The Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara has withdrawn a ballot measure aimed at repealing a new law that exempted lawmakers from the state’s open meetings statutes. 

Caldara said obtaining 124,000 signatures to put Initiative No. 287 on the November ballot and the campaign to win voters’ approval would be costly — in order to just revert the law back to where it was.

The better approach, he said, is to build a coalition and fight for transparency in government.      

“It costs a lot to get an initiative on the ballot, and I don’t have many bullets to shoot,” Caldara told Colorado Politics. “I could shoot that bullet and just get the open meeting back to where it was, or we could build a coalition of transparency activists, work on an initiative that doesn’t just get us back to where we were but increases transparency because they state needs it.”

Caldara, a regular columnist for Colorado Politics and the Gazette newspapers, sought to repeal Senate Bill 24-157, which put limits on what constitutes “public business” and allow lawmakers to discuss bills and public policy via email or text message without it being subject to the open meetings law. Those communications could be available through an open records request, so long as the requestor knows who was in the conversation and when it took place.

The way proponents described the situation, the state’s previous law was practically impossible for lawmakers to navigate and finding a way so policymakers could have conversations around legislation without violating the Open Meetings Law had been elusive.

Critics, such as Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, argued voters “emphatically declared that the formation of public policy is public business and may not be conducted in secret” and that SB 157 would undermine transparency by allowing lawmakers to discuss public business in an unlimited way through electronic, written communications, email, text message, or disappearing messaging apps, such as Signal — all outside of public view.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s website listed Initiative No. 287 as as officially withdrawn.

Caldara said polling on the measure showed support at 51% and 35% undecided, with only 13% saying “no.” 

As such, he believes it would have passed at the ballot box.

“The one initiative that polled well forces state legislators back into the open meetings law, which they recently exempted themselves,” Caldara had written in a June 30 opinion piece for Colorado Politics. “If passed, it would only get us back to where we were before, stopping legislators from having smoke-filled, closed-door meetings.” 

In that column, Caldara cited the high cost of obtaining the necessary signatures for initiatives, noting that process could cost of “up to $1 million per ballot question.” 

“I’ve decided not to spend limited resources on it this year just to reverse one bad law,” he wrote. “Instead, we’ll be spearheading a better initiative to greatly expand transparency and open meetings next year.” 

In the past year, the General Assembly had been sued twice over violations of the open meetings law. In January, a Denver District Court judge ruled that Democrats’ use of “quadratic voting,” a secret vote to determine which bills would be funded by the state budget, violated the law.

Two House Democrats sued the House last year over other violations of the open meetings law, including the use of secretive electronic messaging services and caucus meetings held without public notice or minutes. The lawsuit was settled with an agreement by both caucuses to stop setting those messaging apps to automatically self-destruct and to post minutes and agendas of caucus meetings.

Speaker pro-Tem Chris deGruy Kennedy of Lakewood, one of the bill’s House cosponsors, earlier noted that the definition of public business includes introduced or draft legislation and defines a quorum as “contemporaneous” rather than a “walking around” conversation.

Requiring a meeting to be contemporaneous gets into what’s known as “daisy chain” communications. That’s when a one person has a conversation with several people, but one at a time to avoid open meetings requirements.

DeGruy Kennedy insisted that the bill does not shield the public from being able to see what lawmakers are doing. 

“We’re not trying to pretend that we got it perfectly right, but I have not yet heard better solutions,” he told House members.  

The measure was opposed by governmental transparency advocates, including the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, Colorado Common Cause and the Colorado League of Women Voters, which sent out an email blast early Tuesday, asking people to contact the governor and seek a veto of SB 157.

When Gov. Jared Polis signed the bill, First Amendment attorney Steve Zansberg, who is president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, called it disappointing.

“It is profoundly disappointing that the leadership of both houses, and the Governor, have chosen to effectively exempt one branch of government from our state’s public transparency law,” Zansberg wrote in an email. “It is all the more so, given that our organization’s input was completely ignored, and that they did so during ‘National Sunshine Week’ of 2024.”