After Denver Post reporter David Migoya exposed a scandal at the Colorado Judicial Department in a series of articles last month, a $2.5 million contract was canceled, high-level employees resigned and Migoya filed two routine requests for public documents to continue his investigation. To the Judicial Department’s credit, officials didn’t deny those requests, but they might as well have because The Post was told fulfilling one request would cost $1,839.60 plus copying fees and the other $225 plus copying fees.
Public records in Colorado are no longer free — the default position of most state, local and judicial departments has become charge the maximum amount allowed, estimate it’ll take your employees days of work and then wait to see what happens.
The high costs being charged for records have created a system where only the rich have unfettered access to public records. It’s interfering with every Coloradan’s right to know.
Migoya wanted to see any and all emails sent to or sent from Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Coats and the former court administrator, Christopher Ryan, that were related to a sole-source contract awarded to a former employee who had faced an investigation into her receipts and requests for reimbursement.
We understand that pulling emails from an archive does take time, but we cannot imagine why it’d take an employee 61.32 hours to run a query for those emails and print them out or create a digital copy. Even assuming that Coats required the attorney general himself to review the emails before their release, we are stumped at why it’d take someone an entire workweek plus 20 hours of overtime to complete such a task. Consider — those of you with office jobs — how many emails you read in a workweek and how many you respond to.
And that’s the problem with our current laws and policies regarding open records in Colorado — government entities are playing fast and loose with their estimates of how much time and effort it will take to fulfill a request and then charging the maximum — about $30 an hour — allowed by either the Colorado Open Records Act or the Judicial Department’s internal policies set by the Supreme Court.
This issue isn’t isolated to The Denver Post; 9News reporter Jeremy Jojola took to Twitter last week to lament being asked to pay more than $600 for records about affordable housing. After his tweet and questions about why it would cost so much, Jojola said the Denver Housing Authority “magically” lowered the cost to $230. Jeffrey Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, also wrote last week about a woman who was told it would cost $5,850 for her to review pay-related documents from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
There is a need for balance in the law. We know that individuals, news organizations and companies can file time-consuming requests and that the money paying for those man-hours comes from taxpayers. However, we suspect taxpayers are willing to see some of their tax dollars go to ensure proper oversight of … their tax dollars.
The law and judicial department rules are tilted too far in the direction of putting public records out of reach with high costs. Lawmakers and Justice Nathan Coats must find ways to bring things back into balance, in the public interest.
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