person:
Show me your records, I asked the Colorado DOC, hoping to learn about the things I couldn’t see.
The prison inspector general was investigating crimes —drugs, murder, malfeasance seemed to happen all the time.
That will be $250,000, the CORA lady plainly said. So many tears Jeff Roberts did shed.
I considered a second mortgage. I really, really did.
But in the end, the records remained hid.
Thank you to Natalie Menten for recording the transparency slam for CFOIC.
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