CORA’s maximum research-and-retrieval rate will jump to $41.37/hour on July 1, letting state and local government entities in Colorado charge up to 23.2 percent more to process requests for public records.

Legislative Council Director Natalie Castle calculated the new rate Wednesday using a formula spelled out in a 2014 amendment to the Colorado Open Records Act. It requires inflating the current $33.58 rate by the percentage change in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood consumer price index since 2019.

Governments don’t have to adopt the new maximum rate, although many did so after it was last adjusted five years ago. CORA still requires the first hour of work fulfilling requests to be provided at no charge.

The $7.79-per-hour increase comes as no surprise to the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, which has been warning Coloradans about the impact of soaring inflation on CORA charges.

“If you think the cost of obtaining public records in Colorado is too high now, you’re not going to like what will happen in 2024,” we wrote in 2022.

Fees already can make public records so pricey they are effectively off limits to the public. In 2020 CFOIC published a report calling for the General Assembly to reevaluate CORA’s “unbalanced” research-and-retrieval fee provision, but that hasn’t happened.