CORA changes would extend deadlines and expand government discretion

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Kipp is back with another stab at CORA.

I had heard from my state senator (B Pelton) that Senator Kipp would be back this year with another run at modifying the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA).

Her bill recently came out and I link to it first below. The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition (CFOIC) article on the bill is linked second below as an additional resource if you want it.

I will be advocating against this bill both here and, hopefully, by testifying against it in committee (as of this writing there is no date set).

To her credit, Kipp is not oblivious to past criticism (or strident enough to not care a la Senator Sullivan) about her previous attempts at modifying CORA; having been following her efforts over the course of years now, I’ve noted that she removes and/or modifies some of the more onerous provisions in earlier versions.

Still, I’m a no. I’ll leave it to you to read either the CFOIC piece or the bill summary to see what this bill does in full, but I can outline the provisions I still object to pretty quickly.

I’m glad to see that the bill doesn’t separate us into first- and second-class records requesters by giving special favors to the media (a notable feature of earlier bills), but the provision about extending CORA timelines is back. Quoting the CFOIC piece with lines intact:

“Under the new bill, they would have five working days, rather than three, to fulfill requests and an additional 10 working days, rather than seven, if “extenuating circumstances” exist. Governments could take up to 30 working days to fulfill requests made “for the direct solicitation of business for pecuniary gain” and charge a “reasonable cost” — rather than the maximum hourly rate in CORA — to do so.”

along with this, there is a related provision (from further down in the CFOIC piece):

“The bill also would add an extenuating circumstance, giving records custodians who are ‘essential to the process of responding to requests’ more time to process requests when they are not scheduled to work during the response period.”

As with earlier attempts by Kipp, this bill inserts a bit which would lump together any requests within a 14 day window the custodian thinks are related into one big request with only the one hour’s free research/retrieval time.

“Additionally, it would let governments treat multiple requests — ‘pertaining to facially similar content’ made by the same person within 14 days — as one request, ensuring the requester gets only one free hour before research-and-retrieval charges kick in.”

I fail to see why we should be extending deadlines. Investigating what the government is doing with our money and in our name is already a lot of work to do on top of a full time job when you have a family. Perhaps extending deadlines is not as onerous to one who does this for a living, but when schedule’s and time are tight, this makes something difficult worse.

I also take exception to the proviso about multiple requests. This has been a feature of every previous bill Kipp has done, and I’m just as against it now as I was before. People like me who are not paid journalists without large, monied organizations behind them, are often working a zero to a very limited budget (on a good day).

Mess up? Forget to include something? You get to wait 14 days if you don’t want that screwup to burn up your single free hour of research/retrieval.

Not only that, what if the custodian determines that a second request you made is “facially similar” and thus lumps them together. If you disagree, I hope you got money and time to go to court over it. The bill makes no provision to has that out otherwise.

Kipps latest attempt may not be as awful as earlier ones, but it’s still not the kind of policy we need in Colorado. Even though it doesn’t explicitly favor one group, it creates disparities that put citizens at a disadvantage compared to others.

These are our records. They are not the government’s and we don’t need more barriers to access than we already face.

If you want to follow the bill and/or speak up about it, check it’s progress through the bill link below.

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-107

https://coloradofoic.org/state-lawmakers-try-again-to-let-governments-take-up-to-three-weeks-to-fulfill-many-cora-requests-no-journalist-exemption-in-sb-26-107/

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SB26-065 Front Range Democrats know more than those working the land

I came across SB26-065 first via the Sun article linked below. There is a lot of context about the bill and reactions to it (some of which we’ll get to in a bit), but first I want to look at the bill itself.

SB26-065 is linked second below. I took a screenshot of the bill’s summary and attach it as screenshot 1.

In short, besides adding more to the state’s already bloated regulatory (and non-elected) infrastructure, the bill creates a scheme whereby wanting to grow “field crop” seeds which are coated with a systemic insecticide** must get a permission slip from the government.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT THE COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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