A complaint filed today in Franklin Circuit Court by the Kentucky Open Government Coalition poses "a question of exceptional importance under the Open Records Act: are records sent or received by a public official, pertaining to public business, exempt from disclosure simply because they were sent or received on a privately owned device or email account?"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DwtHsTYcbqRmN-OVJ9H7epuItFTUv6yq/view?…

From the complaint:

"The Defendant in this case, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission, insists that is the law. Alarmingly, Kentucky's current Attorney General agrees. See, e.g., 21-ORD-127. This interpretation violates the plain text of the Open Records Act and decades of practice across the Commonwealth.

"If affirmed by this Court, the Commission's interpretation will gut the Open Records Act and provide a roadmap for public officials to shield all manner of things from the citizens they serve."

The Coalition is represented in this case by Jon Fleischaker, Michael Abate, and William R. Adams,

Kaplan Johnson Abate & Bird LLP.

"What should be particularly concerning to the public" in this case, Abate explains, "is the way that the Attorney General is pretending this has always been the law. That's not true—and his office knows it."

"These rulings are a radical departure from what the law has been," Abate asserts. "And they willfully ignore the fact that the General Assembly rejected the very exemption the Attorney General is now attempting to create. We are confident that the courts will reject this attempt to gut the Open Records law from the inside."

The stakes in this case are high. The public's right to know is in capable hands.