Opinion
Opinion By: Albert B. Chandler III, Attorney General; Amye L. Bensenhaver, Assistant Attorney General
Open Records Decision
This matter having been presented to the Attorney General in an open records appeal, and the Attorney General being sufficiently advised, we find that the Greenup County Fiscal Court properly refused to honor Joseph Charlie Hill's December 3, 2002 request for the same record Mr. Hill requested on September 28, 2002, namely, the consent and release form for "Campbell Cemetery Road." It is the opinion of this office that 99-ORD-107, a copy of which is attached hereto and incorporated by reference, is dispositive of the question presented in this appeal. The fiscal court furnished Mr. Hill with a copy of this record on October 15, 2002, and he is not entitled to received a duplicative copy of that record based on the reasoning set forth in 99-ORD-107. Nor is he entitled to the "(Original) not a copy" of that record. Although KRS 61.874(1) guarantees the open records requester "the right to make abstracts of the public records and memoranda thereof and to obtain copies," KRS 61.872(1) expressly states that "[n]o person shall remove original copies of public records from the offices of any public agency . . . ."
With respect to the remaining requests in Mr. Hill's December 3, 2002 letter, we find that those requests did not conform to the requirement that a requester "describ[e] the records to be inspected." KRS 61.872(2). Instead, the remaining requests were requests for information such as the "mailing address of Winfield Floyd . . . [and] Mr. Floyd's attorney and/or representative," the names of persons who witnessed the consent and release form, and the name and mailing address of the person who held the office of Greenup Fiscal Court Clerk on September 18, 1991. Based on the reasoning set forth in 99-ORD-71, a copy of which is attached hereto and incorporated by reference, the fiscal court had no obligation to honor these requests.
A party aggrieved by this decision may appeal it by initiating action in the appropriate circuit court pursuant to KRS 61.880(5) and KRS 61.882. Pursuant to KRS 61.880(3), the Attorney General should be notified of any action in circuit court, but should not be named as a party in that action or in any subsequent proceeding.