We continue our series of the Top Ten open government stories of 2020 with today’s installment of numbers 7 and 8: Gov. Beshear and Daniel Cameron.
#7 — Governor Beshear settles pending open records litigation he inherited from the previous administration.
Within days of taking office in December 2019, Governor Beshear began releasing public records that the Bevin administration refused to disclose and that had been tied up in litigation.
The most notable of these were the actuarial analysis of Bevin’s 2017 pension reform plan; records identifying shareholders in Braidy Industries; and records involving allegations of sexual harassment against officials in executive branch agencies.
Beshear was the first Kentucky attorney general to ascend directly from that office to the governor’s office since the attorney general was statutorily assigned the role of dispute mediator in open records and meetings disputes. As attorney general, he had determined that the nondisclosure of these records constituted violations of the open records laws. Continued resistance to disclosure in the courts would have defied logic.
Interestingly, the closest precedent for Beshear’s settlement of pending open records litigation upon taking office was that of his predecessor, Matt Bevin. In 2016, Bevin settled an open records dispute involving access to child fatality records maintained by Governor Steve Beshear’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services that had lingered in the courts for years.
#6 — Attorney General Daniel Cameron reinvents his role as open records and open meetings mediator.
Although he regularly professes a commitment to transparency, Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s track record to date raises serious doubt.
Cameron, who took office on December 17, 2019, when his predecessor, Andy Beshear, was sworn in as governor, has changed the face of open records and meetings decisions, deviated from forty-plus years of interpretation of the laws without a specific legal basis for doing so, and – perhaps most shockingly – publicly expressed confidence in “the candor and diligence of the agencies subject to the act.”
Had he made that statement on December 18, 2019, Cameron’s naïveté might be excusable, but this statement was made nearly a year later in the context of inquiries concerning LMPD’s misrepresentations about the existence of records responsive to The Courier’s request for the Explorer sex abuse investigation.
Indeed, in a break from past practice, in the past year the Courier has regularly bypassed administrative review of open records disputes by the Office of the Attorney General and taken its disputes directly to circuit court.
Cameron’s shrinking full-time open records and open meetings staff now consists of one non-merit and one merit employee. He rarely exercises his authority to conduct confidential inspection of disputed public records or request additional documentation from the agency to substantiate its denial. In fact, he withdrew his predecessor’s motion to intervene to clarify the scope of that authority in pending litigation between universities and student newspapers.
Clearly, Daniel Cameron intends to leave his mark on Kentucky’s open government laws, and that mark is unlikely to redound to the public’s benefit.
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