Courier Journal columnist Joe Gerth expresses the outrage we all share after the Kentucky Attorney General "creates a big loophole [in the open records law] for Kentucky officials to hide public business."
"It's hard to believe Kentucky's Open Records Law, which assumes most documents created for the purpose of doing public business by public employees are available for public inspection, would allow a state agency to circumvent the law simply by sending messages using a phone or computer that they purchased rather than the state.
"In fact, it doesn't.
"The first time an attorney general ruled that records kept on private computers and phones were not obtainable through the Open Records Act was when former Attorney General Jack Conway, on his last day in office, ruled that way in a case involving the Louisville Water Company in 2015.
"Over the next few years, then-Attorney General Andy Beshear walked back that ruling in a couple of cases and wrote that one had to judge whether such emails and text messages could be obtained under the law on a case-by-case basis.
"No Kentucky court has ever ruled on the issue.
"So when an outdoorsman from Elizabethtown became concerned that the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources was rife with corruption, he filed an open records request looking for the goods.
"He asked for all communications between the agency's commissioner, certain employees, commission members and two legislators, including emails and text messages written using both state and personal computers and telephones.
"Fish and Wildlife turned him down and he appealed to the attorney general.
"That's when Cameron, in a two-page ruling a week and a half ago, dismissed 45 years of precedent in attorney general rulings that had found that it's not the place that the record is held that's important, it's whether the record deals with public business.
"Good government demands that a court gets the opportunity to overturn Cameron's egregious ruling. And it shouldn't matter if you're a Republican, a Democrat, a Whig or a Know-Nothing. We all benefit from transparency."
