Request By:
Hon. Dandridge F. Walton
Barnett & Alagia
P.O. Drawer 1036
Frankfort, Kentucky 40602
Opinion
Opinion By: David L. Armstrong, Attorney General; Walter C. Herdman, Asst. Deputy Attorney General
You on behalf of the President of the Kentucky Automobile Dealers Association request an opinion pertaining to the manner in which House Bill 860 was enacted at the 1984 session of the General Assembly. Your particular question relates to the fact that the effectiveness of Section 6 of the bill was postponed along with another section until January 1, 1985. Your specific question is as follows:
"Can the effective date for Section 6 of House Bill 860 be changed from January 1, 1985 to July 15, 1984 by the statute reviser when the change causes no hardship, infringes on no agency's or individual's rights and is to correct an inadvertent error made when drafting the revisions?"
Our response to your question would be in the negative. The state Legislature is authorized to establish any effective date for legislation that it deems necessary and once enacted remains effective until modified by the Legislature itself. In other words, the fact that Section 8 of the act makes Sections 6 and 7 of the act effective January 1, 1985, and thus leaving all other sections to become effective on July 13, 1984 as ordinary legislation, is perfectly legal and requires no emergency clause as in the case of legislation becoming effective prior to that of ordinary legislation.
The power and authority of the Legislative Research Commission including, of course, the Statute Reviser is specifically restricted by the provisions of KRS 7.136 which limits the alteration of provisions enacted by the Legislature to the correction of manifest clerical or typographical errors. More specifically, the alteration power is set forth in subsection (1) which specifically prohibits the changing of the effectiveness of any act of the General Assembly. This subsection is as follows:
"The Commission, in preparing editions of the statutes or supplements or pocket parts thereto for publication or distribution, shall not alter the sense, meaning or effect of any act of the general assembly, but may renumber sections and parts of sections of the acts of the general assembly, change the wording of headnotes, divide or rearrange sections and parts of sections, change words when directed by law, change reference numbers to agree with renumbered chapters or sections, or to make corrections in reference numbers when sections referred to are repealed or amended and the correction can be made without change in the law, substitute the proper section or chapter numbers for the terms 'this act,' 'the preceding section,' and the like, strike out figures where they are merely a repetition of written words, change capitalization for the purpose of uniformity, and correct manifest clerical or typographical errors." (Emphasis added.)
See also KRS 7.140(3) which restricts the powers given the reviser to those enumerated above and other related statutes.