When a first met him, Alfred Miller was a reporter for The State Journal.

His career was just beginning. Mine had recently ended.

It was a summer evening in 2017. At the conclusion of the Frankfort Independent School Board meeting we had attended, Alfred asked if we could talk about the ins and outs of Kentucky's open government laws.

He didn't have to twist my arm.

We sat at a picnic table near the board of education parking lot "talkIng shop" for several hours. Alfred was too polite to tell me he was on a deadline.

The professional collaboration and friendship that began that evening took some unexpected twists and turns.

In late 2017, the Finance and Administration Cabinet sued Alfred after he received a favorable ruling from the Kentucky Attorney General's Office in an open meetings case.

Alfred asked me to represent him.

I demurred. Vigorously.

Twenty-five years of writing open records and meetings decisions for the Office of the Attorney General in the "Ivory Basement of the Capitol" had not prepared me for a courtroom battle.

But with some prodding, and the offer of a "little help from my friends," I agreed to represent him, at no charge, in the Franklin Circuit Court. We later countersued the Cabinet for open records violations.

I'm still not sure he got his money's worth.

The open meetings case was "voluntarily dismissed" after the Finance Cabinet convinced lawmakers to amend the open records and meetings laws to exclude the records and meetings at issue in our case. We prevailed in our open records case.

We sardonically referred to the self-serving change in the laws as "Alfred's Law."

While the case proceeded, Alfred left The State Journal to accept a position with The Courier Journal.

Frankfort's loss was Louisville's gain.

Not long after, The Courier announced that this quiet but aggressive young reporter — who grew up on Staten Island, has travelled the world, speaks five languages, received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his graduate degree from Columbia School of Journalism, kills it on the squash court, and prepares an amazing egg tart — would work with ProPublica on a series of articles concerning a then undisclosed state program shrouded in secrecy.

The skills he had developed in exposing bureaucratic abuses and deception at the state and local level through the aggressive use of Kentucky's open records and meetings laws would serve him well in this venture.

And use them he did.

The program, we later learned, was KentuckyWired, "an ambitious statewide broadband project" often characterized as a boondoggle, that is "well behind schedule and more than $100 million over budget."

"State Auditor Mike Harmon," Alfred wrote, "conservatively estimates that Kentucky taxpayers over the next 30 years will be on the hook for $1.5 billion — 50 times what they were originally told the project would cost them. That's because the state quietly assumed most of the risk for this public-private partnership in the closing weeks of the previous Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear's administration."

The Courier released the final installment of its joint project with ProPublica on Wednesday. Having followed the story closely, and shared some of Alfred's frustrations with public agency obfuscation in the handling of his records requests, I congratulated him on his remarkable work:

"This is where serious investigative reporting (coupled with effective use of KORA/KOMA) and critical analysis meet to expose bureaucratic inertia, cynicism, and self-dealing at its worst. Whatever KentuckyWired's future, we won't be drawn into it wearing Old Bub's blinders."

You can learn about Old Bub in the first installment of the series linked below.

And you should. The full series can be accessed here:

https://www.propublica.org/people/alfred-miller

Every Kentuckian, but certainly anyone who values transparency and accountability, owes it to him or herself to read the series.

It reaffirms that the public's interest is best served by free and open examination of public records, regardless of inconvenience or embarrassment to public officials or others, and that such examination "reveals whether our public servants are indeed serving the public."

With respect to KentuckyWired, the jury is still out on that question.