Colorado LegiSource

An informational and educational resource for the Colorado General Assembly by the Office of Legislative Legal Services.

Month: March 2021

  • Contracting for the Publication of the Colorado Revised Statutes

    by Jennifer Gilroy

    Have you ever stopped to wonder how those pretty red statute books, the Colorado Revised Statutes, are published? As you can imagine, it’s very important that citizens have access to the law. So important, in fact, that the state constitution requires the General Assembly to publish the laws it passes at each legislative session. The General Assembly satisfies this requirement by annually publishing the Session Laws of Colorado, a three-volume set of books in which every bill enacted during a legislative session is published.

    In addition, the statutes that are created, amended, or repealed in each of those bills are then codified by subject matter in the collective body of Colorado law known as the Colorado Revised Statutes (CRS)—the previously mentioned red books on your book shelf and at public libraries and courthouses. There are 26 volumes including a two-volume index and a two-volume publication of the Colorado Court Rules.

    The legislature’s Office of Legislative Legal Services (OLLS) prepares the databases for both the Session Laws and the CRS, by making the necessary changes in the former year’s CRS database to reflect the additions, changes, and repeals resulting from the work of the General Assembly during the legislative session.  The work of the OLLS in preparing the CRS also includes drafting the history (or “source”) notes, the editor’s notes, and the annotations of relevant appellate court opinions for each statutory section of law. Once the OLLS has completed compiling the Session Laws and the CRS—which takes a lot of meticulous work and time (the law needs to be published accurately!)—the OLLS sends the giant databases to the contract printer to format, print, bind, and distribute. But who is the contract printer, how is the contract printer selected, and when?

    Like most things, the actual printing of the Session Laws and CRS are governed by state statute. The statute requires that the contract must be bid and awarded in a manner directed by the Committee on Legal Services (Committee), a bipartisan committee of ten legislators, five each from the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Committee must employ standard bidding practices to select the contract printer. Historically the Committee has done so through the use of a request for proposals or “RFP” process.

    The governing statute also sets some limits on the contract. For example, the term of the contract may not exceed five years.  The statute allows a contract to be extended once for up to five more years, but requires the contract to be rebid no less frequently than every 10 years.  Since 2002, the Committee has awarded the print contract to LexisNexis out of Charlottesville, Virginia. The contract awarded to LexisNexis in 2002 was for five years, and the Committee extended it in 2007 for an additional five years.  In 2012, the Committee put the print contract out to bid as required by the statute, and the Committee awarded a five-year contract to LexisNexis. That contract was extended for an additional five years in 2017.

    So now another 10 years have lapsed, and the Committee must once again put the print contract out for bid because the current extension will expire December 31, 2022. The RFP process is lengthy and requires a significant amount of the Committee’s time. Therefore, meetings for the OLLS to advise the Committee about the RFP process, for the Committee to review the RFP before it is published, and for the Committee to meet with those who submitted proposals and select a contract printer must begin sooner than later. The Committee will have its first meeting to address the publications contract on March 25, 2021, with more meetings to follow over the summer and fall months. Once the Committee selects a contract printer, the OLLS will negotiate the actual terms of the contract with the successful bidder and draft the contract. The statute requires the state controller and the attorney general to approve the contract, and, ultimately, the contract must be executed by a representative of the selected contract printer and the chair of the Committee.

    It’s a long and time-consuming process but one that is intended to provide fairness, transparency, and reliability in the quality of the final products: The Session Laws and the Colorado Revised Statutes.

  • Privacy Laws and the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment

    by Jery Payne

    Should a state be able to pass laws protecting people’s privacy? Should the constitution protect a person’s right to freedom of speech? If you think the answer to both is “yes,” then you might be surprised to learn that those two goals can conflict.

    In 2007, Vermont passed a prescription­-confidentiality law, which forbade pharmacies from gathering and selling, for marketing, information detailing the prescriptions written by doctors. This law didn’t regulate the release of patient information; it was concerned with what prescriptions doctors were writing. This information is valuable because the drug companies can use it to market drugs to the doctors that are actually treating the types of patients the drugs may help.

