A controversial bill designed to change the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), that could have stopped an individual from accessing government records for 30 days if they were deemed “vexatious”, has been killed off by state senators.
If House Bill 24-1296 had become law, a records custodian could have asked a district court to determine that an individual or entity was vexatious. The bill said a vexatious requester was someone who submitted a request for public records with the intent to annoy or harass a custodian.
But Sen. James Coleman, a Denver Democrat who chairs the five-member Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, voted against the bill along with Republican Sens. Larry Liston of Colorado Springs and Mark Baisley of Woodland Park. The committee members didn’t explain their opposition to the measure.
The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition opposed the bill as it said high fees already create a barrier to obtaining public records.
“The burdens on the records-requesting journalist or individual are already high, and the efforts in the bill to lessen the burden on custodians have a cost to the public,” Boulder attorney Eric Maxfield, a CFOIC board member said.
Passed into law in 1968, CORA provides citizens with the power to request public records – besides medical records – from state and local government entities unless a specific provision of CORA or other state law says otherwise.
But modifications to the law contained in the bill aimed “to lessen the burdens of responding to records requests for custodians”, according to the bill sponsors.
The CORA bill would have given records custodians five working days, rather than the law’s current deadline of three working days, to comply with records requests, and an additional 10 working days if extenuating circumstances applied.
One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Cathy Kipp, Democrat of Fort Collins, said people absolutely had the right to obtain public records.
“And, I also understand, that there are people who use CORA requests to bog down governmental entities with many, many requests. Sometimes CORA requests are used to ‘verify’ conspiracy theories or urban legends,” said Kipp.
