The town board of Del Norte violated the Colorado Open Meetings Law by censuring a fellow board member during a closed executive session, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday, reversing a judge’s decision and invalidating the censure.
In 2022, Rio Grande County District Court Judge Crista Newmyer-Olsen dismissed Laura Anzalone’s open-meetings lawsuit, concluding that the board’s opinion of her “performance as a trustee, which took the form of a censure,” is not subject to the law because a censure does not concern the “formation of public policy.”
But a three-judge panel of the state’s second-highest court disagreed, writing that Newmyer-Olsen “failed to recognize that the censure was a formal action and therefore … involved the Town’s policy-making powers.”
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that, in order for a public body meeting to be subject to the open meetings law, there must be “a demonstrated link between the meeting and the policy-making powers of the government entity holding or attending the meeting.”