By Brian Eason | The Colorado Sun
In the wake of an alleged blackmail and harassment scandal that roiled the state judicial branch, the Colorado legislature in 2023 created an independent office to help ensure it didn’t happen again.
But two years later, the ombudsman office still doesn’t exist — and it’s not clear why.
The apparent oversight came to light this week when a legislative budget staffer — looking line by line for things to cut from the state’s operating budget to close a $1.2 billion shortfall — discovered an oddity: a $400,000 budget for an agency that had no employees, hadn’t made a budget request and didn’t appear to exist anywhere but on paper.
“This independent agency does not exist,” Craig Harper, the legislative budget staff director told the Joint Budget Committee this week. “There’s no staff. There’s no one (that has) been hired.”