Slower Responses, Stricter Rules: How Colorado is Changing Your Access to Public Records

What This Bill Actually Does

Senate Bill 26-107 is a massive tune-up of the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), the law that guarantees your right to see how state and local governments are operating. First and foremost, it changes the baseline deadlines. Under current law, when you request a public record, the government has three working days to respond. This bill extends that presumed reasonable time to five working days. It also increases the allowed extension for "extenuating circumstances" from seven days to ten days. Furthermore, it adds a new excuse for delays: if the specific employee who holds the records is on leave or not scheduled to work, the government can provide what it has and make you wait for the rest until that person returns.

But the legislation isn't just about giving the government more breathing room—it also introduces strict new penalties. If a records custodian blows the deadline, the bill requires them to give you one additional hour of free research and retrieval time for every single calendar day they are late. They are also required to post their CORA rules, retention policies, and exact instructions on how to make a request directly on their website so you don't have to guess how to navigate the system.

The most aggressive change targets data mining. If the government determines you are requesting records for the direct solicitation of business for pecuniary gain (meaning you want to use the list to sell things to people), the rules completely change. The government gets 30 working days to respond to these commercial requests. Worse, they can bypass the usual statutory fee caps (currently a maximum of $30 per hour) and ignore the standard "first hour free" rule, charging you the actual, reasonable cost of compiling the data. Finally, the bill closes a known loophole by allowing governments to bundle "facially similar" requests made by the same person within a 14-day window into a single request, preventing people from breaking up large queries just to get multiple free hours of research.

On the privacy front, the bill expands protections for public school students. Current law keeps K-12 addresses and phone numbers private; this bill expands that to block the release of any information that could be used to directly contact or message a student. It also explicitly excludes from public records any transcripts or documents generated by translation apps or disability-assistance devices if they were used in place of verbal communication with a government employee.

What It Means for You

As a Colorado resident, this bill is a mixed bag of slower timelines but vastly improved transparency and convenience. If you are dealing with a local zoning issue, researching city council emails, or checking up on a local infrastructure project, you need to expect the process to take a full week (five working days) instead of three. If the city claims the one guy who knows where the files are is on vacation, you might be waiting even longer. However, the new late-penalty rule works heavily in your favor. Because the government is penalized with an hour of free research for every day they are late, agencies have a serious financial incentive not to leave your request sitting at the bottom of an inbox.

The privacy upgrades are the real hidden gems here for everyday families. If you are a parent, this bill ensures that data brokers and marketers cannot use CORA to scrape your children's email addresses or messaging handles from the local school district. Additionally, if you or someone you know relies on a translation app on your phone—or an assistive communication device for a disability—to speak with a police officer, a DMV worker, or a teacher, those generated transcripts are completely shielded from public records requests. You can communicate freely without worrying that a rough, auto-generated translation will end up in the public domain.

Finally, the bill drags the records process into the modern era for your wallet. If a government agency accepts credit cards or electronic payments for other services (like paying a water bill or a parking ticket), they must allow you to pay your CORA fees with a credit card. You also now have the statutory right to request a reasonable breakdown of costs, meaning the government has to show you an itemized receipt of exactly what they did during the research and retrieval process to justify the fee.

• Audit your local websites: Take a look at your local city council or school district website. Once this passes, they are legally required to have their CORA policies and instructions clearly posted online.
• Plan ahead: If you are a community advocate or neighborhood organizer, adjust your timelines. Request records at least two weeks before a critical city council hearing, rather than just a few days prior.

What It Means for Your Business

If you are a Colorado business owner—particularly a general contractor, a real estate developer, a B2B service provider, or a marketer—this is the most important bill of the session to watch. If your company relies on pulling public records to generate sales leads, your workflow is about to hit a brick wall. Requesting newly issued business licenses to pitch bookkeeping services, or pulling recent roof-damage building permits to offer contracting work, will now trigger the commercial solicitation penalty. Government agencies will have 30 working days to fulfill these requests, and they are legally authorized to charge you the un-capped, actual cost of retrieving that data, stripping away the first free hour.

There are, however, a few critical exceptions you need to know about. The 30-day delay and uncapped fees do not apply if the information can be delivered using "computer data extraction methods that require minimal human intervention." This means if you are just asking for a raw database export that a city IT worker can pull with a few clicks, they can't punish you with the 30-day delay. Furthermore, if the agency misclassifies your request as "commercial solicitation" when it's actually for standard research, you can sign an affidavit swearing it won't be used for direct sales. If they still deny you, the bill grants you the right to appeal directly to a district court, where a judge will review the agency's decision for abuse of discretion.

For businesses that regularly contract with the government, the new requirement for an itemized cost breakdown is a powerful tool. If an agency tries to slap you with a $500 fee to review a competitor's winning bid documents, you can force them to prove exactly how many hours they spent and what they did during that time.

• Review your lead generation strategy: If your sales team relies on daily or weekly public records pulls, prepare for those lists to be delayed by up to a month and cost significantly more.
• Automate your requests: Work with your tech team to structure your data requests so they require "minimal human intervention" from the government side, which exempts you from the harsh new commercial penalties.
• Consolidate your inquiries: Because the government can now bundle "facially similar" requests made within 14 days, spacing out requests to get free hours of research will no longer work. Budget your compliance and legal research accordingly.

Follow the Money

According to the nonpartisan legislative fiscal note, Senate Bill 26-107 doesn't require any new state appropriations and won't impact your taxes. The financial impacts are entirely contained within the administrative budgets of state agencies and local governments, and they effectively cancel each other out.

On one hand, state and local entities will see a slight increase in fee revenue because they can finally charge the true, uncapped cost of fulfilling massive commercial data requests. On the other hand, they will lose fee revenue every time they miss a deadline, thanks to the new mandate requiring them to give requesters one free hour of labor for every day a response is late. Local governments, school districts, and state agencies will face a minor, one-time workload bump to update their websites and rewrite their internal policies, but it's not enough to require new funding or staff.

Where This Bill Stands

SB26-107 was introduced in the Senate on February 11, 2026, and assigned to the State, Veterans, & Military Affairs Committee. The bill has a very strong trajectory for a few key reasons: it has prime bipartisan sponsorship in both chambers (Senators Kipp and Rich, and Representatives Soper and Carter), which usually signals consensus on "good government" and administrative cleanup bills.

Because it strikes a compromise—giving government workers more time to do their jobs while giving citizens stricter penalties against bureaucratic delays—it is likely to pass without major partisan friction. If passed, the new rules will take effect in August 2026. If you want to advocate for a specific exemption to the "commercial solicitation" rule, the time to contact the committee members is right now, before the first hearing.