Opinion
Opinion By: Jack Conway,Attorney General;Amye L. Bensenhaver,Assistant Attorney General
Open Records Decision
Leonard Wilson appeals the City of Jeffersonville's denial of his August 28, 2014 request for "the documentation proff [sic] of the amount of time the regular meetings last each month from January 2014 through August 2014." The city denied Mr. Wilson's request in a timely written response advising him that "[t]here is no such record."
KRS 61.835 establishes the legal requirement for the minutes of an agency's public meetings. It states:
The minutes of action taken at every meeting of any such public agency, setting forth an accurate record of votes and actions at such meetings, shall be promptly recorded and such records shall be open to public inspection at reasonable times no later than immediately following the next meeting of the body.
The statute imposes no legal requirement on the agency that the minutes reflect at what time the meeting was convened, at what time the meeting was adjourned, or the duration of the meeting. No other provision of the Open Meetings or Open Records Acts addresses this point of law, and we are aware of no other public record that is likely to contain the information. 1
Although the minutes of public agency meetings often reflect the duration of the meeting because they identify the meeting's starting and stopping time, the City of Jeffersonville did not violate the Open Meetings Act by omitting this information from its commission minutes. Nor did the city violate the Open Records Act by denying Mr. Wilson's request for proof of the duration of the commission's meetings from January to August based on the nonexistence of responsive records. The minutes of the Jeffersonville City Commission's meetings do not contain this information, and the city was therefore unable to produce records that satisfied Mr. Wilson's request. We find no error in the City of Jeffersonville's denial of that request.
Either party may appeal this decision by initiating action in the appropriate circuit court pursuant to KRS 61.880(5) and KRS 61.882. Pursuant to KRS 61.880(3), the Attorney General should be notified of any action in circuit court, but should not be named as a party in that action or in any subsequent proceeding.
Footnotes
Footnotes
1 An agency's regular meeting schedule, required by KRS 61.820, must identify the agency's regular meeting starting time, but is not required to identify the regular meeting's ending time. Even if the regular meeting schedule identified an anticipated ending time, the agency would not be bound by it if it concluded business earlier or later than anticipated. The duration of the meeting therefore could not be accurately extrapolated from the statutorily required regular meeting schedule.