Food for thought as open government in Kentucky comes under siege:

After giving the Tennessee Registry of Election bad advice to facilitate an illegal nonpublic vote, the Tennessee Attorney General's Office "might have come to the conclusion that the public's interest was best served by allowing transparency here and protecting the Open Meetings Act, not undermining it. After all, this was a government body making a decision about a public official.

"This did not happen.

"When news media organizations and the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government filed an open meetings lawsuit, outlining the clear violation, the Attorney General's Office set its compass on creating a new loophole.

"Instead of evaluating its own prior legal advice and acknowledging its mistake, it doubled down against government transparency.

"The Tennessee attorney general argued that the court should adopt a brand new bright-line test on when a decision by a governing body must be in public by public vote and when it could be done in secret: Any decision that is inconsequential, that has no binding effect, could be secret."

[Kentucky's open meetings law mandates that any meeting of a quorum of the members of a public agency at which public business is discussed *or* action is taken be conducted in an open meeting. This mandate extends to serial less than quorum meetings held to avoid the requirements of the open meetings law. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=48229].

A Tennessee court recently rejected the attorney general's "transparent" attempt to undermine Tennessee's open meetings law.

From the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government:

"The open meetings and public records laws in Tennessee will always have enemies who prefer that the people's business be done away from public scrutiny.

We think it's time that the Attorney General's Office stop acting like one of them."