John Simpson has harped on the city of Durango for years about transparency concerns.
In the last two years, the Durango resident and former Durango Infrastructure Advisory Board member has filed many lawsuits against the city and threatened at least one more.
He was successful in one lawsuit about an open records request that didn’t go in his favor. He’s bombarded city staff, officials and councilors with countless emails over what some say are small matters, if that.
On the dais, Durango City Councilor Olivier Bosmans has often been the odd man out in council votes about a range of issues. From funding for housing initiatives to an energy performance contract for city facility upgrades and maintenance, he is frequently the sole person opposing city projects in the name of transparency and fiscal responsibility.
At first glance, the two men seem fairly aligned on subjects such as city debt and finance reporting, and a closer look reveals that is no coincidence.
An open records request to the city filed by The Durango Herald has revealed a heap of email correspondence – a 374-page document of copied emails – between Simpson and Bosmans, wherein they collaborate on matters yet to come before council, plan how to circumvent council opposition, quietly share other conversations with staff and councilors, and schedule phone calls or in-person meetings over coffee.
The records request also revealed at least 30 instances (43 in total, according to a city news release) where Simpson attempted to shield his emails to Bosmans from open records requests, a clear violation of the Colorado Open Records Act given his capacity as a government official as an IAB member.
In said emails, Simpson includes variations of the disclaimer, saying “This message is private and not subject to CORA request.”
Sometimes the disclaimers are capitalized. Other times they appear at the bottom of Simpson’s email or at the top of messages. None of them are valid under CORA.
In an April 15, 2023 email to Bosmans, Simpson says he is forming a referendum to stop the city’s energy performance contract, including “This message is private and not subject to CORA” at the end of the message.
In a Nov. 16, 2022 email to Bosmans, Simpson says former Mayor Barbara Noseworthy and Durango Public Works Director Allison Baker were absent from an IAB meeting, and their “comments that refuted my public comment regarding the 2019 tax were unprofessional, considering neither were at the meeting.”
He concludes his email with a disclaimer, saying the email isn’t subject to CORA.
Simpson did not respond to requests for comment in November.
A December 2021 email chain between Simpson and Bosmans includes an internal City Council discussion about an ethics complaint lodged by Bosmans against former Mayor Kim Baxter.
To City Council, Bosmans says it is the council’s job to serve the community with honesty, integrity and transparency, and it is up to council to critically assess information and make decisions in the community’s best interest.
He said essential information was omitted or misrepresented, and that is why he filed an ethics complaint.
“As elected representative of the citizens of Durango, we are supposed to come to joint, informed, democratic decisions that serve the community,” he says. “When only one council person unilaterally changes these decisions, then the vote of the other members is nullified. If we, as council members, accept this, we are selling our constituents short.”
City spokesman Tom Sluis said in an email to the Herald, “Seems like this is exactly what is happening given the communications between Simpson and Bosmans.”
A news release published by the city on Monday says Simpson is still noncompliant with the Herald’s records request because he refuses to give the city emails stored on his personal email accounts.
The release says Bosmans also tried to conceal three emails from records requests by sending city business emails to himself and blind carbon copying Simpson and others.
In one instance on Sept. 11, 2022, Bosmans BCC’d Simpson, Thomas Egolf, Mark Anderson and former mayors Sweetie Marbury and Dean Brookie in an email he forwarded to himself.
“Any suggestions on how to handle this?” Bosmans says.
The forwarded email chain contains Councilor Jessika Buell’s, then-Mayor Barbara Noseworthy’s and Madrigal’s responses to accusations Bosmans leveled against the city manager about the release of a 2021 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report.
“I too am uncomfortable with your accusations and you insinuating that “the rest of council” is somehow not doing our job,” Buell says in the email to Bosmans. “I am not concerned with the City Managers (SIC) response, I think it is accurate and reflects the scheduled study session calendar and gets us the ACFR and information in plenty of time prior to our budget retreat.”
She says there are staffing shortages in the city’s finance department and the city lost a third-party consultant.
In a previous exchange within the email chain, Bosmans tells Madrigal that Madrigal said the report would be ready in several days. Madrigal denies he said that and asks Bosmans for documentation.
