Follow the money faster: New tool unlocks Colorado spending data in minutes

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

I have mentioned (and used) the TOPS system, our state’s online checkbook register, multiple times. It’s a great way to see who our state is paying and for what.

I noticed recently (within the last 6 months) that the people who run it made it significantly harder to use: I’m not sure why, but at some point they made it so you can only go month by month.**

I had a reader kindly volunteer his time and skill at computer programming to come up with a way to automate TOPS searches so I, and now you since the program is public, don’t have to click and wait month by month to find what we need.

The program this person came up with lives online and is linked first below. They titled it a TOPS scraper. It’s pretty intuitive to use.

I’ll walk you through an example. Let’s say I wanted to know all the things Governor Polis’ Office was spending money on for the whole of 2025.

For that you’d choose …

• “Expenses Scraper” (Revenue Scraper lets you see who is paying money to the state and for what, not taking money from the state).
• “Start Year” and “End Year” are both set to 2025
• “Office of the Governor” for “Department Filter”
• Then hit Initiate Data Extraction (leaving the last two blanks empty to get all results and since I don’t care what name it gives the file holding the results).

The results of this search are tabulated into a spreadsheet by the scraper. The link to the public copy of the search I ran above is put second below if you want to see the results.

Happy searching and another big thank you to the reader who did the programming.

If you find something worth sharing in a search, please give me a heads up. If you find a bug or have feedback for the developer, there is a button and they requested that people use it!

**A not at all uncommon search window in the past for me has been to search for expenses over the course of a year, or to search for a particular payee from 2014 (the year TOPS began) forward.

• TOPS Scraper tool: cotopsscraper.com
• Sample search results: Governor’s Office 2025 expenses

When first degree murder . . . isn’t.

HB26-1281, linked first below, makes some changes to criminal law. Because it is change to criminal law, it also provides an opportunity to talk over how the fiscal note differs from the ones you normally see here.

Let’s start there. Quoting from the bill’s fiscal note: “Legislative Council Staff is required to include certain analysis in the fiscal note for any bill that creates a new crime, or that either reclassifies or creates a new factual basis for an existing crime.”

This analysis starts on p 3 of the fiscal note and begins with a look at the current state of things. What kinds of comparable crimes and convictions are there for current law? This section is attached as screenshot 1. And, because this is Blue Colorado, it just wouldn’t be complete without racial data.

The next section is where we start speculating: it’s hard to know what decisions prosecutors and judges would make. The analysts look ahead at what the likely rates of charging and conviction would be if these new charges were put into law. They do this by looking at current convictions/charges and reassessing them under the proposed law. That’s attached as screenshot 2.

Returning to the bill itself, it’s not an easy one to pigeonhole. On the one hand, it decriminalizes some conduct, on the other, it reclassifies some crimes as worse than under current law and creates an entirely new crime related to drunk driving.

Some quick, non-contiguous quotes from the fiscal note flesh this out.

“This bill creates a new factual basis for the existing offense of first degree murder by extreme indifference by having it apply in an expanded set of circumstances.”

The expanded list of behaviors that could result in this charge are (per the fiscal note): killing more than one person; killing one person and also causing serious bodily injury to two or more persons by means of a deadly weapon; killing a child who is under 12; and/or killing a first responder engaged in the performance of their duties.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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