Request By:
Mr. Tommy J. Wilson
Carlisle County Judge/Executive
P.O. Box 279
Bardwell, Kentucky 42023
Opinion
Opinion By: David L. Armstrong, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
You refer in your letter of April 9, 1985, to a miscellaneous letter this office sent to you concerning county expenditure of money your county received from the state out of the Area Development Fund established in the State Treasury for capital projects. Your question was whether such funds may be spent on county road department equipment or county roads. That remains your question, for the reason that the fiscal court distinguishes between a miscellaneous letter of the Attorney General's Office and a formal official opinion of the Attorney General's Office. You stated over the phone quite candidly that, over the years you have been a member of the Fiscal Court of Carlisle County, the fiscal court has considered a miscellaneous letter of this office just a letter of informal discussion of county problems, but not rising to the formality, accuracy, and seriousness of an official opinion. You said that the fiscal court thinks of an official opinion as our best statement of the law on the subject. Thus you entreat the Attorney General to treat this question as a request, not for a letter, but for an official and formal Attorney General opinion.
Now, to proceed with your question as to whether Area Development Fund money can be spent on county road department equipment or county roads or bridges. KRS 42.350(2), upon its enactment in 1976 (Ch. 339), attempted to define capital projects in some detail. However, in the 1978 amendment of KRS 42.350, subsection (2) contained the short statement that money in the fund shall be used only for capital projects which contribute to community or industrial development in the Commonwealth. The explicit prohibition against using the fund, directly or indirectly, for the acquisition, construction, reconstruction, renovation or maintenance of any road, street, highway or bridge was spelled out clearly upon the enactment of KRS 42.350 in 1976, and later amendments did not remove that prohibition from the statute. As the legislature expressed it in the 1976 legislation, provisions for schools and roads were made in other acts of the General Assembly.
CONCLUSION
From the clear and unambiguous wording of KRS 42.350 (2)(f), it is our opinion that the Area Development Fund money granted to counties cannot legally be expended by a fiscal court for county road department equipment or for county roads and bridges. Thus the expenditure of that fund for the purchase of a truck for the county road department would be illegal, since such purchase comes within the express prohibitions of KRS 42.350(2)(f). The courts are bound by the literal wording of an unambiguous statute. Bailey v. Reeves, Ky., 662 S.W.2d 832 (1984). The term "road, street, bridge or highway" logically includes any road department equipment, such as a truck, to be used by that department.
It is not necessary, in view of the express prohibition of KRS 42.350(2)(f) against using the money for road purposes, to dig into the intricacies of what is meant by the term "capital projects", as it appears in KRS 42.350(2), except to examine the relationship between equipment purchases and "capital projects." Even though KRS 42.350(2)(c) provides for the use of the fund for "the purchase of major items of equipment," such equipment can only be considered in connection with equipment of an eligible "capital project." That isolated language (subsection (2)(c)) must be considered within the general frame of the general purpose of the legislature as gathered from all parts of KRS 42.350(2). City of Owensboro v. Noffsinger, Ky., 280 S.W.2d 517 (1955). Once that juxtapositional concept is understood, it follows that the general and broad prohibition against the use of the fund for public roads, streets, bridges or highways, would extend to any county road department equipment of any kind. We see no intent to except the broad category of "equipment" from the public road prohibition. If there had been such intent, the General Assembly could have easily so written.