A state Senate committee this week decided that a non-profit may function as a surrogate government agency, with 85 to 95 percent of its funding consistently coming from public sources, and yet will not have to honor requests under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA).

A bill that would have subjected such entities to CORA was tabled under heavy fire.

What a travesty. It means the 20 community boards in this state charged with serving people with developmental disabilities — boards that collectively disburse nearly $300 million in public money — can skip merrily on their way, escaping the transparency that ought to apply when taxpayer funds are at stake.

By the time Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, conceded she was “going to have an impossible time” keeping CORA in Senate Bill 38 and would have to drastically amend it, even the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce had joined the community boards and other government-dependent non-profits in slamming the bill. The chamber said it opposed what it called an “unprecedented expansion” of a law “intended to allow the public to inspect government records.”

If the chamber got 90 percent of its funding from the government year after year, then it should have to be subject to CORA, too.

Maybe you could quarrel with Aguilar’s proposed threshold for triggering CORA, at 75 percent of an entity’s funding, but she was clearly on the right track. And that should have been particularly obvious after Denver Auditor Tim O’Brien’s office last year revealed how Rocky Mountain Human Services, a community board, had misused millions in city mill-levy funds.

In another blow to open government Wednesday, a Senate committee killed a bill that would have required government bodies to provide public records in digital form “in a machine-readable standard format routinely used by the official custodian.”

Some local governments and the secretary of state’s office opposed the measure as too costly.

But if an agency maintains records in a digital format, the public ought to be able to access the information in the same format, after appropriate redactions. As the sponsor of Senate Bill 37, Sen. John Kefalas, D-Fort Collins, noted, “I’m aware of situations where it appears that custodians have put up roadblocks to access in order to hide information or to make it harder for requesters to exercise due diligence.”

If there’s a silver lining in the defeat of Kefalas’ bill, it’s that even some opponents seem sympathetic to finding a consensus solution. According to the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert, who testified against the bill, said afterward her office is willing to convene “a working group to keep the discussion going.” And Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, who voted to kill the bill, said he was committed to work toward a viable alternative, too.

Good. No one wants government saddled with heavy compliance costs — but public records need to be public, too.

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