Request By:
Mr. Charles J. Riedinger
Lewis County Attorney
Courthouse
Vanceburg, Kentucky 41179
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
The question you raise concerns the county road program.
Your question reads:
"If the county judge executive makes a trip to any part of Lewis County concerning a road problem, and submits a bill to the fiscal court for 25 per mile traveled, is the fiscal court required to reimburse him?"
KRS 67.722 reads:
"The county judge executive shall receive an annual expense allowance of three thousand six hundred dollars ($3,600), for performing his duties and fulfilling his responsibilities in the administration of the local county road program. Payment shall be made quarterly in the amount of nine hundred dollars ($900) per quarter, the first such payment to be made for the quarter ending March 31, 1978."
Expense allowances are only permissible where expressly provided by statute. KRS 64.710, and Funk v. Milliken, Ky., 317 S.W.2d 499 (1958).
In answer to your question, the expense allowance is designed to cover expenses of the county judge executive in performing his duties relating to the county road program. This would cover any necessary travel expenses incurred as a necessary part of his carrying out his county road program duties. Thus he cannot be reimbursed for particular travel on such mission unless his records reflect that he has previously exhausted the expense allowance given him for such purposes during the annual accounting period in question. This means in a practical way that, in order to ever prove that he has exhausted his expense allowance, he must document all of his actual expenses incurred in connection with his duties involving the county road program.
It must be understood that the statute suggests no formal accountability. However, the statute simply means that the expense allowance is all that the county judge executive can receive from the county, unless he can show in a particular situation that the road program annual expense allowance has been exhausted in paying his actual expenses and does not cover his particular claimed expense. That ultimately means that if he is to recover any money in excess of the annual allowance for such expenses, he must necessarily be able to document all such expenses which were in fact reimbursed by way of the expense allowance. See Manning v. Sims, 308 Ky. 587, 213 S.W.2d 577 (1948) 582.