On his November 29 show, Jon Caldara of Newsradio 850 KOA characterized the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) as one that “the left has been using [] all the time ... to get emails and other communication between elected officials.” Caldara's reference to CORA requests by “the left” omitted instances in which Caldara as well as Republican Party operatives and conservative bloggers have issued or promised to issue CORA requests.

In addition to hosting a KOA show, Caldara is president of the “free market” Independence Institute and host of KBDI Channel 12's Independent Thinking.

From the November 29 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Jon Caldara Show:

CALDARA: Page 7 of the Rocky Mountain News today had an interesting piece based on a CORA request done by the Rocky Mountain News. Now, CORA requests, by the way, are all the rage. What's a CORA request? There's such a thing as a Freedom of Information Act, and the Freedom of Information Act, federally, says that you're able to see whatever the government has done. So unless there's some sort of security reason, if you request some information -- correspondence, something like that -- from the government, they have to give it to you. It's a damn good law. Here in Colorado we have a similar law called the Colorado Open Records Act, thus CORA. And the left has been using it all the time to take a look at who's been sending who -- is it who's been sending whom? whom's been sending whom's; who's been sending who -- I'll have to talk to somebody about it. But they use it in order to get emails and other communication between elected officials, and they can find some good stuff. Well, the Rocky Mountain News did so and found out that [Gov.] Bill Ritter and his staff got some pretty interesting back-and-forth comments before he dropped his Friday afternoon bomb several weeks ago about unionizing the state work force.

On August 2, Caldara held a press conference in which, according to an August 1 Independence Institute media advisory, he was to announce that “the Independence Institute will issue Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests to all school districts and county clerks” for copies of ballot titles and other election materials related to school districts' votes to waive restrictions imposed by Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) on the amount of money government entities can retain and spend. In an August 3 editorial (“Crusading Caldara: Heavy on theatrics, but what else?”) that quoted from the media advisory, the Boulder Daily Camera called Caldara's use of CORA “overkill,” noting:

The Open Records Act is generally invoked when an inquisitive citizen (often a journalist) wants to see government documents that are not readily available. Often, CORA is used when a government agency -- say, a state university -- is reluctant to open its records.

But ballot language is not hidden from public view. It is repeatedly and relentlessly made public. It is posted on government Web sites, published in legal newspapers, mailed to registered voters and dissected ad nauseam.

The only apparent reason for Caldara to invoke CORA is to make a suggestion of government stealth where none is warranted. Let us hope the motivation is more benign, or at least that misleading rhetoric does not drown out reasonable debate about this critical public concern.

Also missing from Caldara's commentary was any acknowledgment of CORA requests filed by such Republican-leaning entities as the “news” website Face the State and the blog To the Right, which headlined a November 15 post “One, Two, Three, Four, We Declare A CORA War” and detailed its own lengthy CORA requests to such Democratic elected officials as House Speaker Andrew Romanoff (Denver), then-Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald (Coal Creek), and state Sen. Chris Romer (Denver).

Following a March 29 Face the State article that revealed an email message obtained through a CORA request in which state Rep. Mike Merrifield (D-Manitou Springs) wrote, “There must be a special place in Hell” for proponents of charter schools, the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post reported on allegations that the website's founder, Brad Jones, had coordinated on the requests with Republican leaders of the Colorado legislature to embarrass Merrifield and Democratic state Sen. Sue Windels (Arvada).

Jones has numerous ties to Colorado Republicans and to the Independence Institute, as Colorado Media Matters has documented.

Moreover, in a November 9 editorial, Face the State described CORA requests it had made for communications that Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter's administration has had regarding employee partnerships and for information regarding the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's contributions to a Denver ballot initiative. In the editorial, Face the State promised, “We will continue to pursue CORAs.”