On March 27, Governor Beshear permitted House Bill 520, "AN ACT relating to law enforcement records," to become law without his signature.

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/25rs/hb520.html

https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article302913014.html

It is safe to assume that Beshear’s course of inaction was motivated, at least in part, by the public relations thrashing  he took from open government advocates when he unapologetically supported 2024's House Bill 509.

A model of poor draftsmanship, HB 509 was meant to codify the right of public officials and employees to avoid open records laws by conducting public business on their personally owned devices or accounts — a widely discredited  practice that poses as great a threat to the public’s right to know as the approved use of self-deleting messaging apps like Signal.

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb509.html

Obviously, a Beshear veto is mostly symbolic. Here,  it would symbolize mute support for the original legislative intent of the open records law and deference to its framers.  His refusal to issue a veto, in this case, communicates neither opposition nor support but, instead, a desire to appease law enforcement and maximize his political capital — at the expense of a  compelling public interest, shared by all Kentuckians, in ensuring that law enforcement agencies are properly discharging their duties and serving the public’s interest.

The Kentucky Open Government Coalition’s request for veto of HB 520 emphasized the courts’ decades-old focus on preserving the required showing of harm under the law enforcement exception to the open records law — not hypothetical or speculative harm, but a concrete risk of harm.

https://kyopengov.org/blog/kentucky-open-government-coalition-sends-gov…

The Kentucky Supreme Court has spoken to this issue with increasing frustration on three occasions: City of Fort Thomas v Cincinnati Enquirer (2013); University of Kentucky v Kernel, Inc., (2021); and Shively Police Department v Courier Journal, Inc. (2024). In the last of these, the Court repudiated decades of Kentucky Attorneys General open records opinions/decisions misinterpreting, along with law enforcement agencies themselves, the law enforcement exception.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ky-supreme-court/1643297.html

https://casetext.com/case/univ-of-ky-v-kernel-press-inc

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ky-supreme-court/116593181.html

House Bill 520 is the legislative effect to the Shively case’s cause. It perpetuates the wrongheaded view that the mere existence or prospect of a law enforcement action is alone a sufficient basis to withhold public records. It relieves law enforcement of the burden of proving/factually justifying that its denial of an open records request is proper — a burden that every other public agency must meet.

In its concluding sentence, the exception admonishes law enforcement agencies that it “shall not be used by the custodian of the records to delay or impede the exercise of rights” under the open records law. This language does not appear in any other exception or anywhere else in the open records law. The law enforcement exception is to be used discriminately — not indiscriminately — and only when the law enforcement agency provides “factual justification. . . that would draw a nexus between the content of the specific records requested in this case and the purported risks of harm associated with their release.”

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=54126 (See Subsection (1)(h)

Although we cannot predict with certainty how HB 520  will be interpreted and applied, we can be certain that some accountability will be lost in translation. Certainly, that was the intent of HB 520 — to which, sadly,  the Governor had no apparent objection.