Request By:
Hon. Jeffrey M. Stiles
Powell County Attorney
Post Office Box 189
Stanton, Kentucky 40380
Opinion
Opinion By: Chris Gorman, Attorney General; Gerard R. Gerhard, Assistant Attorney General
By letter of June 3, 1992, you ask, in substance, whether the fiscal court may ratify submission of an application for a grant. As we understand it, the grant involved ambulance service.
While your letter does not provide details concerning the grant in question, assuming the fiscal court could have approved submission of the application in advance of its submission, we believe the fiscal court can, after its submission, ratify such action. Discussion follows.
As we understand it from your letter, a grant application (apparently related to ambulance service) was submitted to the Cabinet for Human Resources over the signature of the county judge/executive. The fiscal court, at the time of submission of the application, had not approved such submission, although it later did so. Now a question has been raised concerning the legality of the entire process.
While your letter does not provide details concerning the grant application in question, assuming the fiscal court could have approved submission of the application prior to the judge's submission of it, it may subsequently ratify such submission. Fiscal courts are authorized to make provision for ambulance service. KRS 67.083(3)(d). The grant application, for purposes of reasoning concerning a fiscal court's authority to ratify, would be analogous to the contract in