    This law riled up drug manufacturers and data miners, who filed a lawsuit, Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., in a United States district court. The lawsuit wended its way to the United State Supreme Court, which struck down the law based on the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court had two main concerns:

    (1) The law was content-based, which means one has to look at the information to know if the law applies. When a law is content-based, the courts will normally consider it suspect under the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, and this means that it’s unlikely to survive a challenge.

    (2) The law discriminated against certain users of the information. The Court was concerned that the law discriminated against people who would use the information to market drugs. That is, the pharmacies could sell the information to any person that wasn’t a drug manufacturer or marketer. Now, drug companies are the primary market for this information, but maybe a company that provides medical alternatives to drugs would be interested in the same information. The Court considered this fatal to Vermont’s claim that it was protecting the doctors’ privacy. If the law allowed broad communication of information except for one group of people, the Court thought that it didn’t really protect privacy. The Court contrasted this with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which generally forbids the release of patient information:

    For instance, the State might have advanced its asserted privacy interest by allowing the information’s sale or disclosure in only a few narrow and well-justified circumstances. See, e.g., Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 …. A statute of that type would present quite a different case than the one presented here.

    In the holding, the Court also explained:

    This Court has held that the creation and dissemination of information are speech within the meaning of the First Amendment. … [I]f the acts of ‘disclosing’ and ‘publishing’ information do not constitute speech, it is hard to imagine what does fall within that category….

    This case developed our understanding of the Free Speech Clause; that it not only affects laws that disseminate information, but it also affects laws that forbid creating or gathering information.

    In 2015 and 2016, Wyoming passed and amended a statute that made it illegal for a person to cross “private land to access adjacent or proximate land where he collects resource data” without the owner’s permission or other types of legal authority. I expect many of you may be wondering, “What does ‘resource data’ mean?” The statute, section 6-3-414, defined the term as “data relating to land or land use, including … data regarding agriculture, minerals, geology, history, cultural artifacts, archeology, air, water, soil, conservation, habitat, vegetation or animal species.” So the law applied broadly and aimed at protecting the privacy of landowners.

    In a case named Western Watersheds Project v. Michael, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals more or less overturned the Wyoming law for violating the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. The appeals court was following Sorrell.

    If the law had merely forbid crossing private land, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The court explained that there is no “First Amendment right to be exempt from an otherwise generally applicable law in order to facilitate speech indirectly limited by the [law].” The state may forbid trespass although it would stop you from having your say on someone else’s land. This is because the law has a legitimate purpose that isn’t directly related to speech.

    But the Wyoming law didn’t merely forbid trespass; the law forbade trespass for the purpose of getting resource information. The law was content-based; you had to know what type of data was collected to know if the law applied. According to the Court, “The challenged statutes apply specifically to the creation of speech,” and thus “are subject to the First Amendment.”

    The lower court had dismissed the lawsuit upon summary judgment, which means that there hadn’t actually been a trial yet. So the appeals court stopped short of striking down the law. But the appeals court ruling made it extremely unlikely that the law would survive. As expected, the district court ended up declaring the law unconstitutional.

    Colorado and Wyoming are in the same judicial circuit, so this ruling applies in Colorado. So when thinking about a law to protect privacy, we would do well to be careful when (1) the law applies to obtaining only certain types of information or when (2) it’s aimed at one particular group. The first may be considered content-based and the second may be considered forbidden discrimination. It might seem better to narrowly tailor a law to apply only to the information we care about or to the group that wants the information, but either strategy may cause a court to hold that the law violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

  • The FAQs of Responding to CORA Requests

    by Duane Gall and Megan Waples

    Editor’s note: This article was originally written by Kate Meyer and published December 7, 2017. The article has been edited and updated as appropriate.

    Odds are, if you spend any time in the Capitol as a legislator or staff member, you’ll be the recipient of a “Colorado Open Records Act” (CORA) request at some point. In fact, given the recent uptick in CORA requests—and no sign that this trend is abating anytime soon—you may even have multiple requests with which to deal (if you haven’t already!).

