A reminder that although public agencies have long been encouraged to permit public comment at agency meetings, Kentucky's open meetings law does not invest the public with an enforceable right to comment.

This means that neither the Attorney General nor the courts will consider an open meetings appeal based on complaints about prohibitions or restrictions on public comment.

(Because the open meetings law prohibits the imposition of conditions on attendance "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," the Attorney General has, in the past, examined whether a member of the public was illegally removed from a public meeting based on his conduct during the public comment portion of the meeting.)

https://ag.ky.gov/Priorities/Government-Transparency/orom/2008/08OMD249…

Simply put, the open meetings law "invests the public with the right to listen with its ears and see with its eyes. It does not invest the public with the right to participate by comment or impose a corresponding duty on the public agency to permit such comment."

The return of in-person public comment at Jefferson County Board of Education, although not statutorily mandated, is therefore welcomed.

But a recent Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals' opinion casts some doubt on the Board's restrictions on "defamatory or abusive remarks."

https://www.journal-news.com/news/federal-appeals-court-says-madison-sc…

The Sixth Circuit — which hears appellate cases from Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky — held that an Ohio school board's public comment policy restricting "lengthy, personally directed, abusive, off-topic, antagonistic, obscene or irrelevant" remarks was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/21a0156p-06.pdf

As our sister coalition — the North Carolina Open Government Coalition — astutely points out, "Public comment is a thorny, fact-specific issue all over the country."