Jared Polis vetoes public records bill, setting up showdown with Colorado legislature

Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill Thursday that transparency advocates said would hurt the public’s ability to access government records.

Polis’ rejection of the measure, which passed with broad bipartisan support, sets up a rare override vote for lawmakers in the closing weeks of the 2025 legislative session.

This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at kunc.org.

The outcome will decide how long people might have to wait for their school districts, city halls and other governments to provide them records they’re seeking. 

Senate Bill 77 would have given governments more time to respond to records requests from the public and businesses while exempting journalists from the delays.

The bill’s sponsors said governments were being “inundated” with records requests and need longer deadlines to respond to them.

Critics of the bill said it could result in more governments “dragging their feet” to fulfill the requests.

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Some also raised concerns about exempting journalists from the extended deadlines.

In his veto letter, Polis said he did not support the bill’s effort to create three different timelines for fulfilling records requests based on who is making them.

“To ensure fairness and confidence in public transparency, all legitimate requests for public transparency under (the Colorado Open Records Act) should be treated equally under the law, without preference for some requestors over others,” Polis wrote.

He also said the bill would “weaken” the Colorado Open Records Act.

“I support more, not less, openness and transparency,” Polis wrote.

While the bill was debated last month at the statehouse, opponents said residents are facing growing hurdles to access records about government activities, with rising fees one of the biggest obstacles.

The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and other transparency advocates urged Polis to veto the measure. They said giving governments as long as three weeks to respond to some records requests would be a “dramatic step backward” for transparency.

The looming debate between lawmakers and Polis over the open record rules also comes as leading transparency advocates say the state is experiencing a “backsliding” of the public’s ability to access public information.

“In Colorado, we haven’t seen a lot of efforts to expand access,” Freedom of Information Coalition director Jeff Roberts said Friday. “There have been some here and there that we can point to but overall, I think we’ve seen more restricting of access to public information.”

Showdown looms

Polis’ veto may not seal the bill’s fate.

Sen. Cathy Kipp, D-Fort Collins, sponsored the bill and said Friday morning she intends to pursue an override vote of the governor’s veto.

“I have not given up on my legislation,” she said. “We still have to have the conversations to see where people are. We passed (the bill) in both chambers with veto-proof majorities. The question is, will those votes hold?”

Kipp called her bill “very fair” and she said it “gives a lot to people on both sides.”

“Records requests have increased exponentially over the last seven years and so it’s hard for (governments) to keep up,” she said.

She added that some residents were using records requests to look into “urban legends and conspiracy theories.”

The Freedom of Information Coalition reviewed more than 12,000 records requests made in Colorado last year and found residents looking for everything from UFO records from their state lawmakers to the bidding process for holiday lights in Gunnison.

The state health department received the most requests of any state agency surveyed.

Kipp said she talked to Polis for about 30 minutes the day before he vetoed her bill.

“We have these incredible increases in the number of records requests for our scarce resource departments,” she said. “And he disagreed ultimately, he said ‘we don’t want to treat people differently.’”

The bill was vetoed less than nine hours before the 10-day deadline for Polis to take action on it.

Transparency advocates and the governor did support some parts of the bill. One provision they both endorsed would have required governments to provide a detailed breakdown of the fees they were charging to fulfill a request.

But Jeff Roberts, the director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said that provision and others were “overshadowed” by the delays the bill would add to getting records.

“If you put in extra time for records’ custodians to respond, that adds more obstacles, and it gives records’ custodians an excuse to take longer and perhaps even miss the deadlines, because people are generally powerless,” he said. “When that happens, there’s not much they can do about it, except ask again.”

Roberts said he welcomed Polis’ veto. With a potential override vote looming, he said the stakes are high.

“What’s at stake is potentially diminished government transparency in Colorado,” he said. “People already face obstacles to obtaining public records in the form of fees, sometimes unaffordable fees. And if this bill is allowed to become law, if they succeed in overriding the veto, then it will likely take longer to get public records…And there’s just not much people can do when the government drags its feet about that.”