The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission, under fire from open records advocates over its attempt to write its own open records rules, decided Monday to delay a decision on those rules, in part because of objections from the public.

And after hearing from transparency advocates, including the organization that wrote the law creating the commission, one commissioner said he didn’t understand why the proposed rules are so controversial.

The commission decided last month to write its own version of the open records rules, claiming among other things, that it could decide what format in which to provide public records, in direct opposition to a 2017 law that said the person requesting the records could make that determination.

The commission claims that it is not subject to the open records law because it is housed in the Judicial Department, which is also not subject to the open records law. The IEC has been located in the Judicial Department since 2010. Before that, the commission was under the Colorado Department of Personnel and Administration. In both places, the commission has abided by and responded as prescribed by law to open records requests, including requests filed by this reporter over the years.

The Colorado Supreme Court disputes the commission’s claim that it is not subject to the law.  In its 2015 rule-making on access to administrative records, the state high court pointed out the the Judicial Branch “does not include the Judicial Discipline Commission, Independent Ethics Commission, or the Independent Office of the Child Protection Ombudsman.”

The commission has been sued multiple times, and lost at least twice, when it has decided it doesn’t have to obey the state’s open records laws.

Newspapers around the state have published editorials in recent weeks critical of the commission’s rules, including the Boulder Daily Camera, which wrote that “[e]thics are defined as a system of moral principles. One of Colorado’s moral principles is that government records should be accessible to the public as provided in the Colorado Open Records Act. It is bizarre that an entity invented to defend the state’s moral principles would try to exempt itself from one of the most important.”

Also blasting the commission: Colorado Common Cause, which helped write Amendment 41, which set up the state’s ethics law and the commission. Executive Director Elena Nunez, in a Jan. 31 letter, wrote that the commission “does not have the authority to adopt these rules, and even if it did, the rules are not good public policy” and would violate the public’s trust.

And Peg Perl, who spent much of the last decade with Colorado Ethics Watch and monitoring the commission’s activities, wrote that the commission has followed the open records act for years, including responding to multiple open records requests. She also pointed out that in two lawsuits, both involving Ethics Watch, the commission asserted its rights under the open records act that it now purports to reject.

During a Monday hearing on the rules, Perl and others took the commission for task for its lack of transparency.

“The commission has basically defaulted to doing the least amount possible to comply with any open meetings or transparency laws,” Perl said. That includes reluctance to livestream or even record its meetings, despite having had the equipment to do so for at least two years. Meeting minutes are barebones, she indicated. “All of these things are not required by the law but are best practices for transparency and accessibility,” she said.

Perl encouraged the commission to be a model of transparency rather than “doing as little as possible.”

Jerry Raehal, CEO of the Colorado Press Association and also representing the Colorado Broadcasters Association, told the commission that “fundamentally, we believe you are subject to the open records act and should follow it.” Raehal pointed out that a Denver District Court has ruled that the commission is subject to CORA. But more than that, “it is simply bad public policy for individual government agencies to make their own rules for disclosure of public information. That your proposed rules makes provide less access to information than the plethora of other state agencies offends public sensibilities.”

“This seems to have generated a lot of controversy over something I thought was a non-controversial issue,” Commissioner Bill Leone, a former acting U.S. attorney, said. “I”m not sure what’s generating the controversy,” and said he needed more time on the issue to find out why people object to the proposed rules.

The commission decided that there was no hurry in making a decision and tabled the discussion for its March 5 meeting.