“That is a pretty significant statement to make and insinuates that staff has been untruthful which i (SIC) do not believe is accurate,” Madrigal says. “The study session simply states the audit firm is scheduled to present the ACFR to Council. It does not mean it’s currently complete.”
He says the ACFR was being finalized by auditors and was expected to be completed within the next couple of days, after which it would be sent to City Council.
“I do not try to circumvent any of this stuff. It's all publicly available,” Bosmans said in an interview with the Herald on Thursday. “The city has all the emails.”
He said the contents of his emails are public information and he has nothing to hide, and if he blind copies someone, it’s because he is forwarding information to multiple people and doesn’t want to share personal contact information without permission.
Sluis said the emails between Simpson and Bosmans, two city officials, could have amounted to code of ethics violations, as toothless as it is, before the code was revisited by the Durango Board of Ethics.
Bosmans declined to comment when asked if his conversations with Simpson amounted to an ethics violation.
On Dec. 5, 2022, Simpson responded to a forwarded email from Bosmans containing his questions to the city manager about 2022 capital projects.
“I know you probably feel your efforts are futile,” Simpson says. “I know I sure do lately, even more now than ever. But please keep asking difficult questions.”
“Difficult questions,” as Simpson put it, are the source of what’s driving city staff mad, Sluis said in an interview.
He said Simpson and Bosmans are constantly barraging staff with questions that they’ve already been given answers to, adding they just don’t like those answers.
“Simpson and Bosmans fixate on little bits of minutiae within a 400-page document. They’re going to focus on one cell in a spreadsheet on page 382 and then call into question the entire proceedings,” he said.
That grinds everything to a halt for staff, and it draws scrutiny toward the city from residents who aren’t clued into city business.
“Because the implication is that something is going wrong when nothing is going wrong, god forbid, most of the time,” Sluis said. “But they create that perception that there is something wrong. Particularly after the information's been given to them and they’ll still raise it up.”
Bosmans said the questions he asks city staff are “very limited and typically I do not (get) a clear response or full response,” and that the city is running a smear campaign against him.
He questioned why his BCC’d emails were not initially included in the Herald’s records request and suggested the open records process at the city needs work.
The city’s release says the Herald’s request for any and all emails between Simpson and Bosmans did not include “from Bosmans to Bosmans,” and thus were not included in the city’s initial response.
“After further investigation showed those emails went to Simpson, the city provided those to the Herald,” the release says.
City Attorney Mark Morgan said the emails are evidence of “intentional circumvention of CORA, violations of the city’s ethics code, and compromise the city’s position in litigation with Mr. Simpson.”
When asked if Simpson’s and Bosmans’ behavior is comparable to “gish gallop” – a rhetorical debate strategy of overwhelming opponents by making excessive arguments without regard for their accuracy – Sluis said that is “perfectly appropriate.”
Sluis said some staff have expressed they are unsure whether or not they want to work for the city if the constant questions and implications don’t stop.
“What are you supposed to do at that point? You’ve been given the information. It’s accurate. You just don’t accept it,” he said.
In a May 2022 email exchange about Durango’s Community Emergency Relief Fund, Madrigal tells Bosmans, “Your original questions were sent in March and staff responded, you then had additional questions in April, and staff responded to those, and now you have additional follow up questions on this same matter.”
He says staff time is consumed with clarifying questions about the information Bosmans seeks, requests for guidance from a department director or himself, and discussions about how to re-prioritize staff workloads so Bosmans’ questions and concerns are addressed.
“ … It does seem that your request is no longer a question but assigning additional work by requesting additional queries or links to be created on OpenGov that the City Council as a body has not directed staff to work on,” he says.
Simpson claimed the Durango Public Library is funded by the city’s general fund and not a joint sales tax collected by the city and La Plata County. On March 16, Madrigal emailed City Council responded to Simpson’s claim.
“Please see attached from the 2023 La Plata County Budget. The page is labeled “Joint Sales Tax Fund” and lists the Durango Public Library as an expense,” he says. “At this point, staff is expending a lot of staff time to respond to allegations that have no merit.”
Bosmans said again that he doesn’t get complete or accurate answers to questions about the city’s total fund balance, for example, despite the information being “readily available at (the city’s) fingertips.”
“Instead, (I get) a 52-page document,” he said. “I can give you probably 50 examples where I get a vague answer or incomplete answer.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
