Colorado jury duty notices sent from... Albuquerque?

And an Albuquerque postmark...

After two civic-minded Westword staffers -- who live in different Colorado counties -- recently received jury notices that had been mailed from New Mexico, I made a few calls to see if this was a scam, or another example of a Colorado job going out of state. (Or both, depending on how you feel about the justice system.) And the verdict is in:

Three years ago, Axis Data Solutions Inc. of Albuquerque won the state contract to provide jury summons printing and mailing services. "Bids for that service were scored based on fourteen criteria, including prices for printing and mailing; a company's customer-service history; its organization, services and staffing; the company's location; and its software, computer systems and programming capabilities," according to Jon Sarche, public information coordinator for the Colorado State Court Administrator's Office. "Axis's bid was the highest-scoring of those submitted,"

Clearly, location didn't count for too much in that scoring system.

The Colorado Judicial Department compiles the list of eligible jurors. Here's how, according to its website: Each year, the department receives lists of all registered voters and all holders of driver's licenses and non-driver ID cards throughout the state, as well as records from the state Department of Revenue. The lists are merged, and the result divided by county. Through the year, each county requests a certain number of names based on the number of trials scheduled, and names of people to be sent summonses are randomly selected.

Then they're sent to Axis, which mails out the jury summons notifications from Albuquerque.

But all that is about to change. Axis's contract is up June 30, and six companies had been bidding on the deal.

The just-announced winner: Output Services Inc. of Boulder, which has received a one-year contract that may be renewed up to four times, for a potential total of five years. OSI will begin the work on July 1, and will be paid 7.99 cents for each item it handles -- an estimated 850,000 jury summons and failure-to-appear notices in fiscal year 2012.

So keep an eye out for that Boulder postmark....

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