Efforts to overhaul Colorado’s open records law stalled anew.

A proposal that would have extended response times for public records requests and added accountability measures for late responses failed to advance out of its first committee and will not move forward this year.

The Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee rejected Senate Bill 107, sponsored by Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Cathy Kipp of Fort Collins and Republican Sen. Janice Rich of Grand Junction, on a 3-2 vote.

The same duo carried a similar bill in the 2025 session, which was vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis. Kipp also sponsored a similar bill in the 2024 session.

“This bill is about making the system work better for everyone, not about making records harder to get,” Kipp told the committee.

Fulfilling CORA requests, which have become more complex, takes time, staff and resources, and those resources are not unlimited, Kipp told the committee. That’s especially a problem when the requests are broad and less defined, which Kipp said takes the most time.

The bill would extend the response time from three to five working days and, under extenuating circumstances, from seven to 10 days.

For the requestor, the bill provides more accountability, she asserted. Under current law, when the custodian of a record misses the deadline, there’s little the requestor can do, other than go to court.

Under SB 107, if the custodian misses the deadline, the requestor gets a free hour of research and retrieval time for each day the request is late.

As introduced, the bill also allowed the custodian to determine if the requestor is seeking an open records for commercial gain, which would extend the response time to 30 days.

But Kipp announced at the hearing’s onset the bill would be amended to remove the language around commercial requestors to avoid a second year of a gubernatorial veto.

The hearing pitted journalists and governmental transparency advocates, such as Colorado Common Cause and the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, against local and special district government entities, which argued they are being slammed with multiple, lengthy and sometimes overly broad requests.

“This discussion is nothing less than whether retention and provision of public records should be a core function of government in Colorado, just as important as filling potholes, preventing disease or regulating land use,” said Chuck Murphy, the investigative editor at Colorado Public Radio.

SB 107 would tell subdivisions of government that the legislature believes citizen review of government actions can be done when the government has time or when they are more fully staffed, he told the committee.

Murphy wasn’t the only journalist to testify. Tony Kovaleski, recently retired from KMGH-TV, and Matt Sebastian, the Denver Post’s managing editor, also spoke against the bill.

Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition noted that government agencies frequently use extenuating circumstances to delay responding to open records requests. “Delays, exorbitant fees and wrongly applied exemptions” already create significant obstacles to obtaining open records, he said, adding journalists can’t wait three weeks for a response on a timely issue.

Local government representatives, on the other side, testified about the burden that open records place on staff.

Brian Thompson, the custodian of records for the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, said he gets about 30 requests per year, most of them coming from companies that sell that information for profit. With a staff of one, responding means reallocating other core responsibilities, he explained.

In 2019 in Jefferson County, the county received 217 open records requests, according to county attorney Kim Sorrels. Last year, it was 792, and 180 in the first two months of 2026. Jefferson County employees have to take time from their other job responsibilities to handle those requests.

Some of those requests took hours, she said, including one that took 144 hours to complete.

Lauren Parson, an attorney for Denver Public Schools, said passage of SB 107 would be most helpful in responding to the expansive requests, often from law firms or parents. In 2025, that was more than 2,500 hours.

“The time spent on CORA is time not spent on other important matters that impact students,” she said.

The committee was not persuaded.

Sen. Lynda Zamora-Wilson, R-Colorado Springs, said even the delay of a day can “bust a citizen’s participation.” Her struggle was with citizens’ rights and their need for information in a timely manner, she said.

Committee Chair Sen. Katie Wallace, D-Longmont, said she did not want to appear in any way to prevent transparency, and she did not like the “corporate carve-outs” in the bill.

Two Democrats — Wallace and Sen. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial — joined Zamora Wilson in voting the bill down.