Request By:
Ms. Laurie Beatty
Editor
Murray State News
Wilson Hall
Murray State University
Murray, Kentucky 42071
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an opinion of the Attorney General as to whether the Board of Regents of Murray State University may properly hold a meeting by conference telephone. You state that such a meeting was held on October 27, 1978, and that all but two of the members participated in the conversation from various parts of Kentucky.
KRS 61.805 defines a meeting as follows:
"Meeting means all gatherings of every kind regardless of where the meeting is held, and whether regular or special and information or casual gatherings held in anticipation of or in conjunction with a regular or special meeting. "
We believe that a conference telephone call is a gathering or meeting within the statutory definition. This opinion is based upon the statute itself and also upon the court decision in
Fiscal Court of Jefferson County v. The Courier Journal and Louisville Times Company, Ky., 554 S.W.2d 72 (1977). In that case the court declared void a vote taken by telephone by the Jefferson Fiscal Court which promoted and set the salary of the county employee and which approved the lease by the county of real estate for the use of the social services department. The statute and the court decision appear to make telephone meetings completely unacceptable under the Open Meetings Law.
We would point out, however, that in an emergency situation it is not always necessary to give advance notice to the media of the holding of a special meeting. KRS 61.825(2) reads as follows:
"The notice provided for in subsection (1) of this section is not required in the event that a special meeting is called to deal with an emergency involving injury or damage to personal property or financial loss to a public agency or the likelihood of such injury or damage or financial loss, when the time requirement of such notice of such special meetings would make such notice impractical and increase the likelihood of injury or damage or financial loss. "
In such an emergency situation a telephone conference call meeting may be acceptable but the fact that a statutory emergency exists should be well documentated.
The preamble to the Kentucky Open Meetings Law states that the public business is not to be done in secret. We therefore believe that it would be a subversion of the Open Meetings Law to conduct meetings over the telephone except in rare emergency cases.