DENVER — Transparency advocates got a huge win Thursday from Gov. Jared Polis, who vetoed a controversial bill that would have made pubic records less accessible to the general public while giving special privileges to those who meet the state’s definition of a “journalist.”
The veto came on the final day before the bill became law by default.
Senate Bill-077, “Modifications to Colorado’s Open Records Act,” drew criticism from dozens of media outlets, non-profit organizations, and private citizens who manage their own government watchdog sites. Sponsored by Sen. Cathy Kipp, D-Fort Collins, the bill would have given state and local government entities more time to fill Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests, from the current three working days law to five, as well as extending the time for “extenuating circumstances” to 10 days from the current seven.
It also allowed government entities to treat multiple requests by the same person within a 14-day period as one request if the request contained content that was similar. That would have resulted in reducing the amount of free research to just one hour rather than one hour per request.
More disturbing to most who opposed to the bill, however, was a clause that exempted government-approved news media from the new response times, defined in Colorado law as: “any publisher of a newspaper or periodical; wire service; radio or television station or network; news or feature syndicate; or cable television system” and “any member of the mass media and any employee or independent contractor of a member of the mass media who is engaged to gather, receive, observe, process, prepare, write, or edit news information for dissemination to the public through the mass media,” respectively.
However, the determination of who fits that criteria would have been left to the government entities receiving the records requests.
Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, who along with Rep. Lori Garcia-Sander, R-Eaton ran their own bill that would have expanded transparency, but was killed by Democrats in committee, spoke against SB-077 on the Senate floor saying government records are the people’s records, not the media’s records.
“Kyle Clark is no better than Cory Gaines,” Pelton said, comparing the 9News anchor, who is well known across Colorado, to Gaines, a physics instructor at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling who runs the Colorado Accountability Project on Substack (Gaines is also a regular contributor to Complete Colorado.)
Gaines, who is a constituent of Pelton’s and also a member of a ongoing transparency stakeholder’s group working to put an open records initiative on the 2026 ballot, said the veto was much appreciated.
“I definitely want to thank Senator Pelton,” Gaines said. “From the beginning he has spoken against giving special privileges to the media that the public don’t enjoy. But I also would like to thank Gov. Polis because he made the right choice on this bill.”
Several members of the same stakeholder’s group Gaines belongs to had previously urged Governor Polis via letter to veto the bill, one from the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and another including Jon Caldara, President of the free-market Independence Institute;* Jason Salzman of the progressive Colorado Times Recorder and CBS News Colorado.
Governor Polis’ veto statement is available here.
*Independence Institute is publisher of Complete Colorado.
