Request By:
Mr. Frederick G. Neikirk
Pulaski County Attorney
104 W. Columbia Street
Somerset, Kentucky 42501
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
Your county judge/executive has requested that you write concerning the administrative powers of magistrates outside fiscal court meetings. Specifically you ask whether the magistrates serving on the fiscal court have any supervision of personnel, departments, the authority to issue purchase orders for parts, materials or supplies. In short, he wants to know what duties the magistrates have, as individuals, outside a fiscal court meeting.
As one man who, in answering a questionaire as to whether he was married, replied "hardly at all", the magistrates have practically no function as individuals outside of fiscal court meetings.
The fiscal court is a legislative body; and it can only act as a body when it is in session for the purpose of taking action, and can speak only through its orders.
Farmer v. Marr, 238 Ky. 417, 38 S.W.2d 209 (1931). In plain language when the justices of the peace are gathered together properly in a meeting of the fiscal court, they are in business for the county. When the meeting is adjourned and they begin to act as individuals outside of the meeting, they are simply out of business.
While it is generally recognized that a fiscal court may appoint committees to discharge mere ministerial duties, it cannot delegate to an agent or committee any power or authority to exercise a discretion which the law has confided to it.
Calvert v. Allen County Fiscal Court, 252 Ky. 450, 67 S.W.2d 701 (1934) 703.
The thing to keep in mind is that while the legislature has created in the office of the county judge/executive the role of an executive officer for the county, it did not make executive officers out of the magistrates. Thus under the present system, in those counties having the commissioner type of government, the justices of the peace have virtually no public function to perform. However, in those counties containing a magisterial type of government, the justices of the peace are simply members of the legislative body known as the fiscal court. See KRS 67.710, outlining in detail the administrative and executive role of the county judge/executive. No similar role for magistrates has been provided by the legislature.
Secondly, you ask whether the fiscal court sets the number and salaries of the county clerk's deputies. The answer is "yes", except in counties containing a population of 75,000 or over. See KRS 64.530(1) and (5) and 64.345(4)(5).