Democrats in the Colorado Legislature have taken steps every year to erode transparency around what they do.

But voters this year might get the chance to say, “Enough.”

Repeated efforts by lawmakers to diminish the public’s rights under the state’s open meetings and open records laws have accumulated under Democratic trifecta control of state government. Issue advocates, press groups and members of the public have objected at every turn, but the majority too often behaves as if it’s entitled to shut the people out of the people’s business.

Sunshine Week, which runs through Friday and is an opportunity for open government advocates to highlight the importance of transparency, is a good time to explore the “right to know” in a proposed constitutional amendment.

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Two years ago, during Sunshine Week no less, Democratic Governor Jared Polis signed a bill passed by Democrats that in effect exempted the state Legislature from much of the Colorado Open Meetings Law. Passed as a citizen’s initiative by voters in 1972, the law according to initiative backer Colorado Common Cause was the first “sunshine” law in the country. It required state lawmakers and agencies to hold meetings in the open.

Lawmakers gave themselves an out. As leaders of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition explained, Senate Bill 24-157effectively allowed lawmakers to skirt the requirement that their meetings be conducted in the open by allowing them to conduct “serial” meetings, “an endless series of sub-quorum discussions of pending bills and amendments, via emails, text messages, phone calls or in-person meetings,” with no public notice, no minutes, no transparency.

When the public has no view of its government in action, it’s blind to how representatives perform, and it’s robbed of information that’s crucial when it comes time to vote.

Lawmakers have taken other actions to obscure the public’s view of government. In 2021, they instituted increased secrecy around searches for leaders of public bodies, such as university systems. Last year, they made secret the names of people who file a claim for compensation for damages from wildlife, and they barred from public view the details of lucrative deals between student-athletes and public universities.

Some Democrats, particularly Senator Cathy Kipp of Fort Collins, keep trying to the detriment of the public interest to ease requirements in the Colorado Open Records Act — CORA — which says a person has a right to inspect public records.

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Despite regular pleas from transparency advocates, lawmakers have refused to lower the exorbitant fees government agencies can charge to respond to public information requests. The maximum is $41.37 per hour, with the first hour free. This rate, which could add up to thousands of dollars for some requests, effectively makes public records inaccessible for many people, who might have a critical interest in a police incident, a city council policy that affects their neighborhood, or a state law that regulates their business.

Those and other pleas for transparency that have gone unheeded in recent years find bold and fed-up expression in Ballot Initiative 261, which would insert in the state constitution a “fundamental right to know the affairs of government.”

“The people find and declare that Colorado state and local governments have infringed on the fundamental right to know the affairs of government” by blocking public access to meetings and records, the initiative says.

In a single sweeping act, the amendment would declare any rule or law unconstitutional that conflicts with this new right to know. It doesn’t specify which laws it might target, but there’s no question a statute like the Legislature’s open meeting-skirting law would be vulnerable.

The ballot measure was filed by the conservative Independence Institute and the League of Women Voters of Colorado, organizations with disparate political backgrounds that are unified in the belief that open government is necessary for a democratic society. It is scheduled for review and comment during a Legislative Council Staff hearing at 1 p.m. today. If state officials determine it’s eligible for the ballot, the measure’s backers would need to collect enough voter signatures, and it would require 55 percent of the vote to pass.

As they did more than 50 years ago, Colorado voters could again with the force of sufficient numbers demand transparency from government leaders who would prefer to work in secret.