We are all familiar with the idea of unintended and unexpected consequences of actions. Laws passed with the very best of intentions can end up having unanticipated and remarkable consequences. History is littered with examples.

Prohibition, for example, was supposed to stop people from drinking alcohol, but it mostly is remembered for creating a new and profitable market for criminals to secretly make booze and sell it in speakeasies. There are many more.

In my own doctoral research, I learned the creation, during the Cold War, of lots of large military bases with restricted access inadvertently also created huge nature reserves. Vandenberg Air Force Base (sorry, “Space Force Base,” I’m never going to get used to that) found by sealing off non-military access, no fewer than seven different endangered species ended up thriving on those restricted California lands and streams, including my all-time favorite animal’s name, the unarmored three-spined stickleback fish, which only lives on Vandenberg.

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The wartime sinking of ships in shallow waters led to the discovery such sunken ships can become artificial reefs with thriving flora and fauna. We now deliberately sink old ships in critical waters to take advantage of that reef-making ability. This is especially vital given the effect of climate change on natural reefs worldwide. Oh, and when a medicine named Viagra, designed to lower blood pressure, was tested, it was discovered it had, well, a side effect.

But not all unintended consequences are good things. Back in the mid 1990s, AOL, a gateway to the nascent internet for millions, myself included, tried to install a profanity filter because, you know, people. Unfortunately, AOL had to tell the software what words and phrases the filter should look out for, only to discover the good people of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, were automatically banned from the AOL platform. Oops.

As reported in Colorado Politics, we have our own new law with unintended consequences ruffling feathers. Now, I do believe all new laws are well-intended, if only to the legislator who wrote it. We can have honest policy differences, but short of so-called “poison pill” amendments (when a legislator adds an amendment to a bill he or she doesn’t like that is quite radical and unacceptable, in hopes the entire bill will be voted down in order to stop the poison pill amendment from also becoming law), legislative proposals are designed to do good.

A 2021 law here in Colorado was intended to make it easier for people with vision or hearing issues to keep up with the actions of various levels of state government turned out to have a very significant unintended consequence. The Colorado Laws for Persons With Disabilities act was signed into law by GovePolis. Jared on June 30, 2021 (at 6:45 p.m., the document is quite specific). It basically requires government agencies, to include city and county governments, to provide, on their websites, information about their actions in formats appropriate for individuals with hearing or vision impairments. So, big-type or spoken-word documents, and other impairment mitigators must be included on the website, along with “regular” text on what the agency or government entity is doing. And any agency that fails to comply with the new law faces fines or potentially court cases to compel their cooperation.

This is, at least on the surface, a really good idea. Your ability to interact with a government agency to get a service or even just to keep track of what is going on should not be limited by vision or hearing loss. I think we can all agree on this, right?

Well, yes. But unfortunately, compliance with the new law has been spotty and has resulted in at least some Colorado counties opting to simply purge their websites of certain public records because the cost of installing and using visual and hearing impairment solutions is too high. These documents appear to include such things as meeting minutes and budgets.

Clearly those are important items available to everyone, but some counties — seeing the new law as an unfunded mandate — have elected to just take down documents rather than shoulder the cost of also having the same documents in formats visual and hearing-impaired people can use.

There is a way for residents to get ahold of documents removed from websites, by filing a Colorado Open Records Act request, but that service is not free and can cost up to $40 per hour for a researcher to pull up a requested document.

So, instead of making essentially all documents available to everyone, regardless of impairment, some places are making potentially all these public documents unavailable to everyone, unless a large fee is paid.

This legislation was clearly very well intended. And I’d hope those objecting are sincere and are not just balking at the new law just on some anti-state government agenda. But of course, those the law intended to help are as bad off as before, and the general public will find documents that used to be available now gone, absent paying that aforementioned fee.

And that’s wrong.

The law did provide the Governor’s Office of Information Technology $300,000 to help with implementation, but none of those funds went to the actual agencies. Clearly, in the next legislative session, we need to see a supplemental law passed to provide needed funding to the counties and other agencies involved to cover the costs of converting documents and creating the necessary framework to help those with visual and hearing impairments.

Well-intended actions, heck pretty much all actions, will have unintended consequences. Some are good and some are not. It’s not reasonable to expect a legislature to anticipate every possible consequence of a new law, but it is reasonable to expect the legislature to keep a keen eye out for such unexpected results and to be quick to respond and to mitigate the negative outcomes. Will that happen next session?

Stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.