The 26 requests to inspect public records received by Durango School District 9-R in the last two years – just over one per month – does not exactly sound like an onslaught, according to Jeff Roberts, the executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.
But that, along with one persistent, self-styled transparency auditor who has sued school districts statewide, including 9-R, for executive session violations, are the reasons behind the Durango school board’s third legislative priority this year: to limit “extreme or gratuitous” paperwork-generating records requests and legal inquiries.
Although the board’s vice president says the priority is intended to focus only on malicious actors who abuse the system, the statement nonetheless tracks in line with a statewide trend in efforts to build guardrails around the public’s view of government business, Roberts said.
“It seems like things are moving in the opposite direction, to some extent,” he said. “Instead of expanding access to records and proceedings, we have efforts to create more obstacles, we have new limits on obtaining disciplinary records of school officials and we have the Legislature exempting itself from a lot of the open meetings law.”
Two of the board’s legislative priorities address public school funding.
Point one backs efforts to prevent the reinstatement of the Budget Stabilization factor. The sardonically named “BS factor,” which shorted public school districts’ state funding, was eliminated last year for the first time since it was introduced in 2009. It cost Durango schools an estimated $62 million over that period, according to Colorado School Finance Project.
The third priority is not intended to increase the opacity of the district – “We are hugely supportive of the transparency,” Board Vice President Erika Brown said – but to blunt the impact of something Brown referred to as “paperwork terrorism.”
“Protecting districts against bad actors that unnecessarily cost the district time and money. This would include limiting extreme or gratuitous Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests and/or extraneous predatory lawsuits,” the third priority bullet point reads in full.
The language is wider in scope than the comparable 2025 legislative priority adopted by the Colorado Association of School Boards, which states support for expanding the mandatory response time to align with the scope of a records request (all requests currently carry a three-day mandatory response time with an optional seven-day extension).
Brown said the board wishes to mitigate the impact of people who want to harm the district with lawsuits or onerous – and statutorily required – paperwork.
Under the Colorado Open Records Act, which entitles the public to inspect most government records, an entity may charge up to $41.37 per hour for the “research and retrieval” labor associated with fulfilling the request after providing one hour of free labor.
“But there’s a growing number of people out there who are abusing the system in a way that’s really hurting school districts and the students,” she said.
One way in which people abuse the system is by filing separate requests, each for a limited number of documents. A single request to retrieve documents that takes three hours to fulfill could cost someone $83; but if that single request is split into three separate inquiries that take less than an hour each to fulfill, the district may not charge anything for the labor.
Although Brown said the number of CORA requests has been “going up, for sure,” both the volume of requests and incidents of the kind of abuse she described appear limited.
In response to a CORA request from The Durango Herald for all public requests received by 9-R beginning Jan. 1, 2023, through Dec. 23, 2024, the district provided 26 individual requests, nine received in 2023 and 17 received in 2024.
Among those, there appears to be just one case in which someone divided a singular request onto four separate forms. The requests, filed Nov. 20, 2024, by someone with the initials “GC,” were all related to the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion resolution, related hiring policies and Benjamin Smith, the former teacher accused over the summer of child sexual exploitation.
Five of the 26 requests were filed by the Herald, including the request to inspect all received requests.
“I think it would be too bad if we change the law based on one or two anecdotes,” Roberts said.
The district also received two requests filed by FOIA Professional Services, a business that acts as a third party to file anonymous records requests.
“I don’t know who these bad actors are, or why people requesting information from government should even be viewed or labeled as bad actors,” Roberts said.
Brown said she could not imagine the board getting behind legislation that guts the open records statute.
“It would really be targeted after, like, persistent, egregious abuses of it, and putting limits on that,” she said.
That definition would include people such as Matt Roane, the Pagosa Springs attorney who has sued nearly 100 school districts and local governments across the state, according to a post Roberts wrote on the CFOIC blog one year ago. Roane, who sees himself as a government watchdog, files lawsuits over violations, often minor, of the state’s open records or open meetings laws.
In 2022, he received $3,500 under the terms of a settlement with 9-R to dismiss a lawsuit he filed over an executive session violation.
The board’s stated priority around protecting 9-R from “bad actors” and “predatory lawsuits” could tee up the district to support legislation already anticipated in 2025.
State Rep. and Sen.-elect Cathy Kipp, a Larimer County Democrat, plans to reintroduce a scaled-back version of her failed 2024 proposal to modify the open records act, Roberts said.
Last year the lawmaker proposed, among other things, extending response times and allowing governments to label those who file multiple requests as “vexatious requesters,” in some circumstances, and baring them from accessing public records for 30 working days.
The latter point, which was ultimately removed from the bill before it died, would have addressed the kind of abuse Brown cited.
“I don’t see the point of creating more obstacles for records requesters,” Roberts said, pointing out that the cost of retrieval fees increased 23% in July. “Based on the numbers … about what they’ve actually got in the way of requests, that’s not a lot over two years in my mind.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
