Kentucky Senate gets bill that would shield some information about public officials
The Kentucky Senate is advancing a controversial proposal to block the release of some information held in public records about a broad category of current and retired public officials, including judges, prosecutors, police officers, corrections officers and social workers, as well as their immediate families.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted 9-to-2 to approve Senate Bill 63 and send it to the full Senate.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, said his bill is meant to stop the disclosure of “personally identifiable information” about people involved in the criminal justice system. Carroll is a retired police officer.
Under the bill, public agencies could not release the information about the exempted officials or their families if they requested such protection. That would include records disclosing their employment locations or assignments, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses and tax and property ownership records.
The bill would allow for lawsuits against those who disclose the protected information if the officials or their families believe it was done to harass or intimidate them, and with an intent to influence or impact how they perform their jobs, and if they have a reasonable fear of injury or harm to their property as a result.
The General Assembly passed a similar measure last year, but Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed it, calling it “overly broad” and “impractical.” Beshear said a different measure that he signed into law — an “anti-doxxing” bill that criminalized the online publication of personal information with the intent to harass or harm someone — achieved lawmakers’ desired results more effectively.
Opponents told the Senate committee on Thursday that Carroll’s bill would undermine the Kentucky Open Records Act, which provides journalists and other citizens with access to documents and data held by public agencies.
Campaign finance reports disclose political donors’ names and addresses, including those in public jobs, they said, and tax and property records have yielded legitimate news stories about public officials. The law already allows for agencies to withhold certain private information, such as Social Security numbers and medical records.
While a news organization is unlikely to publish a public official’s date of birth, reporters use such information while preparing their stories to be certain they have the correct person and not someone else with the same name, WKYT news director Robert Thomas said.
If Kentucky requires that swaths of public records be blacked out, accurate news reporting will become that much harder, Thomas said.
“There are 326 Robert Thomases in the state of Kentucky,” Thomas said. “There are eight of them the same age as me. And three of us live in Fayette County. So if we were doing a story about me, we would want to be able to cross-reference to be sure we were identifying the correct person. And the senator who proposed this bill? There are 59 Daniel Carrolls in Kentucky.”
Rick Adams, a lawyer for the Kentucky Press Association, said potential traps lurk in the bill’s vague, open-ended language.
“’Personally identifiable information’ is so broadly defined in the bill that if a reporter were to go to the local courthouse to report on what was happening that day and they mentioned the judge’s name and the courtroom that they worked in, that’s a violation,” Adams said.
“The term is so broadly defined that basically any information that could lead somebody to discern somebody’s location at a given time could subject them to civil liability,” Adams said.
According to an analysis attached to the bill by legislative staff, roughly 40,000 local public safety employees would have the right to be shielded by the bill, not counting their families or state judicial officials or state social workers or any of their families.
Removing personally identifiable information about so many thousands of officials and their families from paper and digital files and websites would not be easy, the analysis said.
“The legislation may prevent localities from publishing certain delinquent taxpayers and/or selling all delinquent tax bills to a third party,” according to the analysis.
“With respect to county clerks, the legislation is anticipated to increase duties in already understaffed offices. With the various documents under their purview including those relating to marriages, voter data and vehicle information, there are concerns about the ability to comply,” the analysis stated.
