"LOVELAND'S PARADE OF HORRIBLES ... LACKS MERIT" -- Judge Juan Villaseñor
A True Story That's Stranger Than Fiction
She’d long since reached the limits of her patience, and the moment my friend looked at me, I knew something had changed — something significant.
It turned out I didn’t know the half of it, and the full story is stranger than fiction.
I’ll begin at the end:
On Tuesday, March 29th, 2022, Judge Juan Villaseñor, of the 8th Judicial District Court, ruled that the city of Loveland did not act in good faith in filing a petition in early March.
The petition concerned a request made by current Loveland Mayor Jacki Marsh.
Mayor Marsh, along with her attorney Troy Krenning, had in early March requested to see messages between Mayor Pro Tem Don Overcash and a city employee.
Open Records Acts, like Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA), are laws that recognize our right as individuals to access public documents, which consist of anything in the possession of any public agency.
The Colorado Open Records Acts is called CORA.
Quoting an articulate legal scholar:
Since the Vietnam War and Watergate, when government secrecy created so much popular anger, Americans have insisted on having the right to know what public officials and agencies are doing. Because so few states have full subsidy disclosure, there could be no economic development accountability without open records laws.
Every state has a law, modeled on the federal Freedom of Information Act [FOIA], affirming the public's right to see government documents. The federal FOIA permits "any person" to request access to agency records, including citizens and non-citizens, corporations, universities, and state and local governments.
(Source)
Thus, on Tuesday, March 29th, 2022, when District Court Judge Juan Villaseñor ruled that the city of Loveland did not act in good faith in filing a petition in early March, this same Judge Villaseñor also and in no uncertain terms cited “corruption issues” — corruption, specifically, in how the city of Loveland’s handled the entire situation.
It is, I repeat, a story stranger than fiction.
Did you know that in 1904 the American fiction writer O’Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1862 - 1910), coined a now-famous term — banana republic — in the ninth paragraph of his excellent short-story “The Admiral”?
Here’s the O’Henry paragraph:
In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy. This provision—with many other wiser ones—had lain inert since the establishment of the republic. Anchuria had no navy and had no use for one. It was characteristic of Don Sabas—a man at once merry, learned, whimsical and audacious—that he should have disturbed the dust of this musty and sleeping statute to increase the humour of the world by so much as a smile from his indulgent colleagues.
(Source)
I mention the incomparable O’Henry now in the context of his short-story because on Tuesday, March 29th, 2022, after District Court Judge Villaseñor cited “corruption issues” in the city of Loveland’s handling of the situation, this same Judge Villaseñor also said the following:
“This is the kind of thing that happens in banana republics.”
Judge Villaseñor was of course referring to a Supreme Court ruling in 1909 concerning the putative monopolization of the tropical fruit market.
“It leaves one with the suggestion that Ms. Delynn Coldiron [Loveland city clerk] and her attorneys were in a very difficult position because the mayor submitted a CORA request … and the two folks to whom the request pertained to [sic] had made, admittedly, embarrassing remarks or cast aspersions on the mayor and others. It leaves the court to infer what happened here is Ms. Coldiron was in an untenable situation, where she was trying to please two masters and she couldn’t.”
No, Ms. Coldiron, you cannot. The judge is correct. You cannot please two masters. You’ll either hate the one and cling to the other, or you’ll sustain the one and despise the other.
Quoting Mayor Marsh’s attorney Troy Krenning, who in the following statements is referring to Judge Villaseñor’s comments:
“This does resemble a banana republic. This does have the whiff of corruption. This has the absolute whiff over a coverup.”
All politics, as I’ve said so often, is loco.
Two days after this, the moment my friend looked at me, I knew something had changed — something significant.
Long before any of the things about which you just read and long before June of 2021, when my friend initially filed her first open files request — a request she’d made in order to gain access to a certain quondam police detective’s employment file — my friend had witnessed this very same corruption, firsthand. The former police detective’s name: Brian Koopman of the Loveland, Colorado, police department.
The city of Loveland answered my friend’s request with a heavily redacted and blacked-out file, which you can see in the following video-clip:
(to be continued …)