With no questions on the floor, the Kentucky House passed a bill that would allow public agencies to require photo IDs from residents who request public records.
House Bill 567 from Rep. Patrick Flannery, R-Olive Hill, gained approval from the House with a vote of 71-19 Friday morning. The 19 votes against the bill included 13 Democrats and five Republicans.
The bill now goes to the Senate for further consideration.
If passed by the General Assembly this year, the bill would change the state’s open records laws to allow a public agency’s records custodian to ask for a government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license, to prove a records requestor’s residency. The General Assembly changed state law in 2021 to allow only Kentucky residents to request public records of agencies in Kentucky, with some exceptions for news organizations.
In his explanation of the bill, Flannery said local governments and police departments are seeing an influx of automated requests from chat bots that check boxes on the request saying they are a Kentucky resident. The current state law doesn’t say how proof of residency can be verified.
“This situation with the bombardment of these requests result in a strain on taxpayers’ resources and time and can slow agencies’ responses to otherwise valid requests made by Kentucky residents, news-gathering organizations and other needed services that are provided by our police and local agencies that have to deal with what we would consider unlawful requests,” Flannery said.
Previously, Lawrenceburg Police Chief Bryan Taylor joined Flannery in a House committee to testify in favor of the bill. Taylor told lawmakers that the bill would help his office weed out open records requests made by online bots.
Flannery filed a floor amendment to the bill, which was also approved, to allow public agencies to ask for a requester’s ID via facsimile, email, mail or by hand-delivery. The amendment also says the agency could ask for alternative proof of residency if the requester does not have a photo ID. He said he proposed the amendment after getting “constructive criticism” about when a requester lives in one part of the state and is seeking documents from an agency located elsewhere in Kentucky.
The Kentucky Open Government Coalition submitted a letter in opposition to the bill to the House committee, arguing that the bill could increase bureaucracy for records custodians who are reviewing open records requests.
One of the Democrats who voted against the bill, Rep. Anne Gay Donworth, of Lexington, said that she appreciated the floor amendment but felt like there are other ways to remove requests from bots, such as a CAPTCHA system.
“I am very concerned about making sure that people still feel like they have access to our government,” she said.