Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg’s administration subverted the Kentucky Open Records Act when it refused to provide correspondence between city officials and a private nonprofit pushing a controversial development plan, according to experts in state records law.
A proposal backed by Greenberg to build a tennis and pickleball complex at Joe Creason Park is getting pushback from many local residents. The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting requested correspondence about the proposal, including messages between city staff and members of Kentucky Tennis & Pickleball Center, Inc., the nonprofit pitching the development, and Bellarmine University, which public records indicate was envisioned as part of early plans for the facility.
Greenberg’s administration told KyCIR it must specify the email addresses of non-city employees in order for the government to locate such documents.
“We have no way of searching communications with an external party specifically without their email address,” the city responded in a message on its online platform for managing open records requests.
Experts say the city is not allowed to require someone to list out specific email addresses for outside parties before fulfilling a public records request – not under the current state law.
“There's just no legal authorization,” said Amye Bensenhaver, co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes government transparency.
KyCIR is appealing the matter with the Kentucky Attorney General.
In an email Thursday afternoon, mayor’s office spokesperson Kevin Trager said because KyCIR didn’t provide specific domain names or email addresses to search for, its request “would require that open records staff manually search through tens of thousands of employee emails looking for” correspondence with the Kentucky Tennis & Pickleball Center and any of its staff, directors or other representatives.
“A cursory search has resulted in thousands of emails and documents and would likely take hundreds of hours of staff time to complete redactions,” Trager said via email.
Attorney Michael Abate, who specializes in First Amendment law and is LPM’s attorney in media matters, told KyCIR the claim that the news organization’s request for records “wasn’t specific enough is nonsense.”
“They have to be able to search for certain topics or words in their email system, and if they don’t maintain it that way, then they’re not complying with the act by making the records reasonably available to the public,” he said via email. “There’s no question what you’re asking for and it is their duty to provide it.”
Louisville Metro Government manages scores of records requests from members of the public, and the city has a well-documented backlog of unfulfilled requests, with officials citing limited staff resources.
Greenberg promised to boost transparency within city records in 2023. Since then, he’s faced criticism and lawsuits over how his administration handles records requests from Louisville Public Media, The Courier Journal and his own government.
In this case, KyCIR asked for the following records from Metro Government:
- Correspondence dating back to Jan. 2024 between various city officials and staff, including Greenberg, and the Kentucky Tennis & Pickleball Center as well as any of its officers or staffers, including directors Will and Fred Davis, David Dick and Susan Moss. (Moss is chair-elect of Louisville Public Media’s board of directors.)
- Correspondence from Jan. 2024 onward between various city officials and staff, including Greenberg, and Bellarmine University and several of its staff members, including president Susan Donovan, trustees Donald Kelly and James Allen, and multiple members of the athletics staff.
KyCIR made similar requests for correspondence between Kentucky Tennis & Pickleball Center representatives and Louisville Metro Council members Josie Raymond and Ben Reno-Weber.
While the requests to the mayor’s administration sought correspondence sent to or by staffers across multiple city departments, the Metro Council requests were for messages sent to or from only two individual councilmembers.
The Metro Council Clerk’s office fulfilled those records requests without asking KyCIR to provide specific email addresses for the nonprofit group’s directors or staff.
Bensenhaver said under state law government agencies can require people to submit a signed records request in writing, with their name printed legibly on it, that describes the records they want to inspect.
“It doesn't say anything about, you know, superimposing additional requirements,” she said.
Bensenhaver, whose prior, 25-year stint in the state attorney general’s office centered on public records and meetings issues, noted Kentucky’s open records law was established in 1976, so emails and automated searches for documents weren’t envisioned then.
Regardless, she said the law doesn’t stipulate that government agencies can add requirements as needed or tell someone to provide extra details if they’re seeking records that involve a private individual or organization.
“They're just pulling it out of the air in what may or may not be an attempt to impose additional impediments to public access,” she said. “The burden is not on the requester to do anything more than to describe the records to be inspected.”
Local environmental attorney Tom FitzGerald, who opposes the proposed development, said he got a similar response to his own request for city correspondence about the Joe Creason Park development. He said city officials asked for individual email addresses, as well as a specified timeframe and keywords to search for.
“I don't have the email addresses of the third parties they've communicated with, because I don't know who they've communicated with,” he said. “They should be able to figure that out.”
FitzGerald has raised concerns about the proposed tennis complex and how it was announced after Greenberg’s administration already executed a letter of intent with the developer.
“And I'm not insensitive to the fact that … in this day and age, there's a voluminous number of records that are generated in any given day about any number of topics,” FitzGerald said. “But in this case, we are attempting to get information that I think should have been available to the public in the first place.”
Correction: We updated this story to reflect Susan Moss's role at LPM.
