Scott Franz
Reporter, Capitol CoverageScott Franz is a government watchdog reporter and photographer from Steamboat Springs. He spent the last seven years covering politics and government for the Steamboat Pilot & Today, a daily newspaper in northwest Colorado. His reporting in Steamboat stopped a police station from being built in a city park, saved a historic barn from being destroyed and helped a small town pastor quickly find a kidney donor. His favorite workday in Steamboat was Tuesday, when he could spend many of his mornings skiing untracked powder and his evenings covering city council meetings. Scott received his journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is an outdoorsman who spends at least 20 nights a year in a tent. He spoke his first word, 'outside', as a toddler in Edmonds, Washington. Scott visits the Great Sand Dunes, his favorite Colorado backpacking destination, twice a year. Scott's reporting is part of Capitol Coverage, a collaborative public policy reporting project, providing news and analysis to communities across Colorado for more than a decade. Fifteen public radio stations participate in Capitol Coverage from throughout Colorado.
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SB25-077 would have given governments more time to respond to records requests from the public and businesses while exempting journalists from the delays. The bill's sponsors said governments were being "inundated" with records requests and needed relief with longer deadlines to respond to them. -
State regulators say the legislature removed the public’s access to funeral home inspection reports last year in the same bill they passed to tighten regulations on the industry. This came in the wake of several scandals involving fake ashes and mishandled remains. -
Almost a year after Colorado lawmakers frustrated transparency advocates by exempting themselves from parts of the open meetings law, a coalition of residents seeking more access to government records and meetings said it’s drafting a potential ballot initiative to strengthen “the public’s right to know.” -
Conservationists are urging patience and warning that removing any of the 11 wolves in Colorado so early in the voter-mandated restoration could hurt the chances of success. -
Conservation groups are celebrating the approval of the wolverine restoration bill. They see Colorado as a key piece of a strategy to ensure the survival of the extremely solitary member of the weasel family. -
The new measure will let lawmakers have more private conversations. It will do that by narrowing the definition of public business, let lawmakers discuss bills and other public business electronically without the communications constituting a public meeting, and meet one on one with fewer restrictions. -
Rapid growth at several airports, including Rocky Mountain Metropolitan in northern Colorado, has sparked lawsuits, thousands of noise complaints and health concerns about airborne lead pollution in neighboring communities. -
Like hundreds of other ranchers in Colorado, the Stanko family is anxious about wolf packs being airlifted back to this state, where they were eradicated by the 1940s. -
Democrats who control the state legislature are increasingly using a survey they fill out in secret to help determine whether bills live or die. The results are kept from the public, raising questions about transparency and potential violations of the state’s sunshine law. -
Sen. Kevin Priola blasted his Republican colleagues for what he called their indifference toward the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and refusing to take action on climate change.
