Holding public meetings can sometimes feel like an inconvenience.
Nevertheless, if more than one elected official shows up to do the public’s business, that’s a meeting, and with very few specific exceptions the public has a right to know about it in advance and to attend.
Colorado has robust requirements for government transparency, and the Colorado Open Meetings Law requires specific kinds of notice. Members of the public are free to delegate their oversight of government to journalists, and they often do, but that doesn’t mean that public notice is optional.
It is not.
Freedom of information attorney Steve Zansberg makes an important point when he says that county commissions (and other publicly elected boards) are held accountable by the public, and that presents challenges.
Accountability requires diligence and effort by citizens who should be able to trust their elected officials to follow the law and serve their constituents fairly.
Beyond that, though, the public doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. If no one knows that a meeting took place, no one will request minutes or challenge violations of the open meetings law. A constituent cannot request records without the awareness that those records exist.
On the subject of public records, all Colorado residents should know the Colorado Open Records Act was updated for the first time in 20 years with Gov. Hickenlooper’s signature on SB 17-040 in June. It went into effect on August 9.
The bill’s provisions, said Jeffrey Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, “clarifies the public’s right to obtain digital public records in useful file formats … making it easier to analyze government records.”
In other words, if public records are being kept in “sortable” formats – and in 2017, the vast majority are – citizens are entitled to copies of those records in sortable formats. No more printouts from spreadsheets or image-only PDFs or fuzzy copies run through the nearest copy machine.
Sortable formats allow government records to be more easily and quickly imported into a database, something government watchdogs have called for over many years.
Governmental transparency, and willingness to share information and records in a useful and timely manner, benefits citizens.
These are basic tenets of democracy, protections that should not be eroded.
