American Oversight releases statement on Kentucky House Bill 509

Today, American Oversight released the following statement from Deputy Executive Director Chioma Chukwu following the introduction of Kentucky House Bill 509, which, if enacted, would drastically undermine the state’s public records laws.

“This proposed bill would effectively gut the Kentucky Open Records Act, which was enacted to recognize that ‘free and open examination of public records is in the public interest,’” Chukwu said. “In the last few years, the legislature has methodically chipped away at this vital public benefit in an effort to keep members of the public in the dark about the actions of those who represent them.

“This bill, if enacted, would result in perhaps the most extreme change yet by devastating the very definition of what constitutes a public record and severely limiting what records are even available to the public.”

This is not the first time Kentucky’s legislature has made significant changes to public records law: In 2021, the law was changed to limit records requests only to Kentucky residents, as well as to curtail access to many records generated by the legislature itself, among other changes.

More information on American Oversight’s previous work in Kentucky — including our open records lawsuit, which came after the attorney general’s refusal to disclose public records related to the state’s “Ballot Integrity Task Force” — is available here.