Request By:
Owensboro Riverport Authority
% Honorable Calvin Ray Robinson
Attorney at Law
210 West Third Street
Owensboro, Kentucky 42301
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Carl T. Miller, Jr., Assistant Attorney General
Mr. John Hager, Attorney for the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, has appealed to the Attorney General pursuant to KRS 61.880 the denial of his request to inspect a record of the Owensboro Riverport Authority. The record in question is described as a letter from the attorney of the W. Rogers Company to the Owensboro Riverport Authority, the letter being written by Mr. Richard S. Holt of the law firm of Greenebaum, Doll and McDonald. We wrote you on March 3, 1983 requesting that you send us a copy of the letter requested and you complied, the letter being received in this office on March 7, 1983. Thank you for your prompt compliance.
In your letter of February 21, 1983 to the Ownersboro 21, 1983 to the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer denying its request to inspect the described letter you gave as the reasons for your denial (1) that the letter is not a public record under the Open Records Law, KRS 61.870 to 61.884, and (2) that the letter is a preliminary correspondence with a private individual not intended to give notice of a final agency action. [KRS 61.878(1)(g)].
OPINION OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
It is the opinion of the Attorney General, after inspecting the described letter, that you acted in accordance with the Open Records Law when you denied inspection of the letter. The letter is plainly correspondence between a private individual and the Owensboro Riverport Authority. It is not correspondence between two public officials on official business [cf. OAG 78-370]. The writer of the letter could make it public if he desired to do so but the public agency involved, ORA, has the permissive right to withhold the letter from public inspection under KRS 61.878(1)(g) which exempts from mandatory public inspection "preliminary drafts, notes, correspondence with private individuals, other than correspondence which is intended to give notice of final action of a public agency. "
We are sending a copy of this opinion to Mr. Hager in order to fulfill the statutory requirement in KRS 61.880(2). Since we are upholding the action of the Owensboro Riverport Authority the requester has the right to challenge this opinion in court.