Outpatient services at the Lee Specialty Clinic, a state-owned facility serving Kentuckians with intellectual and developmental disorders, are set to be slashed in mid-July.(Sylvia Goodman / KPR )The administration of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced controversial cuts to a medical clinic this s ummer that were later reversed, but is choosing not to release details of their communications leading up to the cuts.The administration has refused to disclose 127 emails relating to the Lee Specialty Clinic in the run up to cuts announced on June 12, deeming them “preliminary” and thus exempt from disclosure under the Kentucky Open Records Act.The Cabinet for Health and Family Services has gone a step further, choosing to withhold not just the body of those emails, but the identities of who sent and received them, the time and date they were sent and their subject lines.Spokespersons for the cabinet originally told Kentucky Public Radio they would provide the non-exempt identifiers of the withheld emails, but then abruptly changed their minds in August, without explanation.Kentucky First Amendment attorneys have long criticized the overuse of the “preliminary” records exemption by state agencies, but said the Beshear administration is going well beyond that by withholding the entire record instead of just redacting the parts deemed preliminary.“Just because a record has some exempt information doesn't mean you can withhold the whole thing,” said Mike Abate, who represents the Kentucky Press Association and Louisville Public Media. “You can only black out portions of it that are exempt, and you have to release everything else… I think what they're doing here clearly violates that provision of the law.”The Beshear administration announced in June it was making drastic cuts to the Lee Specialty Clinic in Louisville, which provides a wide range of medical services to 1,300 patients across Kentucky with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Beshear blamed the $4.5 million cut set to begin in mid-July on insufficient funding provided by the Republican supermajority of the Kentucky General Assembly earlier that year, which GOP leadership disputed.Two weeks later — and one day after a legislative hearing where Lee Specialty Clinic patients’ family and providers begged for the cuts to be reversed — Beshear announced at his weekly press conference he had found funds elsewhere in the budget to reverse the cuts, saving 1,000 patients from losing services.Following that press conference, GOP House Speaker David Osborne of Prospect released a statement accusing Beshear of creating a crisis around Lee Specialty Clinic “just so he can appear to save the day.”“Suggesting that this program was at risk when the funding was there all along was both irresponsible and unnecessarily cruel to those already facing difficult circumstances,” Osborne said.Osborne — who also questioned Beshear’s motives in two other instances over the summer where Beshear announced, and then reversed, painful cuts — declined to comment on the administration’s full denial of the 127 exempted emails.Abate said the administration was violating open records law, “and I think they know it.”“It's pretty telling that they said they were going to comply, and after you kept pressing for it, they changed their mind,” Abate said. “So there must be something they're trying to hide in these records if they're not willing to do the basic things the statute requires.”KPR is in the process of filing an appeal with the Kentucky Office of the Attorney General.On July 6, KPR submitted another open records request seeking additional communications about the Lee Specialty Clinic in the wake of the announced cuts. The cabinet said last week it is still compiling the records, which may not be complete until September.Cabinet reverses course revealing details of 127 emailsKentucky Public Radio submitted an open records request on June 12, the day the Lee Specialty Clinic cuts were revealed to the media, seeking all communications related to the facility or its leaders by staff of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services stretching back to April. This included the cabinet secretary, commissioners of departments dealing with Medicaid, community based services, intellectual disabilities and finances, and two spokespersons.On July 15, the cabinet responded by disclosing 23 emails, nearly all of which were sent and received on the day of the announced clinic cuts and involved responding to media questions about them. Two emails shared by cabinet leadership were from services providers and the mother of a patient pleading for the cuts to be reversed.The cabinet also noted that it was denying other records they deemed exempt from disclosure under two provisions of the Kentucky Open Records. One exempts “preliminary drafts, notes, correspondence with private individuals, other than correspondence which is intended to give notice of final action of a public agency,” and the other exempts “preliminary recommendations, and preliminary memoranda in which opinions are expressed or policies formulated or recommended.”KPR subsequently asked the agency how many of these records deemed preliminary were withheld, and why they could not turn them over with the preliminary portions redacted.A spokesperson for the cabinet replied on July 23 that there were 127 responsive emails that were deemed “exempt” because of the information contained in the messages.Following up on KPR’s request to have the emails turned over with only the exempted content redacted, spokesperson Beth Fisher said they would send KPR a record of the senders, recipients, date, time and subject line of the emails.