It appears that the legal battle for public access to Metro Louisville's unsuccessful Amazon HQ2 proposal will continue.

https://www.facebook.com/1846598708/posts/10211580054417402?s=184659870…

A few legal avenues remain open for the city. Louisville may seek a rehearing or a modification of the August 9 opinion issued by the Court of Appeals or it may petition the Kentucky Supreme Court for discretionary review.

Thus far, it has done none of the above.

But according to an August 13 article that appeared in the Nashville Business Journal, Mayor Greg Fischer's Office issued a statement that the city would seek review by the Kentucky Supreme Court on the same day the Court of Appeals released its opinion affirming the Jefferson Circuit Court.

In that opinion, the Court of Appeals determined that Louisville's proposal forfeited all protection under the preliminary documents exceptions to the open records law in January 2018 when Amazon announced the finalists for its headquarters and did not include Louisville.

http://opinions.kycourts.net/coa/2018-CA-001560.pdf

Why the interest in the Kentucky case in Nashville?

Nashville, too, submitted an unsuccessful proposal to Amazon for its HQ2. And state and local officials have refused to disclose its contents.

The Nashville Business Journal reported in January that "Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slater's III has sealed information about Amazon 'HQ2' for the maximum five years allowed under state law, which means that the full scope of what Nashville and Tennessee bid for HQ2 won't be known until the end of 2023."

The option to seal a public record is not available to the Kentucky Attorney General and it is unclear under what legal authority the Tennessee AG sealed Nashville's proposal. Here, of course, the Courier Journal bypassed the Kentucky attorney general and took its appeal directly to circuit court.

The courts' ruling that the city's Amazon HQ2 proposal must be disclosed to the public may encourage lawmakers to aggressively pursue legislation aimed at protecting failed incentive packages as it did in the 2019 Regular Session.

In a transparent but ultimately unsuccessful effort to permanently shield the city's failed proposal, and presumably others, lawmakers considered HB 387. If it had been enacted, it would have created several new exceptions to the open records law, including an exception for "Records that pertain to proposed economic development incentives not adopted in final action through acceptance by the grantee and approval by the relevant public agency."

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/19RS/hb387.html

The Amazon case may spur lawmakers to redouble their efforts to block access to public records that reveal tax breaks and incentives offered to private businesses — like Amazon — at the public's expense in the name of economic development.

In 2019, lawmakers did not cite a single example of a business prospect that was deterred from doing business with Kentucky because our open records laws exposed them to excessive scrutiny.

As we have observed on many occasions, the current open records law strikes the appropriate balance between the public's right to know if we are, in fact, the beneficiaries of these bargains, on the one hand, and, on the other, the legitimate need for private entities doing business with the state to protect confidential and proprietary information they must share with the state.

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=49156

To preserve our law, and protect our right to know, we must be prepared to wage our own grassroots battle against any such legislative threat.

Meanwhile, don't look for a swift resolution of the open records dispute between the Courier Journal and Louisville Metro unless, on reflection, sounder minds prevail and Louisville foregoes it's threatened petition for discretionary review by the Kentucky Supreme Court.