DENVER (AP) - A bill to modernize Colorado’s Open Records Act has survived its first Senate hearing - but with an amendment that could mean trouble down the road.
The GOP-led Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee voted 4-1 Wednesday to send the bill by Democratic Sen. John Kefalas to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The bill would, in most cases, allow citizens to more easily analyze public documents by requiring state agencies to provide them in computer-friendly electronic formats.
But committee chair Sen. Ray Scott introduced an amendment to have the judicial branch covered by the bill. State courts have ruled the judiciary is not subject to the records act. Scott’s amendment passed on a 3-2 party-line vote.
Scott said he introduced the amendment because he feels it’s time to overhaul what is and is not covered by the act. Backers of Kefalas’ bill say they only intended to expedite records access under the act.
During the hearing, Scott asked the bill’s proponents whether they supported access to records held by all branches of government. The witnesses mostly answered yes.
His amendment most likely will spark further debate on what has been a yearlong process, led by Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams’ office, to fashion an electronic records bill acceptable to lawmakers.
“This bill wasn’t about creating new exemptions for covering anything more than what is currently covered in CORA,” Jeffrey Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said after the hearing.
Kefalas’ bill is designed to make it easier for citizens to obtain, and analyze, state and municipal computerized records, rather than forcing requesters to pore over paper or PDF documents.
That makes it easier for citizens to search, for example, Excel spreadsheets containing salaries, budget items, crime statistics or other data. Some Colorado jurisdictions and agencies already provide electronic data under the open records law.
But they’re not required to, and all too often records requesters must settle for paper records that are difficult to sort through and, under state law, cost 25 cents per page to copy, plus possible labor costs. That adds up quickly.
Unlike a bill that failed last year, the new legislation carries certain exceptions:
-When a government agency or office doesn’t have the technology - or the know-how - to process a digital data request;
-When a records keeper would have to buy software or other tools to process a request;
-When agencies cannot permanently delete private information such as Social Security numbers;
-When processing a request would violate copyrights or include proprietary software.
Williams’ office, which has invested heavily in making databases easily accessible to the public, led a working group of journalists, government representatives, lawmakers and others over the past year to help draft the bill.
“Public data belongs to the people,” Williams told the committee Wednesday. “It is faster and cheaper to provide the data electronically.”
A similar bill died last year in the same committee over concerns about agencies’ ability to permanently redact sensitive or private information from requested records, costs, and hacking during electronic delivery.
GOP Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg raised many of those same concerns Wednesday, as did representatives of the University of Colorado, the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado Association of School Boards and other organizations.
More than 15 states and the federal government have made it easier for the public to obtain computerized data.
The bill was inspired by a 2015 investigation by The Coloradoan newspaper into pay equity among employees at Colorado State University.
CSU refused to provide a computerized database of salaries but told the newspaper it could inspect documents containing nearly 5,000 employee salaries. Reporters spent weeks creating their own database so they could chronicle university salary disparities.
“By having access to a record in digital form, the public is better able to understand where its money is going,” Lauren Gustus, executive editor of The Coloradoan, testified Wednesday.
The Colorado Press Association, Colorado Broadcasters Association and the Colorado Freedom of Information Council backed the bill.
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James Anderson can be reached on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/jandersonap
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