Request By:
Mr. Jennings Smith
144 Hickory Street
Radcliff, Kentucky 40160
Opinion
Opinion By: David L. Armstrong, Attorney General; Walter C. Herdman, Asst. Deputy Attorney General
This is in response to your letter of February 9 in which you desire to know whether or not this Office has rendered an opinion concerning the interpretation of the following phrase as found in KRS 100.281, ". . . but all plats, preliminary or final, shall be approved or disapproved within ninety (90) days." You further state that the Planning Commission interprets the phrase to mean that it has 90 days after the receipt of each document. However, it is your interpretation that both plats, preliminary and final, must be approved or disapproved within a total of 90 days. KRS 100.281, particularly subsection (1), reads in part as follows:
"All subdivision regulations shall be based on the comprehensive plan and shall contain:
(1) The procedure for the submission and approval of preliminary and final plat and the recordation of final plats. The commission may delegate to its secretary or any other officer or employe the power to approve plats in accordance with the commission's adopted requirements, but all plats, preliminary and final, shall be approved or disapproved within ninety (90) days."
The question has not been presented before. However, in reading the above section as a unit, we believe the reasonable interpretation concerning the 90-day approval deadline would be that the Commission is entitled to a period of 90 days following the submission of the preliminary plat for approval or disapproval and the same period of time, (90 days), to approve or disapprove the final plat. Thus we agree with the Commission's interpretation.
To interpret the statute to require approval or disapproval of both plats within a 90-day period when obviously they would be filed at a time subsequent to one another with possibly the final plat being filed near the 90-day deadline following the filing of the preliminary plat or even after the 90-day deadline, would obviously be unreasonable or impossible to be complied with. In statutory construction, it is a general rule that it is never to be presumed that the Legislature intended to enact an absurd statute or that such statute be construed as to lead to an absurd conclusion. In other words, statutes must be given a practical construction. See