Snow storms and similar natural occurrences do not
fall outside of the Open Records Act’s three-day response requirement, the attorney general's office rules in an open records opinion.
On June 24, 2016, Attorney General Andy Beshear released an
opinion in In re: Daniel
Konstantopoulos/Office of the Clark County Judge-Executive, 16-ORD-128
covering two issues of an open records appeal
Konstantopoulos requested all pay stubs of the Clark County treasurer on Jan. 17, 2016. A snow storm had closed the
county’s offices for several days.
On Jan. 24, 2016, Konstantopoulos had received no response and
filed an appeal with the attorney general. The following day, the county attorney hand-delivered the requested documents to Konstantopoulos at the
meeting of the fiscal court.
Konstantopoulos supplemented his appeal,
challenging both the time and the redactions of gross wages, taxes, and net
pay. The judge-executive responded “unintentional human error” and his
failure to find the statutory basis for redacting the pay stubs contributed to
the delay. The county asked the attorney general to dismiss the appeal after the
records were provided because the county complied with the intent of
the law.
Beshear disagreed, stating that KRS 61.880(1) provides agencies three days – excluding Saturdays, Sundays and legal holidays – after the request is received. He also stated that the legislature did not include natural things like bad weather when drafting this section of the statute, and his office is required to decide appeals by the language of the statute.
The other issue revolved around the redaction of sections
of the pay stubs. Beshear determined that the judge-executive must provide Konstantopoulos
with copies of the requested pay stubs with the salary and incentive
pay not redacted. The attorney general's office found that only
showing gross pay on the stubs did not fulfill the office’s legal obligations
to disclose all nonexempt entries on a pay stub.
No comments:
Post a Comment