“Our team is working on compiling the ‘to/from/subject line’ information for you and should have it this week,” Fisher wrote on July 27. “I’ll check in with Legal to see how things are going.”The following week, Kendra Steele, another cabinet spokesperson, said they were still working on producing the records and hoped to deliver them “in the next few days.”A week later, on Aug. 10, the cabinet reversed course and said it would not provide any information about the exempted emails.“The Kentucky Open Records Act does not require the cabinet to provide exempt records or information about such records other than the information provided in the response to justify the exemption,” Fischer wrote.Cabinet spokespersons did not reply to six follow up emails over the next 10 days asking why the cabinet changed its mind, and if this was a decision made by communications staff or attorneys.On Aug. 20, KPR asked CHFS Secretary Steven Stack after an event in Louisville why the cabinet was not responding to questions about the withheld emails concerning the Lee Specialty Clinic. He suggested sending an email to the same spokesperson who had not been responding.“We respond to those all the time, so we're not trying to hide something,” Stack said.An hour later, the spokesperson said they had no comment on their reversal.Amye Bensenhaver, the co-founder and co-director of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition, said the administration’s reversal and interpretation of preliminary records is part of a growing trend among government agencies.“I don't think there's any agency in state government that's just real friendly toward open government or willing to err on the side of disclosure, which is what the law mandates,” Bensenhaver said. “If they err at all, they should be erring on the side of disclosure, not non-disclosure.”Abate added that Beshear had “a much narrower view of what constituted a preliminary record” when he was attorney general — the state office that rules on open records appeals — than he does now as governor.“I would think we would have gotten a different answer from Attorney General Beshear on the same request than Governor Beshear's office is giving,” he said.‘It’s time to stop crying wolf’There were three instances over the summer where the Beshear administration announced painful cuts to social and medical services — blaming GOP lawmakers for underfunding them in the budget bill passed that year — only to subsequently announce that he had found alternate money in the budget to reverse those cuts.On June 4, Beshear announced major cuts to various social service programs coming at the end of the month. Seven days later at his weekly press conference, Beshear announced he had found $30 million from “outdated or ineffective” projects to fund support for 8,841 children in foster and residential care and prevent 1,500 low-income families with children from losing financial aid.When announcing his reversal of the Lee Specialty Clinic cuts in June, Beshear said he was pulling funds that were allocated to renovating the Kentucky Capitol Annex, which sits across from the Capitol and holds committee rooms and the offices of lawmakers and their staff. Beshear said that project wouldn’t be able to start for years anyways while the main state Capitol remains under construction, and this would serve as a “band-aid solution” for the clinic until the next fiscal year.Beshear also announced in a June 8 letter that Medicaid fee-for-service providers would receive a 4% cut to their reimbursement rate, affecting those who serve some of the most vulnerable Kentuckians. At his weekly press conference on July 22, Beshear announced that he would use $255 million of higher-than-expected corporate tax revenue that month to reverse the cuts.Following that last reversal, Osborne released another statement suggesting Beshear was using the specter of cuts to manipulate Kentuckians.“Rather than frightening vulnerable Kentuckians — including children, individuals with profound disabilities, and seniors — with threats of cuts, it’s time to stop crying wolf and start managing Medicaid with the seriousness, transparency, and accountability Kentuckians expect,” Osborne said.In the two-year budget bill passed in the 2026 session, Republicans slightly increased state spending on Medicaid from the previous year, but allotted at least $400 million less than what Beshear said was necessary to cover benefits. Republicans at the time said they spent less on Medicaid because they did not believe the administration’s estimates.Beshear said in his June 4 press conference that he repeatedly warned GOP legislators that falling short of his requested funding for Medicaid and social services in the budget bill would lead to “painful impacts.”“Action was not taken to correct the most concerning areas,” Beshear said. “Now our families are forced to bear the outcome of these shortsighted decisions.”Following his reversal of the 4% cuts to Medicaid reimbursement rates in July, Beshear said again that he was reacting to Republican lawmakers who claimed they provided sufficient funding in the budget bill.“They say I could have avoided all these cuts; that somehow I'm creating them. Today, I'm taking them at their word, and I'm applying these dollars to reverse cuts and prevent painful impacts to our Kentucky families,” Beshear said. “We will see if their words were genuine or just politics.”When he reversed the cuts to the Lee Specialty Clinic in June, Beshear was asked about families of the patients who accused Kentucky elected officials of using them as political pawns in the legislative hearing the previous day.“I've never used people as political pawns and I never will,” Beshear answered. “When the General Assembly implemented these cuts, they knew or should have known that this is the only place that it could go. And so what we've done is tried our best to prevent that pain. The supermajority has put them there.” ...read more read less