Screen Denver's Electrical and Plumbing Contractors for Disciplinary Actions

Say you are putting together a bid list for electrical and plumbing work on a Denver building, and before you send an invitation to bid you want to know which firms have a disciplinary history with the state. Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) publishes its public actions against a licence (letters of admonition, stipulations, citations, formal complaints) alongside the licence itself. On 2026-10-12, 45 of the 593 active electrical and plumbing contractor licences with a Denver mailing address carried at least one.

The manual way, and what it costs

If your shortlist is 5 firms, look each one up on DORA’s online licence lookup in a browser and read the disciplinary section. That is 5 free searches, and it is fine.

Starting from all 593 is different. DORA’s lookup has no “every contractor in Denver” search, and its detail pages answered an automated client with an HTTP 405 human-verification page when we measured on 2026-10-12. The open-data file in the screenshot does hold everything, and you can download it for free. In it you then filter out every non-trade profession, keep the EC and PC licence types, keep the three active statuses and Denver, and collapse the licences that appear once per disciplinary case into one row each. That is an afternoon in a spreadsheet the first time, and the same afternoon again next quarter.

The faster way

Colorado Electrical & Plumbing License Lookup & List Scraper does that filtering for you and returns one row per licence.

{
  "licenseType": "contractors",
  "city": "Denver",
  "maxResults": 1000
}

contractors means the two firm-level licences, Electrical Contractor (EC) and Plumbing Contractor (PC). The individual licences (master, journeyman, residential) are people rather than firms, so they stay out of a bid list. city matches the mailing city on the licence, ignoring case. maxResults is set to 1,000 because Denver has 593; the default of 500 would cut the list short, and since rows come back sorted by licence type and then number, the part it cuts is plumbing. Run locally on 2026-10-12, this input returned 593 licences (342 EC, 251 PC) in 1.4 seconds.

What comes back

Every licence comes back with license_number, business_name, license_type, status, issue_date, last_renewed_date, expiration_date, the mailing city, address_state and zip_code, and public_actions. The last one is the column this job is about. It is a list, one entry per action, each with case_number, action, effective_date and completion_date. Across the 45 Denver licences that had any, the actions were:

action	Count
CLS Stipulation	38
CLS Letter of Admonition	13
CLS Citation Issued	9
ID Hearing Formal Complaint/Charges Filed with OAC	5
CLS Combined w/other case for action	3

A licence can carry several, and an action can be years old: the first one in the export was a 2018 stipulation completed eight days after it took effect. completion_date is empty on actions DORA has not marked complete.

Two status details are worth reading too. All 593 rows passed the active filter, but one reads “Active - With Conditions” rather than plain Active. And 75 of them show an expiration_date of 2026-09-30, all of them electrical contractor licences, a date already past on the day of the run while DORA’s status still says Active. Treat status as DORA’s answer and the date as a reason to re-check that licence before the job starts.

What you’d do with it

Export to CSV and sort on whether public_actions is empty. The 548 firms with no public action go on the bid list as they are. For the 45 that have one, read the action and its dates; a letter of admonition from years ago and a formal complaint filed this year are not the same finding. Re-run it before each bid round: at $0.004 a licence, the 593 Denver licences cost $2.37.

Worth knowing

This is a screening list, not a contact list. DORA publishes no street address, phone number or email, so you will be pairing these licence numbers with contact details you already have. The city filter matches where the licensee’s mail goes, not where they work: a firm based in Aurora that works in Denver is not in this export, and statewide 834 of the 7,841 active contractor licences have a mailing address outside Colorado. The coverage is the electrical and plumbing licences the state issues; a general contractor is licensed by the City and County of Denver, not by DORA. And firms whose licence reads “Need Master Hire - Cannot Practice” are not in an active export at all (48 in Denver on 2026-10-12); set status to need_master_hire to see them.

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Run it yourself: How to run Colorado Electrical & Plumbing License Lookup & List Scraper walks the whole thing step by step.

If you already have a vendor list and just need to check it, Verify Colorado Electrical and Plumbing Contractor Licences runs those licence numbers as one batch. For Washington, DC jobs, DC Contractor License Lookup & List Scraper (DLCP) covers general contractor and home improvement licences there.