Request By:
Mr. James A. Kidney
City Attorney
City of Highland Heights
175 Johns Hill Road
Highland Heights, Kentucky 41076
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an opinion of the Attorney General on two subjects, the Open Meetings Law and City Government.
OPEN MEETINGS LAW
You raise several questions pertaining to the Open Meetings Law, KRS 61.805-61.850. The first is in regard to whether a special meeting called pursuant to KRS 61.825 must be confined to dealing with only the subject announced in the notice calling the meeting.
There is nothing in KRS 61.825 which requires that a notice of a special meeting must specify the purpose of the meeting or the subjects which will be discussed and acted on. City councils, however, are under a specific statute governing special meetings which preempts the general statute, the Open Meetings Law. KRS 83A.130(11) provides that special meetings of the council may be called by the mayor or upon written request of a majority of the council; that the call of the meeting shall designate the purpose of the special meeting and no business may be considered other than that set forth in the designation of purpose. As city attorney you acted correctly when you advised the council to call another meeting in order to bring up a second unrelated topic for discussion at a special meeting.
Your next question has to do with whether an agency's meeting is invalid if it does not fully comply with the requirement to give at least 24 hours notice of the meeting to the news media. KRS 61.825(1) provides that written notice of a special meeting must be given to each member of the public agency and to each news medium which has on file with the public agency a written request to be notified of special meetings, said notice to be delivered personally or by mail at least 24 hours prior to the time of the meeting. The strictness of this requirement is ameliorated by the following sentence in the statute: "If time does not permit giving 24-hour notice, then notice that is reasonable under existing circumstances and is calculated to inform the public shall be given to the news media and the public." In the particular circumstances you describe, the decision to call a special meeting allowed only 25 hours prior to the meeting to get notice to the news media, and since some of the media offices had closed for the day and could not be notified until the next morning the 24-hour requirement was not met. We believe that if the media received notice the morning of the day of the meeting there was reasonable compliance with the statute. Also, any action taken by an agency in a meeting which does not comply with the Open Meetings Law will, nevertheless, be of legal effect until and unless it is declared void by the circuit court under KRS 61.830.
CITY GOVERNMENT
Your question on city government is whether an ordinance can become effective without the signature of the mayor when the mayor refuses to sign it.
The controlling statute is KRS 83A.130(6) which reads as follows:
"All ordinances adopted by the council shall be submitted to the mayor who shall within ten days after submission either approve the ordinance by affixing his signature or disapprove it by returning it to the council together with a statement of his objections. No ordinance shall take effect without the mayor's approval unless he fails to return it to the legislative body within ten days after receiving it or unless the council votes to override the mayor's veto, upon reconsideration of the ordinance not later than the second regular meeting following its return, by the affirmative vote of one more than a majority of the membership. "
Under this statute, an ordinance becomes law without the mayor's signature if he neither signs it nor vetoes it within ten days after it is submitted to him. If the mayor vetoes the ordinance, it will take an affirmative vote of a majority of the membership plus one to override the veto.