Request By:
Honorable Glen Shepherd
Mayor, City of Cumberland
Cumberland, Kentucky 40823
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Walter C. Herdman, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
This is in answer to your letter of recent date in which you raise the question as to whether membership on the Cumberland Valley Area Development Board and the Cumberland Municipal Housing Commission are compatible, thereby permitting one individual to serve in both capacities at the same time.
Our response to your question would be in the affirmative. Area development districts are considered separate political subdivisions of the state pursuant to OAG 73-318; however, they are in the nature of hybrid bodies not comtemplated by § 165 of the Constitution and KRS 61.080 relating to incompatible offices.
At the same time, a municipal housing commission is also a separate political entity which the Court of Appeals has held to have some attributes of a state agency but is not a county or subdivision of a county, a city or a town. [Reference OAG 70-444]. Here also the court has indicated that a housing commission is neither fish nor fowl but is also a hybrid agency never contemplated in the referred to sections of the constitution or statute. See Louisville Municipal Housing Commission v. Public Housing Adm., 261 S.W.2d 286 (1953).
Under the circumstances, therefore, there would exist no constitutional or statutory incompatibility in the event a person served on the Cumberland Valley Area Development Board and on the Cumberland Municipal Housing Commission at the same time.
There is always the possibility of a common law incompatibility; however, this is a question of fact that only the counrts can determine. See Hermann v. Lampe, 175 Ky. 109, 174 S.W. 122 (1917).