Request By:
Mr. Dwight Preston
Hardin County Attorney
#30 Public Square
Elizabethtown, Kentucky 42701
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
The Hardin County Fiscal Court is accepting bids for the next fiscal year for the operation of the ambulance service within the county.
Last week the fiscal court presented you with the question as to precisely what the term "ambulance service" embraces. The specific question is whether or not the fiscal court, in granting an ambulance franchise, can restrict the ambulance service to emergency cases only. The answer is "yes". The franchise should be restricted to emergency cases only.
Of course the foundation for the letting of a franchise by a city or county is found in Section 164 of the Kentucky Constitution. That section requires that franchises be issued for a term not to exceed 20 years. It further requires that the franchise be awarded after due advertisement for bids; and the franchise must be awarded to the highest and best bidder. KRS 65.710 through 65.730 permits counties to contract for ambulance service. Specifically KRS 65.730 provides that a county may provide for ambulance service for all "sick and injured persons" in the
In OAG 67-272, which you mention, we concluded that since the courts have adopted the common law rule to the effect that judicially a day is the whole or any part of the period of 24 hours, from midnight to midnight, the computation of the per diem fee must necessarily take the "midnight-to-midnight" rule into consideration. Thus if a particular defendant is incarcerated in the county jail, the fee of $5.75 will be paid for any incarceration between midnight of one day to midnight of the next day. Should he remain in jail after the second midnight then that would involve another $5.75, since his retention would extend over into the second period of midnight to midnight. See
Talbott v. Caudill, 248 Ky. 146, 58 S.W.2d 385 (1933).
It is our opinion that the doctrine of the common law rule as exposed in Talbott v. Caudill is still the law in Kentucky. Thus no matter the number of times an individual is committed to and released from the jail during any day [midnight to midnight] the Executive Department for Finance and Administration would pay, where the prisoner is charged with violating a statute, only one day for keeping and dieting that individual so long as his retention involves only one day, in terms of midnight to midnight.
The point is that the computation of the dieting fee is based upon one day in jail being considered confinement for all or any part of the period from midnight to midnight. It has nothing to do with a prisoner being charged with different offenses in connection with such retention. The thrust of the common law rule is that the law will not cut a day into pieces, since the law generally rejects all fractions of a "day". Further, there is nothing in KRS 64.150 suggesting any departure from the common law rule based on different offenses being charged to the same prisoner. Only the time frame [midnight to midnight] is significant.