The dispute over a $25,000 report commissioned by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office now centers on whether the document can be located and who was responsible for keeping it. Eight months after a Denver nonprofit requested the report on staff turnover, the office has not produced it, and the consultant who prepared the work has demanded legal immunity before discussing what happened to it.
Suzanne Taheri, an attorney with the conservative government-accountability nonprofit Public Trust Institute, filed an open records request in February, according to CBS News Colorado. Taheri said she noticed a $25,000 invoice for leadership development work on the state's transparency portal; Griswold's office initially told her there were no records documenting the expenditure. Colorado hired Susan Heinzeroth of SageRiver Consulting to conduct training and produce findings, conclusions and recommendations for the Secretary of State's Office, the station reported.
Taheri told the station that the office's explanation changed: it first said no report existed, then said a report existed but had never been received, and ultimately declined to ask Heinzeroth for it directly. Former Griswold staffers told the station Heinzeroth's work included an employee survey. Other former employees separately told the station the report was highly critical of Griswold and alleged that the secretary refused to take custody of it because of that criticism.
The Dispute Over Custody and Access
A Denver District Court judge ordered the Secretary of State's Office to ask SageRiver Consulting whether it still had the report, according to CBS Colorado. SageRiver has since posted a notice that it is temporarily closed. After the order, the company conveyed conditions for further engagement through Heinzeroth's attorney, the station reported.
The conditions included a guarantee that neither the Secretary of State's Office nor the Public Trust Institute would contact or subpoena Heinzeroth again, hold her liable, or disparage her, with a $25,000 penalty if the agreement were breached. Taheri called the demands ridiculous. Heinzeroth's attorney said Heinzeroth had already provided the Secretary of State's Office with a survey summary and final report, and argued she had no legal duty to search further because SageRiver was not the report's official custodian.
Heinzeroth's attorney told the station that Heinzeroth had retired, shredded hard-copy documents and attempted to delete and erase electronic files. Heinzeroth said it was possible, but unlikely, that files remained in archived electronic storage; she offered to search the archive for two hours at a cost of $1,600. That was separate from an earlier proposal, cited in the dossier's broader reporting, for a fuller archival search costing $4,000. Taheri has filed another motion asking a judge to order either Griswold's office or SageRiver to turn over the report and survey results. CBS Colorado reported it had not yet heard back from Heinzeroth's attorney for comment on the new filing.
Contracts and Records-Retention Rules
SageRiver had done other work for the Secretary of State's Office: a $12,200 visioning project in September 2019, a $24,950 strategic-planning project in September 2020, and a separate $24,750 leadership contract that November, according to the Denver Gazette. The Gazette also reported that the office searched 13 email inboxes for the missing report but did not include Ian Rayder's inbox. A separate SageRiver contract for the same $25,000 amount produced a 700-page strategic-planning report, according to a Gazette editorial.
Colorado's state retention policy requires the Secretary of State's Office to keep such documents for ten years, as reported by CBS Colorado, Taheri said. The office's own published retention policy states that records including office policies and procedures, purchase orders, rulemaking files and official letters must be kept for defined periods under the State Archivist Schedule. Separately, purchase-order terms cited by the Gazette state that a vendor deliverable becomes the exclusive property of the state and must be returned once a contract ends. The Secretary of State's Office has said it complies with all record retention obligations and the Colorado Open Records Act, which, per a summary published by the Colorado General Assembly, generally requires records be made available within three business days of a request, with a possible seven-day extension for extenuating circumstances.
What CORA Provides When Records Are Wrongfully Withheld
If a court determines that a public-records custodian improperly denied inspection, it must award court costs and reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party, according to the Colorado General Assembly's Colorado Open Records Act summary. The information available about this case describes an order directing the office to ask SageRiver about the report and a later motion seeking its production; it does not describe a court finding that the denial was improper or an award of fees.
Political Stakes as Griswold Runs for Attorney General
Griswold is term-limited as secretary of state and won the Democratic nomination for Colorado attorney general in June, according to CBS News Colorado. Taheri, who said she has filed hundreds of records requests over the years, described this case as her most obstructionist CORA case yet. She said she believes people simply do not want to produce the report, calling its whereabouts a shell game, and argued that a third party paid with public money must ultimately produce a public document.
Taheri said Griswold should explain why her office failed to retain the report and survey results in the first place, adding that a failure to maintain public documents could carry serious consequences if Griswold becomes the state's next attorney general. With the matter now back before a judge, the question of whether the report still exists — or ever will resurface — remains unresolved.
