Request By:
Mr. Guy L. Palumbo
Letcher County Attorney
Courthouse
Whitesburg, Kentucky 41858
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
You ask whether county coal severance funds may be obligated by the fiscal court beyond the present fiscal court's term of office. Specifically you ask whether the present fiscal court, whose individual terms of office end December 31, 1981, can presently obligate future receipts of 1982 and later years of coal severance funds for the future construction of a new county high school. We assume you are referring to the local government economic assistance program covered in KRS 42.455(1)(f) (library and educational facilities).
The answer is that the fiscal court cannot create in any year county obligations, without a vote of the people, which would be in excess of the county's income and revenue for the particular year. See § 157 of the Kentucky Constitution. As the court said in Payne v. Covington, 276 Ky. 380, 123 S.W.2d 1045 (1938), the purpose of § 157 and 158 (county indebtedness not to exceed 2% of the value of the taxable property in the county) is to require counties to adopt the pay-as-you-go plan and not to incur obligations in excess of their current revenues.
As to available current funds in a particular year, a fiscal court is further restricted by KRS 68.310. That statute provides that except in case of emergency, no county may during the first half of any fourth fiscal year (presently July 1, 1981 to December 31, 1981) encumber or expend more than 65% of all of its current funds, taken as a unit, budgeted for that fiscal year, not counting funds involved in bonded indebtedness.
Thus the proposed expenditure must be carefully measured in terms of the above constitutional and statutory restrictions.
Finally, county expenditures must be made in terms of an actual budget appropriation for the particular year. See KRS 68.240 and 68.300.