Senate Bill 40 to make public records more accessible in a digital and searchable format is expected to get a hearing this afternoon.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. John Kefalas, D-Fort Collins, thinks he has the agreements and amendments he needs to pass the bill out of the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee Wednesday afternoon.

Privacy and cost concerns have been raised mostly by the state Attorney General’s Office and colleges. A similar bill died last year.

“This is a balanced bill, it’s a compromise bill,” he said, adding “not everybody is happy with this bill.”

The bill has been scheduled for a hearing and cancelled twice already. Kefalas said the extra time allowed him to work on compromises and agreements.

While many agencies provide digital files of public records now, many don’t. When the public or the press is researching a broad topic, volumes of paper data obtained from a public agency can be difficult to scrutinize.

Kefalas said he’s not trying to make any records public that aren’t already public under the Colorado Open Records Act, but rather make them accessible in a format the public can analyze, such as Excel spreadsheets or search functions.

He said the bill would opt out small towns or public agencies that can’t afford the technology.

“Government, they are the stewards of these public records,” he said. “What this bill has always been about, in my view, is not about changing the parameters of CORA on what’s available to the public and what’s not. It’s about that last step,”

The Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee meets at 1:30 p.m. in Room 271 in the Capitol.

In 2014, Kefalas carried a bill that established the fees government agencies could charge for records, including the first hour for free, as well as require agencies to post their public records policies and prices for research and copies on their website.

“For me, it’s always been about open and transparent government,” he said.

The bill would exempt records requests that would force public agencies to buy software or computer hardware to fulfill them, as well as requests for records containing private information such as Social Security numbers when agencies cannot delete that information.

The Secretary of State’s Office, which has led state agencies in making state databases accessible to the public online, has helped Kefalas and is expected to testify in favor of it Wednesday.