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.

The maximum hourly rate state and local government entities can charge to process requests made under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) rises every five years with inflation. Set at $30 when the legislature passed House Bill 14-1193 in 2014, the rate was reset to $33.58 on July 1, 2019.

Two years from now, it’ll rise again — by a lot.

To get a good picture of how today’s soaring inflation will likely affect CORA’s research-and-retrieval rate, the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition contacted Natalie Mullis, an economist and director of Legislative Council, the General Assembly’s non-partisan research staff. Mullis helpfully answered our question by plugging the latest Consumer Price Index numbers (for urban consumers in the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area) into the spreadsheet she developed to adjust the CORA fees rate in 2019.