Request By:
Mr. Nat Ryan Hughes
Hughes, Gregory & Haverstock
204 South Sixth Street
Murray, Kentucky 42071
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney, General; By: Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
As attorney for the Murray Electric Plant Board, you have requested an opinion of the Attorney General concerning the Kentucky Open Records Law, KRS 61.870-61.884. You state that a member of the Plant Board has requested to inspect certain Plant Board records and that certain lists be compiled for him. The items requested are as follows:
1. Copy of TVA contract
2. Complete list of real estate owned by Murray Electric System
3. List of total assets (all equipment, real property, etc.)
4. List of total liabilities
5. Copy of power rate structure
6. List of monies, reimbursed expenses or advances for expenditures for employees, board members, and anyone connected with Murray Electric over the past five years.
7. List of all equipment transactions including trade-ins over the past five years
8. List of bid sheets, purchase orders, or accounts payable, for street lights, wire, conduit, plastic pipe, and meter bases, over past five years.
You state that to furnish copies of the records requested would require the hiring of a new employee. Your question is whether the Board may refuse to honor this member's request under the Open Records Law. First, we note that an electric plant board is created by a city of the second or third class under the authority of KRS 96.160 et seq., and is therefore a public agency as defined by KRS 61.870 and subject to the Open Records Law.
It is our opinion that it will be sufficient for the Board to allow the requester access to the records he wants to inspect if they exist and that the Board does not have to prepare lists which are not already in existence. All the items named above are lists which may or may not exist except items 1 and 5.
In OAG 76.375, we dealt with a similar situation where a newspaper reporter made a mass request for records and lists to be furnished to him by the Department of Education. In that opinion we concluded as follows:
"Blanket requests for information on a particular subject without specifying certain documents need not be honored. State employees may not be requested to make compilations of records, but the public has the right to inspect compilations which have been made in the course of business unless the subject matter is confidential by law.
"The right to have copies of records is ancillary to the right of inspection and does not stand by itself. If a person has not inspected the records he desires to copy and cannot describe them with specificity, there is no requirement that copies of any records must be delivered to him. A citizen may make a fishing expedition through public records on his own time and under the restrictions and safeguards of the public agency, but a willingness to pay for copies of records is not sufficient to put the state agency under obligation to furnish broad categories of records.
"A person does not have a right to require a list to be made from public records if the list described does not already exist. If the list exists and is not otherwise confidential by law, a person may inspect the list and may obtain a copy of it.
* * *
"State agencies and employees are the servants of the people as stated in the preamble to the Open Records Act, but they are the servants of all the people and not only of persons who may make extreme and unreasonable demands on their time. For this reason, we believe that a person desiring that lists be made or that he have copies of broad categories of information must expend his own time in digging out the information unless it has already been compiled. "
A board member should certainly have access to the records of the board of which he is a member. Under the Open Records Law any person is entitled to access to public records unless they are by their nature exempted, and he is also entitled to purchase a copy of any record he may inspect for a reasonable fee which may not include the cost of staff time required. KRS 61.874(2). But neither a board member nor a member of the public can demand that virtually all the records of the public agency for the past five years be copied for him for a fee or that any information lists be prepared for him. The Open Records Law only gives him the right to inspect records and select the particular records which he wants copied and sold to him after he has inspected them.
We are enclosing a copy of OAG 76-375 and we trust that it and this opinion will be helpful to you in dealing with the board member's request. We have reviewed the copy of the Murray Electric System public records policy and it is in accord with the Kentucky Open Records Law.