    This article addresses issues and answers questions that frequently arise for legislators and legislative staff in responding to a CORA request. Specifically, we’ll talk about deadlines associated with requests, tips for finding records, and other considerations you may find helpful. [Note: In addition to CORA, this article refers to the policies of the Colorado General Assembly regarding public records requests. The policies are included in the “Legislative Policies Related to Public Records and E Mail,” dated July 2019 (“the Policies”) and are available through the “Open Records Requests & Policy” link at the bottom of the Colorado General Assembly website.]

    Deadlines

    I’ve received a CORA request; what do I do and when do I need to do it? The first thing a legislator or legislative staff person should do is contact the Office of Legislative Legal Services, and he or she should do so as soon as possible. As you will see below, time matters in responding to CORA requests. The OLLS staff will work with you to prepare a response.

    LegiSource previously covered the nuts and bolts of being “CORA’d.” Please refer to that article, and the Policies, for a broad overview of the process–and keep in mind that CORA imposes strict deadlines. Generally, upon receiving a CORA request, recipients have three business days to respond in some fashion, although production of all of the requested records may not actually be completed within that time.

    This CORA request is dated more than three days ago, but I only just opened the email/got the letter/found out about it from OLLS. What is my deadline to respond? According to subsection II.C.5 of the Policies, the CORA clock starts ticking when the recipient actually receives the request or, in the case of a request to a legislator that is also sent to the Office of Legislative Legal Services (OLLS), the earlier of when the legislator actually receives the request or when the OLLS notifies the legislator of the request and confirms that the legislator is aware of it. So, how does this work in real life?

    • Example 1: If a CORA request arrives on August 1st (i.e., during the interim) via United States mail to a legislator’s office at the Capitol, and the legislator doesn’t open it until he or she is in the office on September 1st, the period of time in which to respond commences on September 1st, and a response is due three business days later on September 4th.
    • Example 2: The same CORA request from Example #1 is also sent to the OLLS, in accordance with the Policies. The OLLS receives its copy on August 1st and promptly leaves a message for the legislator to whom it is addressed. The legislator and the OLLS actually discuss the request on August 4th. In this case, August 4th is the day from which the response deadline is calculated, so the response will be due on August 7th.

    Ack! I need some time to get to my records to determine whether I have any to produce. Despite the stringent deadlines that attach to any CORA request, there is some wiggle room (up to seven additional business days) for recipients when “extenuating circumstances” exist. Even so, the recipient must provide written notice to the requestor, within the initial 3-day window, that the recipient is invoking an extension due to extenuating circumstances.

    Ok, but what constitutes “extenuating circumstances”? Subsection II.D.3 of the Policies states that extenuating circumstances exist when a request is submitted during the legislative interim and the recipient legislator’s office is closed. CORA itself provides that extenuating circumstances apply when an agency can’t fulfill a broadly stated request encompassing a large volume of records. In the case of the general assembly or its staff or service agencies, this specifically includes the period when the general assembly is in session (section 24-72-203 (3)(b)(II)(B), C.R.S.).

    Of course, “extenuating circumstances” do not exist when the CORA request is merely inconvenient. Because someone may file a CORA request at any time and the turnaround period is so short, CORA requests can be very inopportune. Although “[r]esponding to applications for inspection of public records need not take priority over the previously scheduled work activities of the custodian or the custodian’s designee” (Policies, subsection II.D.2.a), CORA recipients must take their duties under the law seriously even when a request comes at a bad time.

     

    Finding records

    How should I assess whether I have responsive records? First, read the language of the request carefully. Many requests are limited to certain dates, names, terms, topics, and types of records. A legislator responding to a CORA request should keep in mind the request’s parameters. Start by using the request itself to identify appropriate search terms. Often, certain records are specified or terms are provided. If not, reassess: Is the request sufficiently specific to enable the legislator to comply? If so, proceed, making reasonably diligent and good faith efforts to devise search terms to unearth any responsive records. If not, the requestor will need to be contacted to clarify his or her submission. Please consider allowing OLLS to handle this on your behalf.

