The Courier Journal reports on the administration's legal maneuvering in Office of the Budget Director v. Suetholz.

The article quotes an administration official who emphasizes that the Supreme Court "defeat" is merely procedural and that the administration has followed the Supreme Court's directive in filing a motion for a writ of prohibition.

A writ of prohibition, as the name suggests, is an order from a higher court (in this case, the Court of Appeals) to a lower court (in this case, the Franklin Circuit Court) prohibiting the lower court's action — often on a jurisdictional question.

Here, it relates to that part of the Franklin Circuit Court's May 9 order requiring the administration to release the actuarial analysis to Suetholz within ten days.

No news yet that the Court of Appeals has issued a writ.

The administration claims that Judge Shepherd's May 9 nonfinal order (the issue of Suetholz's attorneys' fees has not yet been resolved) deprives it of an opportunity for appeal since the order also directs the administration to release the report before its 30 days for filing an appeal expires.

The case is scheduled for a hearing on June 12.

On Monday, Judge Shepherd issued an order extending the ten day deadline in his May 9 order to June 12. He noted that the administration did not petition his court for a stay of the May 9 order as might have been expected.

Again, the Supreme Court's ruling here is not a ruling on the "merits" of the case (that is, whether the Attorney general's staff and Judge Shepherd properly decided that the administration violated the open records law in denying Suetholz's request for the actuarial analysis), but is instead a ruling on "procedure."

This is not unexpected (since lawyers are obligated to zealously defend their client). The problem here, as we indicated earlier in our post on the administration's actions, is that the cost to the taxpayers goes up each time the administration undertakes these efforts — especially when their efforts are ill-conceived and therefore fail.

If the Franklin Circuit Court awards attorneys' fees (and rarely has there been a case that so clearly cried out for attorneys' fees based on the "willfulness" standard in the open records statute governing award of attorneys' fees), it has indicated it will include attorneys' fees associated with litigating these new procedural challenges.

If Suetholz then wins in the appellate court, these attorneys' fees incurred in responding to the administration's procedural maneuvers, ratchet up.

And if the appellate court also affirms her right to attorneys' fees (which again seems likely since there is no "plausible justification" for the administration's argument that the disputed actuarial analysis is a "preliminary" record), the taxpayers will pay the cost of the administration's failed procedural efforts *and* its efforts to prevent disclosure of a nonexempt, taxpayer funded actuarial analysis that should have been released when Suetholz first requested it in 2017.