A version of this story was originally published in the July 21, 2016 print edition of The Montgomery County Chronicle under the headline “One year later: External pressures, local decisions have joined together to influence Independence’s medical scene” that includes additional information, including a forward and chronology by Chronicle editor Andy Taylor. When Mercy Hospital […]
The Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) does not “require a request to be made in any particular form,” and requests may be made orally, although an agency “may require a written request.” While such flexibility in the nature of the request may seem to favor those who request documents, especially those who are not lawyers, […]
July 1, 2016, will mark the one-year anniversary of the passage of statutory amendments that conferred additional powers on the office of the Attorney General to penalize public agencies for violations of the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) and Kansas Open Meetings Act (KOMA). Among other things, these new statutes give the AG subpoena power and […]
News organizations’ fears about the Department of Labor’s new Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations, which were proposed last year, will apparently be realized. In February of this year, the Department of Labor (DoL) announced that the new rule will be published in July, perhaps even earlier, and be effective 60 days after publication. The […]
Note: The primary purpose of this request form is to easily enable requestors to include in their requests all statutory language in the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) related to public agencies’ duties to disclose public records. Although a KORA request is not required to be in any particular form, including the language here in your request […]
For any journalist, but particularly student journalists covering their school’s administration and its relationship to its students, the federal Family and Educational Rights Act (FERPA) can present significant roadblocks to obtaining records that would otherwise be open to the public under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA). In Kansas, if a journalist asks a school […]
On February 9, 2016, the Committee on Judiciary recommended that the Kansas Legislature pass the bill now known as House Sub for Sub SB 18. The bill’s key feature is that it would amend the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) to expressly state that video recorded by law enforcement using body and dashboard cameras would be […]
On Tuesday, January 26, 2016, the Senate Committee on Judiciary introduced SB 361, a bill that would amend the definition of “public records” to include state-related communications made from personal devices. The bill was the result of a recommendation of the Kansas Judicial Council’s Open Records Advisory Committee reached during several meetings in the fall […]
Settlement agreements memorializing amounts paid by public agencies to end legal disputes are public records under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) and thus subject to disclosure, even if the parties to the dispute attempt to keep the agreement confidential. As long as settlement documents are retained by the agency in the ordinary course of […]
When a local or state government agency in Kansas receives a request for a public record, the agency may assert that the entire record is exempt from disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA). In conjunction with that assertion, an agency then may flatly deny the request for the record. However, a flat denial […]
