Colorado Code README

Colorado Code — Colorado Revised Statutes by citation, topic, and title

Keyless. "C.R.S. 18-3-102" returns murder in the first degree.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1704+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

The official site redirects into a wall; a second official route does not

leg.colorado.gov's "C.R.S. Online" link does not host the text itself — it redirects into advance.lexis.com, a JS-rendered, cookie-session SPA whose own next step is a login-capture redirect (CaptureReturnUrl). That is the same class of wall this pack family declines (ASP.NET postback / anti-bot), and it has no stable per-citation URL to probe anyway.

The Office of Legislative Legal Services separately publishes the whole C.R.S. as downloadable files, one per title, on its own plain file server — no login, no JS, keyless:

https://olls.info/crs/crs2026-title-18.htm         (current edition)
https://olls.info/crs-archive/CRS-2015-TITLE-18.htm (a historical edition)

Files are per title, citations are per section — and titles are BIG

A title file holds the whole title plus case-law annotations after every section (Title 18 alone is ~9.5MB), so the section is cut out of it bounded by the next section heading OR the start of the annotations, whichever comes first. Annotations are Lexis's editorial case-law commentary, not the statute, and are never returned — only the statutory text, the Source: amendment history, and Cross references: (all public law).

The cut runs on the raw HTML, not the tag-stripped text, on purpose: a real section heading is the only place a citation is wrapped in <b><span>NUM.</span></b>. The per-article mini table-of-contents that precedes every article, and plain cross-references inside OTHER sections' annotations (a citation that happens to land at the start of a text line once tags are stripped), both repeat the same number unbolded — textually indistinguishable from a heading after stripping, never bold in the source.

Three file formats across 27 years of archive

Checked against Title 18 (old enough to exist in every edition):

2025 is declined explicitly (edition_format_unsupported) rather than risk a silently wrong parse for one edition out of twenty-seven — almost certainly a one-year migration artifact between the other two generators. If a future year changes format again, co_statute will start answering section_not_found for a title that exists; the same risk every sibling state pack already takes on the current year alone, just extended here across 25 archived years too.

Topic search is a nearby-heading window, not full hierarchy awareness

co_search runs against the ~18MB General Index (crs2026-index.htm), which is a nested tree — a topic heading followed by indented sub-entries that do not repeat the heading word. Matching only a result line misses that structure, so each query word is matched within a small window of the lines immediately preceding a citation-bearing entry. This works well for short topics (1-3 words: "landlord", "security deposit", "concealed handgun") and gets noisier on long compound phrases, which is why the tool description says so.

The four capabilities

• By citation — co_statute. Yes.
• By topic — co_search (General Index) and co_titles (title list with subject hints). Yes, with the window caveat above.
• Historical version — co_statute with year, 2000-2024 and current; 2025 declined (see above). Yes, mostly.
• Amendments/history — the Source: line, surfaced as history. Yes for the current template and 2000-2024; for 2000-2024 editions cross_references is usually null because that era files "Cross references:" inside the annotations block this pack deliberately excludes.

Data sources

• https://olls.info/crs/ — current C.R.S. edition, by title.
• https://olls.info/crs-archive/ — archived editions back to 2000, by title and year. robots.txt disallows crawling this path for SEO; that is not a redistribution question for data this public (CLAUDE.md's standing ruling).
• https://olls.info/crs/crs2026-index.htm — the General Index, for co_search.

Colorado Office of Legislative Legal Services. Colorado statutes are public record.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "colorado-code": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/colorado-code/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/colorado-code/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1704+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/co_statute \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"section":"18-3-102"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/co_statute. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "colorado-code": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-colorado-code"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-colorado-code

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Colorado Code data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT