Score one for cupcakes! Bake sale beats the establishment!
Nancy Rumfelt, the one woman army at Liberty Watch, who had to have a “Bake Sale for Transparency” to raise money to pay for an open records request, defeated the education establishment. On Tuesday voters in the Thompson School District in Loveland voted overwhelmingly “no” on a [...]

Defining precisely what a so-called green job actually is and how many have been created in Colorado is perhaps the only job as hard as actually creating such emerald-hued employment— and a University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business survey due later this spring attempting to quantify the growth and qualify the nature of the [...]

COST has long considered transparency in government a bi-partisan issue. We’ve profiled State Representative BJ Nikkel’s excellent CDOT transparency bill (HB 1002) that is cruising through the House.
Another bill that deserves praise is State Representative Mark Ferrandino’s (D-Denver) tax expenditure transparency bill (HB 1104), which focuses on selective tax relief that is used to advance [...]

“State Transparency Website Not Transparent Enough”–that’s the title of a recent 7NEWS story (video) discussing Rep. B.J. Nikkel’s (R-Loveland) transparency efforts, including the CDOT transparency measure passed 65-0 in the House earlier today.
While Nikkel gives the current state online database–Transparency Online Project or TOPS–a “C” for content, it is the confluence of both that content [...]

Rep. B.J. Nikkel’s HB 1002, designed to close a gap in the state’s online transparency offerings for Colorado’s Department of Transportation, passed out of the House today on a 65-0 vote.
The bill still needs Senate approval, as well as the signature of Gov. John Hickenlooper.

A little transparency goes a long way.
The Public Utilities Commission’s chair, Ron Binz, has rejected any possibility of being reappointed to his current position by Colorado’s new Governor John Hickenlooper. Facing ethics concerns revealed by Colorado Open Records Act requests regarding possible backroom deals that benefited Xcel and a penchant for expensive, overseas junkets that [...]

Earlier this month, COST profiled the excellent investigative reporting conducted by The Denver Channel’s Tony Kovaleski in discovering the profligate spending practices of Pinnacol Assurance’s board of directors, who had spent in excess of $300,000 in posh golf and span junkets.
The subsequent row over the expenses stirred up calls for board resignations, and now COST [...]

Rep. B.J. Nikkel (R-HD 49) earned another win for transparency when HB 1002, a bill that COST profiled two weeks ago, received unanimous bipartisan support in clearing the House Transportation Committee on Wednesday on an impressive 12-0 vote.
A recap of what the transparency bill requires of the Colorado Department of Transportation:
This bill requires the Colorado [...]

The move will require the approval of the seven-member Legislative Audit Committee, but two Republicans, Sen. Scott Renfroe and Rep. Steve King, plan to ask for an audit of the Public Utilities Commission because of some of its recent decisions in the energy, taxi, and telecom sectors–the list is quite extensive:
“We felt it was appropriate [...]

Voters and residents of South Carolina move closer to finally being able to know how their legislators vote on issues critical and mundane alike, after a bill passed unanimously in the state’s lower chamber:
South Carolina law would require legislators to take a roll call on most of their votes under a proposal fast-tracked by House [...]