On a day when developments in open government law were occurring at the state and national level almost hourly, I read the Courier Journal article linked below with consternation.

In it, the Courier reports that the current administration's spokesman, Woody Maglinger, disputes the Franklin Circuit Court's determination that the budget director willfully violated the open records law in denying Ellen Suetholz' request for the actuarial analysis of the governor's 2017 pension plan.

That's no surprise.

"The legal issue in this case," Maglinger professed, "is far from clear-cut as evidenced by the fact that it took Judge Shepherd 32 pages of opinion to resolve this case."

And then, of course, the kicker, "We intend to appeal."

What is it about the word "after" that the administration is incapable of understanding?

The Franklin Circuit Court went to painstaking effort to explain why the analysis of a plan — generated "after" that plan has been finalized and presented to the public in fully formed and formulated fashion — is not, and cannot be, preliminary.

And, yes, that analysis in conjunction with the other issues presented in the case resulted in "32 pages of opinion."

Judge Shepherd laid out a cogent, and we trust irreversible, analysis of a clear-cut legal issue in precisely the number of pages required.

Perhaps Maglinger and the current administration would have been more comfortable with a single sentence declaration: "Preliminary comes before, not after."

Contrary to the views expressed by the current administration, this is a clear-cut legal issue. An appeal at this juncture is an utter waste of time, money, and judicial resources.

To quote a Republican lawmaker who appeared in an interview earlier today in a wholly unrelated non-open records case, the goal here is "Delay, delay, delay and hope they go away."

Ellen Suetholz is not going away.