Colorado’s Missing Report Has More Terms Than Pages Anyone Can Find

A report commissioned by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office cannot be located, and an effort to find it is heading back to court. CBS Colorado reports that the state paid $25,000 for leadership-development work that was supposed to produce findings, conclusions and recommendations.

The findings are missing. The conclusions are disputed. The recommendations may eventually have to include a folder.

A requester acting for the conservative Public Trust Institute saw the invoice on the state’s transparency portal and asked what the public received. According to requester Suzanne Taheri, the office first said there was no report, then said there was one but it hadn’t received it, and refused to ask the consultant for it. A judge ordered the office to make that inquiry.

Already the invoice has demonstrated greater public-service aptitude than the work it describes. It exists, can be found and has answered a question without judicial supervision.

Counsel for SageRiver Consulting says the report and survey results were delivered to the state. The consultant had retired, counsel said, shredded hard copies and attempted to delete electronic files. Counsel maintains that the firm is not the report’s official custodian and isn’t legally required to search. Taheri disputes that position and says state retention rules require the office to keep the records for ten years. The new motion seeks another order; this has not become a judicial finding of illegal destruction.

What has materialized is an offer to search an electronic archive for two hours at a cost of $1,600. Taheri agreed.

Then came the conditions.

CBS reports that the consultant wanted the state office and the institute to agree never to contact her again, subpoena her, hold her liable or disparage her. Breaching those conditions would mean paying her $25,000.

Ah. There’s the missing detail. We have not recovered the report, but we have established the replacement value of an unflattering opinion.

Keep the three prices straight. Twenty-five thousand dollars for the original work. Sixteen hundred for a proposed two-hour search. Another twenty-five thousand under the proposed penalty terms if the promises are broken. This is not one mysterious bill being described three ways. The public-records problem has developed accessories.

And the accessories are unusually well documented. Nobody seems to be searching an archive to determine whether the no-disparagement condition exists. That part of the accountability project has enjoyed excellent retention.

I’m sorry, but what is the public supposed to do with this? Request the product of public spending while agreeing to severely restrict how it can respond to the search? It’s a records request with the personality of a bad software licence. To continue, accept the terms and conditions governing your subsequent disappointment.

The legal custody dispute matters. Contractors don’t automatically become responsible for every record forever, and a claim that the state already received the material deserves examination. But that makes the public office’s end of the chain more important, not less. Outsourcing the work cannot sensibly mean the taxpayer must also outsource knowing whether the work is still anywhere.

Former employees told CBS the report was critical of Griswold. We haven’t seen it. It would be convenient if this entire ordeal were just an unusually demanding reading-comprehension test, but the reading remains the unavailable component.

For fuck’s sake, the subject was leadership development. Whatever the original recommendations said, the sequel has supplied a practical exercise: identify who is responsible for the thing the government bought.

So far, the most securely preserved result is a proposed agreement limiting the questions, the legal demands and the criticism of the search. Not the report. The conditions surrounding the possibility of looking for the report.

At this rate Colorado could save $1,600 by commissioning an imaginary search. It would produce exactly as much material the public has been allowed to read, and we could all promise not to say anything unkind about the imaginary findings.

Actually, never mind. That last sentence may have just cost another $25,000.