A recent Facebook post by Kentucky Public Retirees' President Larry Totten generated considerable discussion. Much of it — not surprisingly — was negative.

Totten described the new identification procedure for admission of visitors to the Capitol Annex to attend legislative committee meetings.

In the past, visitors were asked to indicate their destinations and produce a drivers license or photo ID. The security guard on duty manually recorded the visitors' names and destinations on a written visitors log.

The new identification procedure uses LobbyGuard. As Totten described the procedure, a visitor to the Annex is asked to enter his or her destination on a computer screen while LobbyGuard scans the reverse side of the visitor's drivers license and takes the visitor's picture. LobbyGuard then generates a customized photo identification badge which the visitor is required to wear while in the Annex.

Totten did his homework. He explained that LobbyGuard's website states that it captures and stores the photographs — as well as personal information, he suspects — and provides instant background checks "against a custom list of banned individuals."

He described the delays created by LobbyGuard, acknowledging that frequent visitors might avoid the lengthy check-in process, but expressed concern about the uses to which the stored personal information "might be — or already is" being put.

Responding to Totten's post, I expressed equally grave concerns about the open meetings implications of the new identification procedure.

KRS 61.840, I explained, addresses conditions on attendance at public meetings. It states that "no conditions other than those required for the maintenance of order shall apply to the attendance of any member of the public at any meeting of a public agency."

It further states that "no person shall be required to identify himself in order to attend any such meeting."

In a 2001 open meetings decision, I continued, the Kentucky Attorney General approved a sign-in sheet at the entrance of a state building that housed several separate public agencies. The attorney general's staff concluded that the sign-in sheet was a reasonable security measure and not an agency imposed condition on attendance at the public meeting.

https://ag.ky.gov/orom/20011/01OMD023.doc

Until the new identification procedure was established in the Capitol Annex, legislative committees only required an attendee to sign in if he or she wished to testify. The Attorney General has also approved a sign-in sheet for this limited purpose.

The identification procedures now in place in the Capitol Annex are far more invasive and place, in my view, an impermissible condition on attendance at public legislative committee meetings.

Persons wishing to attend the committee meetings are not only required to identify themselves upon entering the Annex but are required to wear badges identifying themselves as a condition to attending the public meeting.

Would the procedure survive a legal challenge under the open meetings laws?

I am doubtful. It is clearly an overreach.

But I am equally concerned that lawmakers might respond to an adverse ruling on this issue by amending the open meetings law to permit it.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time when such oppressive measures are justified as necessary to ensure security.

But the more likely rationale for the implementation of the new identification system, and the rationale suggested by many members of the Facebook community who responded to Larry Totten's post, is to discourage public participation at legislative committee meetings.

And this, of course, is why the open meetings law absolutely prohibits conditions on attendance and requirements that attendees identify themselves.