Colorado Officials Continue to Delete COVID-19 Emails

Good luck getting transparent information on Colorado’s handling of the pandemic. Any government electronic communication older than 30 days is likely gone, and if they happen to have the documents you request, they may charge you thousands of dollars to produce them. The Denver Post’s request for emails and memos from the early days of the COVID-19 response was met with a bill for “at least” $20,707 according to a recent report by the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

Despite calls from media organizations and officials at the Colorado State Archives to preserve all communications related to the state’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) is continuing to purge all emails related to their COVID-19 response – some as quickly as 30 days.

 Executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition Jeff Roberts, quoted by the Denver Post, said, “I’m disappointed because we asked for this. Just because they may not think the messages are important to keep, those are government records and they are the public’s records.”

The State Archives posted a request in June for Colorado officials to retain records related to COVID-19 “for posterity,” and 60 Colorado news organizations sent a letter to Jared Polis in April 2020 requesting more transparency and records retention related to the state’s COVID response:

We write today to request that you take a few additional actions that we feel would greatly help to ensure journalists throughout the state are best equipped to tell the stories that must be told. Our primary objectives are to keep the public informed, to accurately chronicle the events of this unprecedented period – to write the “first rough draft of history” – and to report on how government officials, local business and civic leaders, and communities are responding:

From the letter, published at the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition

The letter specifically requested retention of electronic communications:

Please urge all public officials in Colorado to retain emails, text messages, messages from platforms such as Slack and Zoom recordings related to the crisis, so that accurate chronologies of their collective responses can be obtained and recorded. These primary records will become particularly important in the future, as journalists and social science researchers attempt to reconstruct this chaotic period to determine what we can learn from the response.

Yet CDPHE is continuing the purge of electronic communications, appealing to the letter of the law rather than the exceptional nature of the public’s interest in the state COVID-19 pandemic response. To make matters worse, Colorado state and local governments are charging media entities and citizens exorbitant fees to retrieve public documents requested under the Colorado Open Records Act – often hundreds or thousands of dollars.