* Note: To see PDF Documents cited in this post simply click on the underlined segment
Well I have been a bit under the weather and not too diligent about keeping up with this blog. Because the comment section on the previous blog post was getting long I thought it might be a good time for a new post. There are 2 items of news that I thought I would bring up for discussion.
The first item is the most recent article in the Herald Leader that announces: “UK violated open meetings law at trustees dinner, attorney general finds”. Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article92139037.html . This article describes the Attorney General’s decision on a complaint brought on by the Herald Leader with respect to its open records request for minutes of a recent Board of Trustees meeting in which a presentation of the Hazard matter was made. We discussed this Hazard matter in the comments section of a previous post, and if you are unaware of this you can read about it in the Herald Leader article entitled: “Amid secrecy, UK pays $5 million to fix billing issues at Hazard clinic” (http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article81581847.html#storylink=cpy ). In their denial of the Herald Leader's open records request, the university lawyers claimed that although this business matter was discussed at this BoT open meeting, no meeting minutes were kept. The Attorney General ruled that in not creating minutes of this meeting UK violated the Open Meetings Act. Then when the Herald leader requested a copy of the Hazard presentation made at this meeting the UK lawyers once again cited the old attorney-client privilege mantra they have perfected, and once again the Attorney General’s office wasn’t buying it, citing legal precedents for why it did not fall under this attorney-client privilege umbrella. So once again UK lawyers are deciding on whether or not to appeal this decision in circuit court. If they do, that would make 3 open records-related Attorney General decisions they are fighting in court. Someone earlier in the comments section questioned why, with a $192,000,000 profit, are they delaying physician raises till September? Well one reason might be because of all these pending legal matters they have chosen to engage in. Legal matters that cumulatively strive to to hide public records from the public. Of course here again is the question of why?
The second item of interest is actually some “perhaps” positive news in this same area. I received information that the university legal office, or at least the university open records custodian, Bill Swinford, has provided the open records requested by Dr. Hatemi that define physician salary and compensations. This as you may remember was an aspect of one of the above Attorney General decisions that the university lawyers decided to fight, claiming that KMSF is not a part of the university and therefore exempt from providing this information. Hopefully this means that the university has changed its stand on this and now are willing to acknowledge that KMSF is a part of the university and subject to public records laws. Because the above Hazard matter is also a KMSF-associated fiasco, it will be interesting to see how they eventually approach this latest Attorney general decision.