Lexington denies breaking open meeting law, but considers new rules for ‘work groups’
After concern over whether residents got enough say in solar panel regulations proposed by a Lexington council “work group,” the city’s Urban County Council will consider putting new rules and definitions in place for these groups and task forces.
Council frequently uses these meeting bodies, but their rules are currently hazy, leading some open government attorneys to raise concern that these groups meeting in private violates the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Vice Mayor Dan Wu placed the topic in the council’s General Government and Planning Committee during a Tuesday council work session “in an effort to more clearly define and codify into council rules in regards to work groups, working groups, task forces and the like,” he said in the meeting. It is unclear what those rules might look like.
The move follows recent controversy around public transparency and engagement from a solar work group, made up of four council members and two city staffers, which met behind closed doors to draft policy around rural solar installations in Fayette County.
The council has used work groups and task forces to create public policy — sometimes in public meetings and sometimes in closed meetings — on issues such as short-term rentals and sober living homes.
There was some confusion between city attorneys and several council members on how precisely these groups are regulated.
Wu told the Herald-Leader there are no clear regulations for work groups and task forces in either the city charter or the council’s rules and procedures.
“They’re not really even mentioned,” he said in a March 19 Herald-Leader story on the legality of these bodies.
The city’s law department denied that the work group violated open meetings law, which sets standards for when groups of government officials have to provide public notice and welcome the public in for meetings. The law department argued in a March 23 letter that because these work groups do not have membership formally appointed by the mayor, vice mayor or the council altogether, they are not subject to the Open Meetings Act.
“Instead, without any action, direction, creation, or control by the Urban County Council, a small group including several members of the council volunteered to informally discuss a very broad topic,” city attorneys wrote in response to a Herald-Leader letter alleging the solar work group violated the Open Meetings Act by failing to have those meetings open to the public.
Additionally, because the groups are not comprised of a majority of council members — at least eight of the 15 member body — and were not authorized to enact public policy, they are also exempt from the act, city attorneys argued in the letter.
“They brought their informal discussions to the General Government and Planning Committee and to the Urban County Council as a whole for further discussion and for further action at public meetings,” attorneys wrote of the solar work group’s March 10 presentation to the council which included eight pages of written policy regulations.
The group drafted the recommendations over the course of 11 scheduled meetings.
But a 2025 Kentucky Attorney General guide on the state’s open meetings and Open Records Act shows that subcommittees of public bodies are subject to open meetings.
“A committee of a public agency, even if its function is purely advisory, is a public agency for open meetings purposes and a quorum of its members is calculated on the basis of the committee’s membership and not the membership of the public agency that created it,” the guide said.
Wu’s move to place the topic into a council committee could create specific regulations for work groups. City attorneys conceded in their letter to the Herald-Leader those regulations could be beneficial to the public.
“The Council does recognize based upon the Objection that further discussion and clarity regarding the application of the Open Meetings Act to Council subgroups would be appropriate,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the ordinance that regulates solar on agricultural land is moving forward.
In April, the full council will decide whether to send the new draft language to the Urban County Planning Commission. The commission will discuss and potentially revise the rules before sending them back to the council for further debate and a final vote of approval.
This story was originally published March 25, 2026 at 10:40 AM.
