Request By:
Honorable Grover D. Adkins
City Attorney
City of Louisa
Main-Cross Street
Louisa, Kentucky 41230
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Walter C. Herdman, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
This is in answer to your letter of November 15 in which you seek an opinion concerning the following:
"On behalf of the City of Louisa, Kentucky, I hereby request the advice of your office as to whether a member of the City Council who operates an ambulance service and is at many times the only qualified and available ambulance service in the area would be guilty of any conflict of interest in responding to any emergency calls which originate from the radio dispatch office of the city."
Our response to your question would be in the negative.
KRS 61.280 reads in part as follows:
"No officer of a city of the fifth or sixth class shall be interested, directly or indirectly, in any contract with the city of which he is an officer, or in doing any work or furnishing any supplies for the use of the city or its officers in their official capacity. . . ."
The above statute clearly prohibits any member of the city council of a fifth class city from being interested, directly or indirectly, in any contract with the city. From the facts given, however, no contract involving the city and the councilman in question would exist since the compensation for the ambulance services comes from the individual receiving said service and not from the city, and the contractual relationship lies here.
Likewise, we do not believe a common law conflict of interest or a violation of public policy would be involved. In the case of
Arms & Short v. Denton, 212 Ky. 43, 278 S.W. 158 (1925), we quote the following excerpt:
"Public policy is defined to include and embrace all acts or contracts which tend clearly to injure the public health, the public morals, the public confidence in the purity of the administration of the law, or to undermine that sense of security of individual rights, whether of personal liberty or of private property, which any citizen ought to feel. 6 R.C.L. 712. The same text says:
"'It is no doubt correct to say that, while public policy forbids the enforcement of an illegal or immoral contract, it is equaly insistent that those which are lawful and contravene none of its rules shall be enforced, and not held invalid on a bare suspicion of illegality.'"
See also the case of
Commonwealth v. Withers, 266 Ky. 29, 98 S.W.2d 24 (1936).
As we have previously indicated, we do not believe that the member of the city council in question whose ambulance service responds on occasion to an emergency call from the radio dispatch office of the city, would be in violation of the provisions of KRS 61.280 as no contract would be involved between the city and the ambulance service, nor do we believe that a common law conflict of interest would exist.