    So, do I just need to check through my emails? No, not necessarily. CORA and the Policies broadly define “public records” to include many types of records. Only if the request is explicitly limited to emails should the legislator confine his or her review to emails. If the CORA request seeks records in broad-based categories such as “all correspondence/records/documents” or “any communications,” the type of records covered by those broad categories is not limited to emails but could be any type of correspondence—printed letters or memoranda, hand-written notes, screenshots of text messages or social-media posts, etc.

    Reviewing and retrieving my records will take me a few hours because I potentially have quite a few records to produce. In that case, please STOP! If responding to a CORA request will require more than one hour, the requestor must pay a deposit based on the estimated time required (not counting the first hour) to retrieve any potentially relevant records. Therefore, if it appears that you will need more than one hour to respond to a request, please give OLLS an estimate of the time that it will take. (In the case of emails, you can estimate the number of emails that may be responsive to the request, because we apply a standard factor of 2.5 minutes per email to calculate the time required to process emails.) The OLLS will then multiply the estimated time by an hourly rate to calculate the estimated search-and-retrieval fee.

    The requestor must pay a deposit, equal to the estimated search-and-retrieval fee, within 30 days. Only when this payment is received should you proceed with actually assembling the requested records. If payment is not received within the 30-day period, the CORA request is deemed closed and no further action is required.

    The requestor must be notified of the requirement for payment of the deposit within three business days after receiving the request unless extenuating circumstances exist. (See item #3 in Deadlines, above.)

    Because the fee deposit is based on an estimate, the actual number of records located and the corresponding time spent retrieving and reviewing those records in order to respond to the CORA request may vary from the estimate. If it falls below the estimate, the overage paid by the requestor is refunded to him or her. If it exceeds the estimate, the requestor must pay a supplemental fee to cover the amount of time the legislator estimates will be necessary to retrieve the remaining volume of records.

    Do I have to produce my personal records that contain a term or otherwise appear to fall within the scope of the CORA request? Not necessarily. It’s the nature of the record, and not the platform on which it is created or stored, that is determinative. The mere fact that a document is created during one’s tenure as a legislator does not render it a public record. CORA defines “public records” as writings “made, maintained, or kept by the state, any agency, … or political subdivision of the state … for use in the exercise of functions required or authorized by law or administrative rule or involving the receipt or expenditure of public funds.” Further, the Colorado Supreme Court has observed that the definition of “public records” in CORA is intended to preserve a balance between private and public interests. Accordingly, the scope of CORA’s “public records” definition limits the type of documents covered by CORA to those that relate to the performance of public functions or the receipt and expenditure of public funds. The Supreme Court has stated that “CORA was not intended to cover information held by a government official in his private capacity.” https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2623451/wick-communic-co-v-montrose-county-board/

    On the other hand, a public record is a public record regardless of the medium. So if a legislator uses a personal email account to conduct public business (e.g., relating to the performance of official functions), the records pertaining to that public business are still “public records” and must be disclosed if requested under CORA.

    Is my constituent correspondence subject to disclosure under CORA? Potentially, yes. CORA’s definition of “public records” explicitly exempts a constituent communication that “clearly implies by its nature or content that the constituent expects that it is confidential or is communicated to request assistance or information relating to a personal or private matter that affects the constituent and that is not publicly known.” But any other constituent correspondence (e.g., an email urging that a legislator vote for or against a particular bill) is subject to disclosure. If a legislator has constituent correspondence that falls within the definition of “public records,” the OLLS will assist in redacting the constituent’s personal e-mail address and any extraneous matter such as forwarding headers, etc., before the document is released.

    Any other lifelines I can use? In addition to the OLLS, legislators may want to use their own staff members (aides, interns) for assistance in responding to a CORA request. Aides and interns are often tech-savvy and are familiar with the types, locations, and amount of records in a legislator’s custody. And legislators may want to apprise their caucus’s leaders or staff about CORA requests so that they can track and assist with the responses if desired.

