The fix is in at a Colorado Administrative Law hearings? E.g. Griswold's office tripling the penalty recommended by their own hearing officer. The late bloomers.
I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking the fix is in at a Colorado Administrative Law hearing (especially in the SOS’s Office).
If you break one of our state regulatory agencies’ copious rules, the process for our state’s administrative hearings bears little resemblance to a real trial. I recently did some looking into the state’s administrative hearings process, and was disappointed in what I found.
The idea of this being a hearing in front of an independent, nominally-impartial, and disinterested judge is decidedly NOT what the process looks like.
This goes, as you might imagine for an office run by Jena Griswold, double for the Secretary of State’s Office.
More in the op ed below.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/09/22/problems-with-colorados-administrative-hearings-system/
Griswold’s Office tripling the penalty recommended by their own hearing officer.
I thought the below would be a terrific post to put with my op ed earlier since the two are related.
In the first post today, I shared an op ed showing how many of the state’s administrative hearings are NOT run by impartial jurists. They’re hearings where the administrative agency investigates you, charges you with an infraction, and then hires or employs the judge who’ll hear the case (and, as in the case of Griswold’s office, hires an openly partisan Boulder lawyer).
The case I’ll summarize below is another great example of administrative “justice” in this state, though in this case it’s actually an example of an administrative hearing officer being overruled by someone in the department for not being harsh enough!
And, unsurprisingly, this case is one involving a conservative group and Jena Griswold’s Secretary of State Office.
Before starting in on the meat of the case, I point you to the second link below. It is the Secretary of State’s Complaint File for this case. All the documents I reference and quotes I take are from this file.
In 2020, voters gave the nod to Proposition EE, a tax on products containing nicotine which funded schools but largely went to funding Polis’ signature Universal Pre K. I put the Blue Book entry for the measure first below if you want/need the context.
There was a group called “No On EE” pushing for a NO vote on the proposition that broke campaign finance laws/rules by not including the name of the human acting as registered agent for the group.**
Despite attempting to cure the violation, the Secretary of State’s Office went ahead with their case. The Elections Division of the SOS’s Office, acting in a manner similar to the prosecution, sought a guilty verdict and a find or between $150K to $350K. The hearings officer found No on EE guilty and imposed a fine of $10K. Screenshot 1 from the document “OAC Decision” shows that in summary.
Not satisfied with this result, and characterizing the ruling as without rationale or analysis, the Deputy Secretary of State, in the document named “Final Agency Order” goes through a wordy (and in my opinion no better founded) rationale for tripling the penalty to $30K.
Let’s run through it again in case the import slipped by.
The SOS’s office charged a violation, hired a hearing officer who found there was a violation and entered a fine well below what they SOS’s office wanted. Upon hearing this, the Deputy Secretary of State tripled the original fine imposed.
It boggles my mind that this is a system operating in the United States. Not only is your judge hired by the same people prosecuting you, if they don’t like the outcome, they just get a do over and jack up the penalties--the Deputy Secretary’s verbiage notwithstanding!
The legislature and judiciary ceding their authority to rulemaking bodies and other divisions of government is not how our country was intended to run by its founders.
It may result in some efficiencies, but it has come at a cost too. The cost where an unelected official in the SOS’s Office can, at his discretion, triple the fine on someone he disagrees with.
**As a side note, the group running the Yes on EE campaign included public relations firm Hilltop Public Solutions, with employee Chris Griswold, brother of Jena (see the third link below). Ah, smell that swampy air!
https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/initiative%2520referendum_2019-2020%20hb%2020-1427bb.pdf
https://tracer.sos.colorado.gov/PublicSite/SearchPages/ComplaintDetail.aspx?ID=587
https://hilltoppublicsolutions.com/team/chris-griswold/
Closing out the growing season
The liatris (foreground) and rabbitbrush (background) are some of the last bloomers for the season.
Enjoy them in their resplendent (and, for the rabbitbrush, funky) glory while they’re still going!