Open Meetings Lawsuits as a hobby? A weapon? An industry? Attention CO Democrats: small business does not equal big business. An update on my solar panel performance.
Using open meetings laws as a weapon (and/or possibly to line ones pockets?)
I am a fan of government transparency. I am a fan of open meetings laws. I usually read articles on these things when I see them.
I got my local paper last week and one of the articles on the front page caught my eye for that very reason. It's linked below.
As I read the first line, however, I did a double take. I took and attached this line as screenshot 1 so you can see it too. Why on earth is a man from Pagosa Springs, CO suing a school district in Logan County for an open meetings law violation.
I did some looking into this and thought I'd share it with you because I think this is a case of open records law (fan that I am) being abused.
I promise I'll come back to this, but I wanted to share a quick story from my dad's experience (decades long, semi-retired mechanical engineer). Disputes are common in the construction industry. A common problem is when the owner of a brand new building (or one that got retrofitted or remodeled) is unhappy with how the building heats or cools.
The owner brings suit against the contractor, saying that the building was built wrong and isn't performing as it should. The building owner's attorney, experienced in this type of litigation recognizes that lawsuits like this take a lot of money. Someone has to fund the mounting of a case--experts don't testify for free, paperwork and evidence needs to be assembled and organized.
If the owner doesn't have the money to do this (or doesn't want to spend it), the attorney offers a way to "bootstrap" their way into the lawsuit: attach people to the lawsuit who have no possible responsibility in the matter, but who the lawyer thinks is good for some quick settlement money to fund the rest of the lawsuit.
They sue the architect, the engineers, etc. When they collect the small nuisance settlement money, they now can go after the bigger fish. I diagrammed what I mean in screenshot 2.
Why is this relevant? I think what we are seeing with this Pagosa Springs lawyer is similar: he files lawsuits all over the state, then quickly and quietly settles them with the offending schoolboards, walking away with a smallish check in hand.
And they add up. According to the Denver Post article linked second below (and dated from 08/22) this "gentleman" had by that point filed at least 32 lawsuits similar to the one he would later file against RE-1 Valley.
If each suit netted the same amount as RE-1 Valley's, those 32 suits total $104,000. That's about $52,000 a year. Not too shabby for something you can do from home part-time.
This lawyer could be a fan of open meetings laws and thus could be out there, alone on the bridge, defending us all from the scourge of violations, and the school boards do likely violate the law.
But there's still the sheer quantity of them to consider, and there is the disparity in the impact of these suits to consider as well.
I want to add one last thing to the discussion. Take a look at screenshot 3 attached. When you sue a school district, there is a difference in how that suit lands in a big district like DPS vs. RE-1 Valley. DPS has full time staff to manage this and also to help them consult on how to properly hold meetings.
Rural districts often lack this. Suits like these burden them in a different way than they do large, urban districts.
I'm not arguing that a special case should be made when someone breaks a rule, but perhaps a lawsuit should be limited to (when the parties break the rule in good faith) training to fix the problem.
https://www.journal-advocate.com/2023/03/15/re-1-valley-school-district-settles-open-meetings-lawsuit/#:~:text=March%2015%2C%202023%20at%203,contract%20extension%20behind%20closed%20doors.
https://www.denverpost.com/2022/08/01/colorado-open-meeitngs-school-board-lawsuits/
**Related: weaponizing disability law (particularly against small business)?
A proposed change to Colorado law would not allow businesses to fix disabled access problems PRIOR to getting hit with money damages.
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2023/03/24/hillman-lawsuits-should-be-last-resort-in-disabled-access/
Let's stay for a minute on the concept of disparate impacts on different entities.
The interview below between Caldara and Tony Gagliardi, President of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, was interesting and I'd recommend you watch the whole thing whether you own a small business or no.
The part that I want to highlight in this post, however, begins at about the 7:25 mark.
When our state piles regulation upon regulation there is a disparity in how those regulations land on businesses across the state; small businesses are disproportionately impacted by these regulations.
You have to understand that small businesses are ... small. In contrast with a big company who have the economies of scale to have whole departments full of full-time, expert professionals to handle compliance with regulations, a small company run by a couple (it's worse if it's run by a single individual) can't run their business AND become an expert.
Additionally, for a small business, the owner has to be the janitor, maintenance person, marketing guru, HR department, etc.
New rules, new laws, new regulations have a couple of impacts particular to small businesses because of this:
1. It could put an unwitting owner in the position of breaking the law and subject to fines or worse.
2. It forces small business owners to "pay retail" for expert services (as opposed to "wholesale" that big business pays for their in-house departments) to handle compliance.
Is the ever-increasing regulatory burden in this state (along with the ballooning growth of government) what those running the state mean when they talk about supporting small business? Is it what they mean by equity?
***One last thing: I'd like to remind you that while Polis and his merry band of progressives brag about helping small business (by doing things like reducing a filing fee from $50 to $1) they have done absolutely nothing to address the concerns raised in the interview. Worth remembering and pointing out.
An update on solar panel performance.
I posted a ways back about my solar panels and how little they were generating over Winter.
I have been watching the meter and the solar production for a bit now and thought I should update. I want to give a full picture of their output and that includes both failures AND successes.
If you look at screenshot 1 attached you'll see solar production (blue) overlaid with energy consumption (tan) vs. time since the first of the year. Ignoring some blips from snowstorms and cloudy days, you can see that I started getting back into generating more than I consumed about mid-February.
There towards the tail end of March I have the inverse of what I did over Winter:
--I'm consuming half of what I produce
--I'm making about twice as much energy as I did over Winter again. This one becomes more apparent if I do as I did in screenshot #2 where I removed all the consumption.
Lastly, I zoomed in on the last week in March to give you a tighter view of consumption and production (again, in tan and blue respectively). Clearly some days in the week have high electrical consumption (doing laundry and running the oven are the big users) and some don't while the solar production is relatively consistent.
I am glad to see production coming up and even more glad to start building a surplus. Remember that the whole scheme here was to have zero net surplus or cost when averaged over a year; I'm going to need a mighty pile of credits for high summer when the AC's bumping all day and most of the night!