The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider Senate Bill 63, sponsored by Sen. Danny Carroll (R-Benton) at its 10:00 am meeting on February 17. The Committee will hear testimony opposing the bill from the Kentucky Press Association and the Kentucky Broadcasters Association.
Carroll’s “Act relating to personal information and declaring an emergency” has generated considerable opposition, prompting the “right leaning” Bowling Green Daily News to “decry the seemingly endless pursuit of Kentucky Republicans to mock the concept of public transparency, to weaken the press and to generally disregard basic freedoms afforded by the First Amendment.”
The Daily News describes SB 63 as an “absurdly wide-ranging and open-ended attempt to not only drastically limit the amount of ‘personally identifiable information’ that Kentuckians are allowed to know about public officials, but also to establish grounds to sue anyone who shares the kind of information that has been freely available for decades.”
The Coalition can’t really improve on this characterization of SB 63, but we have registered our continued opposition in a statement of opposition and a brief summary of that statement that will be included in the Committee’s meeting folder:
“Chairman Westerfield and Senate Judiciary Committee Members:
“The Kentucky Open Government Coalition opposes Senate Bill 63, an act relating to personal information and declaring an emergency. On January 24, the Coalition submitted to all members of the Senate a copy of our Statement of Opposition to SB 63.
“We asked that a copy of the Coalition’s full statement be included in your Senate Judiciary Committee February 17 meeting folder. A copy is also linked below.
“The Coalition believes that SB 63 will adversely affect both the public, and the public officials it is intended to protect, by creating additional burdens on each and eliminating few, if any, of the ills it targets.
“We oppose SB 63 for the following reasons:
“1. SB 63 fails to address public agency implementation and provide parameters for measuring public agency compliance. Documented challenges associated with implementation of New Jersey’s ‘Daniel’s Law,’ the state law on which SB 63 is based, necessitated cessation of the law and immediate statutory revision.
“2. Without exception, the personally identifiable information to which SB 63 extends protection, is already shielded from disclosure by KRS 61.878(1)(a), the Open Records Act privacy exception. These “enhanced” protections are redundant.
“3. SB 63 signals a seismic shift in the Open Records Act from a disclosure statute to a nondisclosure statute. It’s reverses the legislative policy recognizing that ‘free and open examination of public records is in the public interest.’
“Therefore we urge the members of this Committee to ask the following questions before they cast their votes :
• Does this bill provide clear guidance to public agencies and the public on implementation and enforcement?
• Is an amendment to the Open Records Act necessary to extend privacy protection since existing law provides adequate protection for the information identified in SB 63 or?
• Is the problem which SB 63 seeks to address actually remedied by this foundational shift in the Kentucky Open Records Act?
“The answer to each of these questions, the Kentucky Open Government Coalition firmly believes, is unequivocally ‘no.’ For this reason, we ask the Judiciary Committee members to vote ‘no’ on SB 63.
“Passage of SB 63 ensures confusion and invites the need for immediate remedial legislation. As set forth in greater depth in our full Statement of Opposition, Kentucky’s lawmakers would be wise to treat the New Jersey debacle associated with ‘Daniel’s Law’ as a cautionary tale.”
The full text of our Statement of Opposition to SB 63 can be found at:
https://kyopengov.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/2022-01-24%20Statemen…
