[In Colorado, "The public is told it's about managing storage, blah blah blah. I was told straight-up in my tech orientation that emails auto-delete, quote, 'to get around CORA.' They just came out and said that.'"]

This is part 1 of "Smokescreen," a four-part Newsline investigation into a culture of secrecy and political meddling at Colorado's Air Pollution Control Division.

"Few Coloradans know the Air Pollution Control Division by name, but every time they take a breath of Rocky Mountain air, they're impacted by the decisions it makes.

"A branch of the state health department with a staff of about 200, the APCD is tasked with overseeing Colorado air-quality policy and, increasingly, with leading many of its efforts to transition to clean energy and battle climate change.

"It's important work that provokes strong opinions and sharp disagreements. Within the last year, the APCD has been sued by multiple environmental groups that accuse it of failing to implement critical climate legislation. Several of its own employees have filed a formal whistleblower complaint that has prompted both state and federal investigations. In July, it abruptly withdrew a pending transportation-emissions rule in a procedural maneuver that state lawyers said was unprecedented. As the agency regulating Front Range air quality, it faces an imminent federal downgrade reclassifying the region as a 'severe' violator of the Clean Air Act.

"All of this has unfolded as Colorado has experienced its smoggiest summer in more than a decade.

"And the APCD's leadership doesn't want to talk about any of it.

"Resistance to media scrutiny is part of a larger hostility within the APCD towards accessibility and public disclosure, according to several former CDPHE employees, as well as attorneys representing three whistleblowers within the division. They paint a picture of an agency where public communication is constantly subject to top-down political interference and a reluctance to offend 'regulated entities' like oil and gas companies and other industrial polluters.

"From inspection reports of major air pollution sources to policy statements to advisories about ongoing public health incidents, employees must navigate layers of approval processes that frequently result in delays, heavy editing and even outright suppression of information. One ex-staffer said that he was instructed that the department's emails are set to auto-delete 'to get around' the Colorado Open Records Act.

"'They want to hide what they're doing'

"The APCD's inaccessibility to the media is only one part of what former employees say is a broader lack of transparency at the division and CDPHE as a whole.

Dickson said that many of his biggest concerns center on the department's handling of internal communications in relation to the Colorado Open Records Act, the state law governing public access to government records. Like many other state government agencies, the department's email messages typically auto-delete after 90 days.

"'What we were told internally about why we auto-delete is different from what the public is told,' he said. 'The public is told it's about managing storage, blah blah blah. I was told straight-up in my tech orientation that emails auto-delete, quote, 'to get around CORA.' They just came out and said that.'

"'Email records retention in Colorado is a problem that needs to be addressed,' said Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, which has called on state lawmakers to reform and modernize CORA. 'The records retention law doesn't even define emails as a record that needs to be retained. … The policies, if you read through them, give a lot of discretion to the people in government to decide what to keep and how long to keep them.'

"In a written statement, Bare declined to comment directly on Dickson's claim, instead referring Newsline to the department's records policies, which he wrote 'are consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the Colorado Open Records Act.'"