Why a council newsletter is not a marketing email
Three bodies of law reach an elected office’s newsletter: Colorado’s accessibility law, the ADA’s web rule, and records law. None of them names “newsletter” in a headline, which is why most offices find out from a complaint or a records request. Here is each one in plain words, with the source. This is not legal advice.
1. Colorado HB21-1110 and HB24-1454 (accessibility)
Colorado requires public entities’ digital content and the tools they use to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. The good-faith grace period added by HB24-1454 ended July 1, 2025, and the law carries a private right of action. The state’s Office of Information Technology recommends accessible newsletter templates.
What Pressroom does about it: the pre-send checks, the plain-text version of every issue, and the published conformance reports.
What it does not do: meet the law for an office by itself. The office’s own words, images and image descriptions remain its responsibility, and our reports are self-assessed until an independent audit lands.
Sources
- HB21-1110 at leg.colorado.gov
- HB24-1454 at leg.colorado.gov
- Colorado Office of Information Technology, HB21-1110 accessibility pages (oit.colorado.gov)
- CIRSA and Colorado Municipal League guidance on HB21-1110
2. ADA Title II web rule (accessibility, federal)
The Department of Justice’s rule under Title II requires state and local governments’ web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. An interim final rule effective April 20, 2026 set the dates at April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 people or more (Denver included) and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones; that extension is being challenged in court, so the dates could move earlier.
The rule does not name email. A newsletter is in scope through its public web archive and through the government’s effective-communication duties, which is why Pressroom treats the email and the archive page as the same document.
Sources
3. Records retention and open records
Colorado's municipal records retention schedule classes a municipality’s publications, newsletters included, as permanent records (Schedule 40.260).
The Colorado Open Records Act treats an elected official’s correspondence on public business as a public record; drafts and working notes may be withholdable work product, but they are still records. A newsletter that lives in a marketing account disappears when the account closes or the aide who owns the login leaves.
What Pressroom does about it: the public archive with a permanent address and RSS, legal hold, and the editorial-history export that answers “who approved this, when, and what went out” in one archive.
What it does not do yet: map retention periods to a specific records schedule; the office decides what it must keep.
Sources
- Colorado State Archives, Municipal Records Retention Schedule, 40.260
- C.R.S. 24-72-202, Colorado Open Records Act definitions
4. Not law, but the inbox providers’ rules
Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft require senders of more than about 5,000 messages a day to authenticate (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints under 0.3%. Pressroom’s sends carry RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers, and the pre-send checks score spam signals.
If your office is on Mailchimp or Constant Contact today, the question to ask the tool is: who approved this, is it accessible, and where will it be in 2031?