The Louisville Metro Council denies that it violated the open meetings law in a series of non-public telephone conference calls with Mayor Greg Fischer that occurred over a period of several months.

The denial follows the Courier Journal's July 1 open meetings complaint addressed to Chairman David James.

So it's back to Jefferson Circuit Court for the Courier and, this time, the Metro Council in an appeal of the council's denial of the Courier's open meetings complaint.

(The Courier once again bypassed the Office of the Kentucky Attorney General for unstated reasons.)

On July 1, the Courier reported that at a recent meeting "a Louisville Metro Council member said reporters would need to wrap up their questions soon because they had a '3 o'clock conference call with the mayor.'

"But that conference call does not appear to have been made available to the public, and The Courier Journal was unable to obtain access to it — despite some describing a series of similar briefings the mayor held as a way to keep city leaders informed about COVID-19 and civil unrest."

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/metro-government/20…

https://www.facebook.com/419650175248377/posts/710639936149398/?d=n

The Metro Council did not deny that the telephone conference calls occurred with the mayor, that a quorum of the council was present, or that COVID-19 and recent unrest were the topics of discussion.

Instead, the council maintained that the matters discussed during the conference call did not constitute public business and were therefore not subject to the open meetings law.

The conference calls, the council maintained, "offer an opportunity for members to pose ... questions to the Mayor's office during a period when the Mayor's time is severely limited."

Emphasizing that no legislation was discussed, the council argued that "not all discussions between public officials constitute public business."

Defending the unpublicized meetings, the council argued that it "couldn't take action relating to the governor's and mayor's COVID-19 orders, and the discussion of daily protests was 'to enable them to answer the many questions they were receiving.'"

Nor, the council argued, did it "have the option of taking action in the streets. No votes were taken, nor were any collective decisions or promises made by members."

But as Courier editor Rick Green correctly points out in today's article about the newspaper's circuit court appeal of the council's denial:

"These calls weren't about the mayor's garden. They weren't about UK recruiting or how the Cardinals will do against Clemson in September. These were pre-arranged, scheduled and organized calls to discuss the public's business."

And as attorneys for the newspaper correctly emphasize, the council takes an "absurdly narrow view of what it means to be discussing public business.

"When a quorum of the Metro Council is meeting, they can talk about the weather, but if they 'start talking about city business, it's a public meeting.'"

In other words, the presence of a quorum of the members of a public agency *and* a discussion of public business *or* taking action triggers the requirements of the open meetings law.

The most fundamental of these requirements is the duty to notify the public of agency meetings and admit the public to those meetings.

"Public business" is not defined in the open meetings law but has been defined by the courts as "the discussion of the various alternatives to a given issue about which the [agency] has the option to take action."

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-supreme-court/1092479.html

This definition is buried in a lengthy 1998 Kentucky Supreme Court opinion in the seventh of ten issues, warranting only four paragraphs. It is by no means a definitive analysis of the concept of public business.

The silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud of agency secrecy is the potential that the courts will more closely analyze the definition of "public business" and provide a workable definition that does not lend itself, as here, to a cynical and self-serving construction that impedes access to public agency discussion of the most pressing public business of the day.

None of the defenses the council raises justify a discussion of public business —especially this public business — that excludes a public hungry for the truth.

The council acknowledges that a quorum of its members were not conferring with the mayor about the weather, the mayor's garden, UK sports, UofL sports, etc., during these scheduled meetings conducted over several months. They further acknowledge that they regularly discussed local developments relating to the pandemic and ongoing protests.

A quorum of council members participated in discussion of public business with the mayor. These discussions triggered the requirements of the open meetings law which they ignored.

The Courier's, and the public's, right to know was, accordingly, grievously abridged.