Colorado Supreme Court sides with transparency in child abuse hotline case

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

The CFOIC article linked at bottom details a recent ruling by the CO Supreme Court. Five years on from when the suit was first filed, the state’s highest court ruled that the Colorado Sun and 9News have a right to some records from the state’s child abuse hotline pertaining to group homes for children.

The State of Colorado, in particular the State Department of Human Services (CDHS) had argued that releasing the statistics would violate state statutes pertaining to confidentiality, mainly due to there only being three group homes from which statistics were sought.**

Quoting with links intact:

“CDHS contended the information could be used to identify individual informants, children or family members — in violation of a confidentiality provision in the Colorado Children’s Code Records and Information Act — because the street addresses of the Tennyson Center, Mount Saint Vincent and Cleo Wallace facilities are publicly known. It also claimed the requested numbers would confirm that a report of child abuse or neglect originated from one of the RCCFs.”

This argument is fleshed out a little further down in the article:

“The Children’s Code says that ‘reports of child abuse or neglect and the name and address of any child, family, or informant or any other identifying information contained in such reports shall be confidential and shall not be public information.’”

The media outlets here, as you might imagine, were looking to see statistics to bolster their earlier reporting about children not being protected at these homes.

There is plenty more quoted from the CO Supreme Court’s majority ruling in the CFOIC article. I’ll leave it to you to read up as much as you’d like, but the upshot of the court’s opinion is that there is no harm nor loss of privacy in sharing the statistics the Sun and 9News sought along with mention of Colorado’s lengthy history of valuing transparency: the facilities are already known to the public (including their addresses), and the legislature (per the court) didn’t ever intend to keep these statistics private.

This ruling and what the news outlets wanted strike me as pretty reasonable. I don’t think there’d be any harm to any particular child’s privacy here if the news outlets didn’t stray from their original request. And I do value public and media access to information.

What do you think? Do you see the balance differently?

**This put me in mind of a dynamic I’ve seen sometimes in public health research: some data is tossed because the sample size is small enough to make it such that someone’s records could be identified.

• CFOIC: Five years after lawsuit filed, Colorado Supreme Court orders disclosure of child abuse hotline statistics
• 9News: Residential treatment facilities for children in Colorado

The opening salvo of another “Oil and Gas War”?

In response to an initiative filed by the conservative group Advance Colorado, see the first link below, environmental group Conservation Colorado has filed four ballot measures. Those are links 2 — 5 below.

Dueling ballot initiatives is nothing new. One group runs a ballot measure, and another group which doesn’t like that starts running one or more of their own.

So, here we have Advance Colorado running a proposal to enshrine the right to buy natural gas, and for utilities to sell it, in the Constitution** which spurs Conservation Colorado to run four measures of their own.

Since (presumably) they cannot simply make fossil fuels like natural gas illegal, the environmentalists flood the zone with measures designed to accomplish that by other means.

Quoting from the Independence Institute analysis paper linked sixth below (with links intact–their analysis is spot-on and well worth the time to read):

“On March 20, CPR News reported that Conservation Colorado filed four ballot measures targeting the oil and gas industry. The group calls them a direct response to Advance Colorado’s Initiative 177, which would enshrine in the state constitution a right for consumers to buy natural gas and for utilities to sell it. That framing doesn’t hold up. Initiative 177 is a consumer choice measure that leaves every existing environmental rule in place. The four retaliatory filings, in contrast, open sweeping new legal and financial liability for the oil and gas industry. Taken together, the measures are designed to make the future of Colorado oil and gas as bleak as possible.”

This is foolishness, this ballot tug of war, and I don’t blame Advance Colorado for it.

There would not need to be a ballot measure ensuring we had a right to choose natural gas were it not for the fact that environmentalists want to reach that far into your life: it’s not about using less; it’s not about emitting less carbon; it’s about making it so you do things their way. It’s about eliminating fossil fuel use entirely.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.