CBS Colorado has a remarkable story out of the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, and by “remarkable,” I mean the kind of public-sector nonsense that would get you laughed out of the room anywhere normal people are expected to account for money.
Former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Taheri has been trying to obtain records connected to $25,000 taxpayers paid SageRiver Consulting for leadership development work in Jena Griswold’s office. According to CBS Colorado, the consultant was hired to produce “findings, conclusions, and recommendations,” and says she provided Griswold’s office with a survey summary and final report. Yet after an open-records request, a lawsuit, and a court order directing the Secretary of State to seek the records from the consultant, the report may now be gone. The consultant told the state she shredded hard copies and attempted to erase electronic files, although archived electronic copies may possibly remain.
How very fucking convenient.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Taxpayers shelled out $25,000 for consulting work involving leadership development inside Griswold’s office. A purchase order says the consultant was supposed to produce findings, conclusions, and recommendations. In the private sector, we call that a deliverable. In government, apparently we call it a scavenger hunt.
- Taheri requested the consultant’s report because she wanted to know what Coloradans received for their money. Griswold’s office told her it had no responsive records and initially refused to check with the consultant. Taheri sued, and a Denver District Court judge ordered the office to seek the records from SageRiver.
- Then comes the punchline. In a court filing, the Attorney General’s Office said the retired consultant had shredded hard copies and attempted to delete electronic files. The consultant said archived copies were possible, but unlikely. Nothing says “transparent government” quite like chasing taxpayer-funded records through the digital equivalent of a dumpster.
- Here is the part that ought to make every Colorado taxpayer sit up: the consultant says she gave Griswold’s office a survey summary and a final report. CBS reports the Secretary of State’s Office would not explain what happened to those documents, while saying it complies with record-retention and open-records obligations. That leaves one painfully obvious question: where the hell are they?
- And yes, this matters politically. Griswold is term-limited as Secretary of State and is now the Democratic nominee for Colorado attorney general against Republican Michael Allen. The woman asking voters to make her the state’s top law-enforcement officer is running an office that cannot readily produce a taxpayer-funded report now sitting at the center of an ongoing records lawsuit. You cannot make this stuff up.
My Bottom Line
Regular Coloradans do not get to spend $25,000 of somebody else’s money, receive a finished product, lose track of it, and then shrug when somebody asks to see it. Your boss would want answers. Your accountant would want answers. Your spouse would probably want answers. But when government does it, somehow we are expected to accept a fog of lawyers, retention policies, archived files, and bureaucratic finger-pointing.
Come on.
Does anyone seriously believe that a professional consulting report created in 2021 simply vanished from the face of the earth? Maybe it did. The lawsuit is ongoing, and nobody should claim destruction as established fact when the reporting says the records may have been destroyed. But that does not absolve Griswold’s office. The basic questions remain embarrassingly simple: What exactly was produced? Who received it? Who had custody of it? What retention rules applied? And why can’t the taxpayers who bought the damn thing readily see it?
This is how public trust gets ground into hamburger. The Colorado Secretary of State administers elections, a job where credibility and public confidence are not decorative accessories. Yet here we have a taxpayer-funded report, a records fight, an office declining to explain what happened to documents the consultant says she delivered, and Coloradans once again being told that everything is fine because the bureaucracy says it followed the rules. That is not transparency. That is the government equivalent of a teenager saying, “I totally did my homework, but something happened to it.”
And now Jena Griswold wants to be Colorado’s next attorney general. Give me a break. Based on this episode alone, voters have every reason to demand better accountability, better judgment, and fewer disappearing acts from their public officials. Michael Allen is the only logical choice for Colorado’s next Attorney General. Colorado does not need to promote this kind of bureaucratic dysfunction. It needs an attorney general who understands that public records belong to the public, taxpayer money requires accountability, and “we can’t find it” is not an acceptable governing philosophy.
Source: CBS Colorado
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