SB 63, HB 524 are bad bills that the General Assembly shouldn’t turn into bad law

Let’s say that you have an ethically-challenged sheriff, who is a duly elected pubic official, who repeatedly refuses to pay his property taxes.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

I daresay this is information that most voters and taxpayers would like to know before they go to the polls on Election Day to decide who their next sheriff will be.

A bill currently being considered in the Kentucky General Assembly though would give this deadbeat non property tax paying sheriff the power to keep you from knowing such information about his delinquent taxpaying status.

Such are some of the unintended consequences of Senate Bill 63, which is currently pending in the Kentucky Senate.

The same ethically-challenged sheriff in the above example, who has his wife and daughter and brother on his office payroll who also don’t pay their property taxes, could also block information about their delinquent property tax bills from being released to the public too.

Retired and current public officials, such as judges, social workers, police officers, prosecutors, correction’s officers and so forth could also block the release of certain public records about themselves under the bill.

This proposed bill, which is nearly identical to one passed by the Kentucky General Assembly last year but was vetoed by Gov. Andy Beshear, could also potentially prevent a third-party from purchasing the delinquent tax bills of one of these individuals.

I’ll give the bill’s sponsor, Danny Carroll, credit for what we will assume are good intentions to try and protect police officers and various other public officials and their families from being harassed, but it also opens up a can of worms for potential abuse here.

As a journalist for over 25 years, I don’t know that I have ever published someone’s birthdate in a story, unless it was something like a feature story about someone born on Christmas 75 years ago or something along those lines.

I have used information like dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers in an array of public documents to pinpoint things, such as whether someone charged with a crime is the same individual, who is say a police officer or elected official or the manager of a local factory.

Being able to access such information enables journalists to be able to do our jobs better, and helps us get it right, which is something that everyone wants.

This isn’t the only bad bill currently before the Kentucky General Assembly.

Another is House Bill 524, which would allow all local government entities to bypass publishing public notices in newspapers and instead just put them on a government website.

Put more bluntly, this bill basically puts the fox in charge of the henhouse.

As someone, who looks at websites and particularly government websites on a pretty regular basis, I can assure you that often times information on these websites is hard to find or can be difficult to access.

I’m just talking about the stuff that they want people to be able to access. Frequently, you will find links to positive things that are disabled or don’t work anymore. I’ll cite the example of one government website that I can think of right off the bat that once had a community calendar of events, which hadn’t been updated in well over a year.

Now imagine if you will, a government entity, whose responsibility it is to post a critical audit of their administration on their website. How long do you think this audit link is actually going to work most of the time?

If you don’t like that example, how about posting information about bids on government projects.

Many of you would presume that elected officials would want to get this information widely disseminated. After all, more bids usually means cheaper prices for government entities to pay on projects.

What about some of our more ethically challenged officials out there though? What about the judge-executive, who wants to direct some business fixing a road to his fishing buddy, who is a contractor? The judge-executive has the bid put up on the county’s website ever so briefly for say a few hours. Then the link for about the bid suddenly stops working and isn’t fixed until a couple of hours before the bids are due. Oops.

The judge-executive’s fishing buddy already has the information though. Knowing that he is probably going to be the only bidder, the judge-executive’s fishing buddy pads his bid a few thousand dollars above his usual amount.

Because no other companies knew about the bid in time to make one, the judge-executive’s fishing buddy gets the bid, and we, the taxpayers, pay out more for a project than we should have. Now imagine this happening time and time again. How long will it take before the judge-executive is talking about needing a tax increase to cover expenses, such as rising bids for building projects.

You also might have a situation where fishing buddy contractor kicks back a few thousand dollars to less than scrupulous judge-executive.

Fortunately, we have a good judge-executive here in Whitley County, whom I don’t think would ever do anything like this. Overall, we have a really good group of elected officials period in Whitley County right now, but they won’t be here forever. Sometimes power corrupts.

We’ve had some bad apples in the past, and eventually we’ll probably get some bad ones again in the future.

This is why you have to tailor the law to put in checks and balances to protect against potential government abuse, and one of those checks and balances is publishing public notices in the newspaper of record in the county rather than relying solely on government websites.

These are two bills currently before the Kentucky General Assembly that I would encourage 82^nd Rep. Regina Huff and 25^th Senator Robert Stivers to vote no on.

I would also encourage the public to contact your legislators and ask them to vote no on Senate Bill 63 and House Bill 524.

Huff can be reached by e-mail at Regina.Huff@lrc.ky.gov. Stivers can be reached by e-mail at Robert.Stivers@lrc.ky.gov.

If you would like to call and leave a message for your legislator, please call the Legislative Message ​​​Line at (800) 372-7181.