At the beginning of the Colorado 2013 legislative session, two House bills were introduced, attempting to smooth the bureaucratic bumps in the road that citizens encounter when trying to file Colorado Open Records Act.

As of this week, there will be only one.

State representative and sole sponsor of HB13-1037, Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, said he intends to kill that bill during committee this week because “stakeholders could not agree on the language.”

“I could not imagine the firestorm that this bill was going to start,” Salazar said.

The bill was designed to ease the financial burden imposed on record seekers who request public documents from an organization. In the past, CORAs have been filed with an open clause of cost association for things like making copies. The cost is determined at the discretion of the organization that already has the documents.

“All stakeholders agree there’s a problem out there with public entities that are bad actors,” Salazar said. “Basically, they are using CORAs to create a profit margin.”

He gave the example of the Colorado Division of Real Estate, which he said has a person specifically employed to answer and fulfill citizen and journalist requests for public information.

“If the request is too voluminous, (that person) will charge you $32 per hour,” Salazar said. “There’s a lot wrong with that. To begin, I don’t even believe that person makes that much an hour.”

Salazar said that after conferring with citizens, journalists and professionals across Colorado, he believes the bill needs another year of discussion and fine tuning before the language will be ironclad enough to face the House floor in 2014.

One of the main subjects the revised bill will address are businesses and organizations attempting to impose unnecessary costs on CORAs to profit from a job they are already paid to do, Salazar said.

Another difficulty with open records requests tends to be travel time. That is the focus of a second piece of CORA-related legislation, HB13-1041, which is still alive and slated to be heard in committee Wednesday.

Sponsored by Rep. Brittany Petterson, D-Lakewood, and Democratic Sen. John Kefalas, the bill addresses the current nonspecific language of how CORA documents are transferred to people who request them.

“In the past, the practice was that people would need to travel great distances to get the information,” said Kefalas. “But things can be done electronically now. (That would be) easier for rural people who live far from the county courthouse, for example.”

Kefalas said he’s sponsoring the bill because he was approached by too many people who had problems obtaining public documents in Colorado.

“The foundation of all this is open democracy and access of information,” he said. “Transparency and access to the appreciate organization is necessary here.”

Megan Mitchell: 303-954-1223, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/megs_report