Request By:
Mr. James P. Dady
Staff Writer
The Kentucky Post
421 Madison Avenue
Covington, Kentucky 41011
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an opinion of the Attorney General concerning the Kentucky Open Meetings Law, KRS 61.805-61.850. You present the following statement of facts.
"On June 12, the port authority board, at a regularly scheduled meeting voted to accept the resignation of Executive Director Patrick Carigan and appoint Robert Vogt as interim director. Both votes were unanimously in favor.
"There was little discussion of the actions at the meeting. In a subsequent interview, the board chairman, James Ward, said he and other board members agreed to accept Mr. Carigan's resignation and appoint Mr. Vogt on the basis of telephone conversations among the members prior to the meeting. Mr. Ward acknowledged that the board's actions at the regular meeting only served to ratify decisions which had already been made on the basis of the telephone conversations. "
In the case of
Fiscal Court of Jefferson County v. Courier Journal, Ky., 554 S.W.2d 72 (1977) the Court declared void telephone votes of the Jefferson Fiscal Court which promoted and set the salary of a county employee and which approved the lease by the county of real estate for the use of the Social Services Department. The facts you present, however, are different. In the Jefferson Fiscal Court case the vote was taken by telephone and recorded in the minutes. The facts you present are that the Port Authority Board members discussed the question of the resignation of the director and the appointment of an interim director by telephone before taking action at a regularly scheduled meeting. We see no violation of the Open Meetings Law in this state of facts.
The Port Authority Board took formal action in a regularly scheduled meeting. We do not believe that the fact that the Board members had informally discussed the business before hand, and had, perhaps, informally polled the membership as to what action should be taken, constituted a violation of the Open Records Law. We do not believe that it is the legislative intent that members of a public board shall not talk to each other about the public business of the board except in a meeting. What the Open Records Law provides in KRS 61.810 is:
"All meetings of a quorum of the members of any public agency at which any public business is discussed or at which any action is taken by such agency, are declared to be public meetings, open to the public at all times, except for the following: . . ."
Meetings by a telephone conference call are, of course, a violation of the Open Meetings Law since a conference of a quorum would be a subversion of the law just as much as a face to face meeting of a quorum of a public board.
In the facts you present there is still another reason why we believe that the Open Meetings Law was not violated. The accepting of a resignation and the appointment of an interim director were matters of personnel which are exempt from the Open Meetings requirement by KRS 61.810(6).
In summary, we do not believe that the Northern Kentucky Port Authority violated the Kentucky Open Meetings Law under the facts stated above.