    Other Considerations

    The requestor didn’t specify a reason for the request/I suspect the request is ill-intentioned. CORA does not require a requestor to explain why a request is submitted or for what purpose or in what manner any documents produced in response will be used. A record is either subject to inspection or not; the motivation for the request is irrelevant.

    The request I’ve received is very, very broad; doesn’t the request need to be limited in some way? There is no requirement that a request contain any parameters; in fact, requests are often couched in expansive terms. For example, requestors can state that they are seeking “all records” that include a certain term (e.g., “energy” or “House Bill xxxx” or “the Jane Doe Lobbying Firm”), and they do not otherwise narrow the scope of the request. This approach can be deliberate (if a requestor isn’t certain what records may exist and thus wants to cast a wide net) or inadvertent (if a requestor doesn’t anticipate the large volume of records that a custodian may have in his or her possession that may contain the sought-after term). So long as the request is “sufficiently specific to enable the custodian to locate the information requested with reasonable effort” (Policies, subsection II.C.1.), that’s all that matters.

    Once I’ve been CORA’d, may I continue to discard records in accordance with my usual records retention process? No, at least not with respect to any records that may be included within the scope of the CORA request. You should treat a CORA request the same way you would treat a litigation hold, under which a person is obligated to preserve records for a certain amount of time in anticipation of future potential use at trial. Once the CORA request is completely concluded, you may proceed with document disposal pursuant to your normal retention and disposal policy. (For more information on developing such policies, please refer to Subsection IV of the Policies and consult with the OLLS.)

    Whew! Responding to that CORA request seemingly took forever; how can I reduce the amount of time the next one takes? You can mitigate the time spent responding to requests by creating (and abiding by) a written records retention policy that establishes how long you keep various types of records, the frequency with which you dispose of records, etc. The fewer records in existence, the lower the volume of records that you may have to review and therefore potentially less time you will spend searching for, retrieving, and reviewing them. Alternatively, you may feel it necessary, in order to adequately complete your legislative duties, to maintain records for significant lengths of time. The Policies contain a number of guidelines and recommendations regarding records categorization, retention, and deletion; you may also consult with the OLLS. If you decide to establish a written records retention policy that could affect the documents produced in response to a specific CORA request, the policy must be in place before the request was received.

  • The New Legislative Information Resource Center at the State Capitol is Open!

    by Darren Thornberry

    Picture of the new library space, featuring a work table and wooden shelving, a ladder, and research books.The Colorado General Assembly is back in session and with it comes the opening of the dazzling new Legislative Council Resource Center. The remodeled space in the basement of the Capitol building consists of the Legislative Council Staff (LCS) front reception, the legislative library, and offices for up to four staff members.

    Yes, the legislative library is still here! LCS staff maintain library services, including access to statutes, session laws, journals, and recordings of legislative hearings, and the office is open to all legislative staff and the public for legislative research.

    The renovation of the space that was formerly the legislative library had two purposes: First, renovating the library space allowed LCS to consolidate two front-Another angle of the newly renovated library facing offices–the Joint Legislative Library and the LCS front office—to serve both purposes in one space. Now there is a streamlined entrance to LCS staff offices, and a single place for legislators and the public to access legislative resources and LCS staff. The second purpose was to renovate existing LCS office space to house the Office of Legislative Workplace Relations, which is now located in Room 026 in the north end of the Capitol basement.

    A key renovation goal was to restore the space to the Capitol’s “Period of Significance,” which was established as 1904, when the Dome was first gilded with gold. A unique find during construction was a gallery/hallway similar to the open gallery that is on the 1st Floor directly above the renovated space.

    The new Legislative Information Resource Center, located at the foot of the Capitol’s Grand Staircase in the basement, is a comfortable resource area for members of the legislature, legislative staff, and the public to easily access legislative resources and LCS staff.

    Left to Right: Legislative Council’s Elizabeth Haskell, Elizabeth Burger, and Juanita Hill

    L-R: Legislative Council’s Elizabeth Haskell, Elizabeth Burger, and Juanita Hill

    Presently, because of the pandemic, members of the public are asked to call 303.866.3521 to make an appointment to use the library resources.