Bluegrass Politics tweets that a lawsuit has been filed against the Kentucky Public Pension Authority in an open records dispute involving access to the 2021 Calcaterra Pollack report for which taxpayers bore the $1.2M cost.
The plaintiff in the open records case, Jordan White, is identified in the 2020 Supreme Court opinion — Overstreet v Mayberry — as counsel to Blackstone Group, L.P., Blackstone Alternative Asset Management Company, L.P., Steven A. Scharzman, and Tomilson Hill.
The Kentucky Public Pension Authority has denied multiple requests for the New York law firm’s report summarizing its investigation into “specific investment activities conducted by the Kentucky Retirement Systems to determine if there are any improper or illegal activities on the part of the parties involved.” Those activities are the subject of ongoing litigation in Franklin Circuit Court.
KPPA contracted with Calcaterra Pollack in late 2020 and Calcaterra Pollack delivered the final report to KPPA in May 2021. KPPA shared a copy of the report with the Kentucky Attorney General under a circuit court order in Overstreet v Mayberry.
(The Attorney General intervened in the Mayberry case just before the circuit court dismissed it pursuant to Kentucky Supreme Court’s instruction in its 2020 Mayberry opinion.)
https://law.justia.com/cases/kentucky/supreme-court/2020/2019-sc-000041-tg.html
In addition to the plaintiff’s request in the newly filed open records case, KPPA has also denied open records requests submitted by the Courier Journal, the Herald-Leader, Kentucky Government Retirees — a labor organization with 15,500 supporters that advocates on pension issues for retired public employees — and the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. KPPA characterized Calcaterra Pollack as its “legal representative” and invoked the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine in support of its denial of multiple requests. The Attorney General also denied open records requests for the report.
In our recent analysis of the top ten open government stories of 2021, the Kentucky Open Government Coalition included KPPA’s refusal to disclose the report, observing:
“Public interest in KPPA’s disdain for the public’s right to know seems to have waned, but the issue remains an urgent one. Can a public agency evade accountability, and the open records law, by contracting with a private law firm — at taxpayers’ expense — to conduct an investigation into the public’s business and possible abuse of the public trust, then avoid accountability by invoking the attorney-client privilege? In at least one unrelated case involving a private attorney’s investigative report produced under contract with a public agency, the Franklin Circuit Court in 2020 said no, ‘The taxpayers paid for this report. They have a right to review it in full.’”
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