Tag: Open Meetings Law

At the peak of the Animas River crisis, Cynthia Coffman reached out to the Durango City Council and La Plata County Commission and invited...

  Jon Caldara, the controversial president of the Independence Institute free-market think tank in Colorado, has succeeded in doing what many might see as...

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Newly released documents confirm that politicians and industry representatives secretly met in March to hammer out a position on the Bureau of Land Management's plan to scale back available lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for oil shale research and development.

The state's top ethics panel has turned over to the Denver District Court copies of all the notes and other records made during five secret meetings a judge said were held in violation of Colorado Open Meetings Law. The judge plans to review the notes and decide whether they should be made public in response to an open records request and lawsuit filed by The Colorado Independent.

DENVER — The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission violated the state's Open Meetings Law when it failed to convene a dozen closed-door meetings held earlier this year according to strict legal requirements, a Denver District Court judge has ruled. Because the ethics panel didn't follow the law, the court ordered the state's top ethics panel to "immediately" release all records of any improperly closed meeting, even those the commission claims are protected by attorney-client privilege.

Below are the redacted recordings of seven closed-door meetings released by the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission following an open records request by The Colorado...

Dug up fresh, daily. TRANSPARENCY: This time it's a problem in Longmont, with the city council. The rule is pretty basic but apparently hard to...

No group empowered to pass judgment wants to think of itself as a "star chamber," least of all the Colorado panel that, until recently,...

The state's top ethics panel routinely deliberated in private only to emerge with positions ready for adoption in swift, unanimous public votes, audio recordings of the closed-door meetings reveal. The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission also discussed topics in executive session it hadn't described in detail -- or at all, in some cases -- as state law requires.

What does it look like when a government body debates and makes decisions in a closed-door executive session? Pretty much the same as it would in public -- which the law requires -- except that only the meeting's participants get to see what went into the decision.