The transition to the newly redesigned Kentucky Attorney General's website has been a rocky one for followers of open government.
https://ag.ky.gov/Pages/default.aspx
As expected, the changes to the website delay public access to the open records and open meetings material that could previously be accessed with a single click.
Why does this matter? Any member of the public may want to learn whether the Office of the Attorney General has previously addressed a particular records or meetings access issue and how the issue was resolved.
But "one click" searching is no longer an option.
"Government Transparency" has now been entirely eliminated from the Attorney General's homepage "Priorities," replaced by "Checking Government Overreach," "Protecting Life," "Defending Religious Liberty," "Fighting Human Trafficking," "Combatting Child Abuse," and "Tackling the Drug Epidemic."
The residual presence of "Government Transparency" under the drop down menu on the homepage—that we first reported—has been entirely eliminated.
The "Open Records/Open Meetings" materials now appear as the third item under "Resources" on the drop down menu on the homepage.
The significance of this "de-prioritization" is not lost on us. At least now we know how we rate in the current Attorney General's administration.
And, for now, previous links to open records and open meetings decisions appearing in our posts, like this one, are no longer active links:
https://ag.ky.gov/Priorities/Government-Transparency/orom/2001/01OMD110…
The Kentucky Open Government Coalition apologizes for the inconvenience this may cause to anyone reading our past posts.
There may be an easier way to access these dead links, and we hope the Google "crawl" will eventually catch up with them. We welcome your suggestions. We unsuccessfully tried replacing "Priorities/Government Transparency/" with "Resources" in the URL. For now, we suggest this short cut to the dead links in our posts.
•Click into the pre-August 31 link and note the year of the decision (in our example, the year is 2001 based on the first two digits of the ORD number) and the chronological number assigned to the ORD (here, 110 for the 110th decision issued in 2001).
•When the "404 Error" page appears, go to the drop down menu that appears on that page.
•Scroll down to "Resources" and select "Open Records/Open Meetings."
•Scroll down to "Browse the Decisions," hit the down arrow, select the year, 2001, and hit "Go."
•When the 2001 Open Records and Open Meetings" page appears, scroll down under "Title" to 01-ORD-110, look to the far right and click "Download"
https://ag.ky.gov/Priorities/Government-Transparency/orom/2001/01OMD110… now appears as an active link at: https://ag.ky.gov/Resources/orom/2001/01OMD110.doc
As we indicated on August 31, open records and meetings decisions can also be located on the Attorney General's website by using the Search feature at the top of each page and using appropriate search terms. In our example, "whispering," "observation," "hear," and "61.840" might assist you in locating this decision (01-OMD-110) determining that public officials violate the open meetings law by whispering during a public meeting since the law requires agencies to ensure effective public observation, including the ability to hear, at KRS 61.840.
Kentucky Open Government Coalition posts after August 31 should contain live links to open records and open meetings decisions on the Attorney General's new website.
We will submit a letter to the Office of the Attorney General this week, urging him to once again recognize Government Transparency as a Priority and restore it to the homepage of his website, but we are not optimistic about our chances of success.
