Request By:
George Wilson, Secretary
Corrections Cabinet
State Office Building
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Carl T. Miller, Jr., Assistant Attorney General
Ms. Mary Schurz, Editor of The Advocate Messenger has appealed to the Attorney General pursuant to KRS 61.880 your denial of her request to inspect certain public records in your custody. The records are described as a study of alternate sites for a 500-bed medium security prison. The Honorable Barbara Jones, General Counsel, Department of Corrections, responded to the request on your behalf and stated that the kind of information requested is exempt from the requirements of mandatory public inspection by KRS 61.878(1)(h), "preliminary recommendations, and preliminary memoranda in which opinions are expressed or policies formulated or recommended."
OPINION OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
It is the opinion of the Attorney General that you acted in accordance with the Open Records Law, KRS 61.870 to 61.884, in denying inspection of the described records.
By telephone conversation with Ms. Jones we have learned that there exists no unified formal study document on the question of selecting a site for a 500-bed medium security prison. The "study" documents consist of intra office memoranda from employees of the Department of Corrections in which they express opinions and make recommendations and as such the "study" documents are exempt from mandatory public inspection by KRS 61.878(1)(h).
We dealt with a similar question in OAG 82-450. In that case there was a formally developed document known as "Development Potential Analysis, Ormsby Village, Lynwood Properties, Jefferson County, Kentucky" which was prepared for Jefferson County by Real Estate Research Corporation. We considered it exempt under the same statutory provisions. In this case, where there is no formal study document, only memoranda from various department employees, there is all the more reason to hold that such intra office communications are exempt under KRS 61.878(1)(h).
As directed by statute a copy of this opinion is being sent to the requester who has the right to challenge it in court under KRS 61.880(5).