Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) is a statute that insures government will be as transparent as possible. There are some exceptions regarding personnel matters, bids for goods or services and negotiations such as a real estate transaction, but once those are culminated, in most instances, they become part of the public record also.

The county receives CORA requests regularly and one recent request was for any settlements paid out in the past year. The county responded and two settlements were provided with the names removed as per a court order.

Apparently two people had been arrested without justification and they threatened to sue. A cash settlement of $20,000 each was deemed to be a less expensive than going to court, losing, and paying both a settlement and their legal fees. The deputy eventually was terminated and the criminal arrests were reported by the media. Somewhere in the process, the request was made to have the records sealed by the courts to protect the victims, a reasonable request given it was the county employee who made the mistake. However, government is subject to CORA so records can not be sealed except for the few exceptions listed in the statute. Those are the details of the issue that are public, anything beyond that is speculation. I have no knowledge of the names, ages, gender or what the accused may have been suspected of.

The County Attorney at the time (not our current acting county attorney) saw the justice in sealing the records and made that request of a judge, in apparent violation of CORA. Procedures in place since 1996 were followed to reach the settlement but obviously something went wrong after the dollar amount was determined.

The dilemma is, if we release the names of the individuals we run the risk of violating a court order, which is called contempt of court and puts us at risk of committing a misdemeanor. If we do not release the names we are violating CORA. The solution lies in the hands of the judges, but they will not make a ruling unless someone files suit and brings it before them.

We will be revising the procedures and anticipate lowering the dollar amount before it must be brought to the commissioners attention from the current $25,000 to something substantially less, possibly requiring all settlements to be seen by the commissioners before they are finalized. With an organization as large as the county the commissioners donít want to be signing off on the purchase of every tire and paper clip, but settlements may be an entirely different animal.

Of course our hope would be that public employees would not make errors in judgment, but with almost 2000 employees that is not likely. Fortunately most mistakes donít have these types of consequences but the risk is always there, and that is how we find ourselves in the situation we are presently in. We can and will revise the policy but in the meantime we are between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

CONTACT THE WRITER • HISEY4CD4@MSN.COM

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