Conservatives cheered, liberals moaned as the KY legislature ticked off this checklist
The 2022 General Assembly, controlled by Republican super-majorities, delighted conservatives and enraged liberals.
While the focus in the final days might have been on what did not become law, like bills legalizing sports betting and medical marijuana, a long list of bills crossed the finish line. Most were GOP priorities that overcame vetoes by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.
“It was really, Mr. President, more than most of us could have thought to be accomplished when we began this journey sixty legislative days ago,” Senate Majority Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, said in a floor speech Thursday night. “But we rarely wasted a day.”
Here are ten of the highest-profile subjects they addressed.
▪ Income tax cuts. With House Bill 8, lawmakers continued Kentucky down the path of reducing the state’s income tax rate while expanding the 6 percent sales tax to cover more services. The taxation shift is estimated to cost the state’s General Fund $888 million over the next two years, but Republican supporters say it will produce growth over the long run.
Certain “triggers” written into the bill — including enough revenue to cover spending and a healthy balance in the state’s “rainy day” budget reserve trust fund — will allow the income tax rate to drop by 0.5 percent increments from its current top rate of 5 percent. The first 0.5 percent cut is expected to happen automatically this year.
▪ State budget. For the first time in recent memory, Kentucky got a two-year budget that wasn’t filled with painful cuts to services.
Instead, flush with billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 pandemic aid and a healthy state economy, the $13 billion annual General Fund includes big pay raises for long-neglected state workers; full contributions for public pensions, plus extra cash to help pay down the pension systems’ $26 billion in unfunded liabilities; and full-day kindergarten at local school districts.
The budget did not include the state-funded preschool programs for 4 year olds that Beshear wanted, nor the mandated teacher pay raises that he requested. GOP lawmakers said they included enough K-12 school funding for local districts to provide teacher raises if the districts choose to.
The budget should leave $1.75 billion in the state’s “rainy day” trust fund for unexpected needs. The budget also left about $1 billion unspent to absorb the income tax cuts.
▪ Abortion ban. With House Bill 3, lawmakers essentially ended abortion in Kentucky, at least for the moment. Lawsuits challenging the bill already have been filed by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Kentucky.
The bill bans the distribution of abortion pills by mail; raises the legal standards for minors seeking an abortion; and mandates the creation of a new and expansive certification and monitoring system to track details about all abortions administered in the state as well the physicians who provide them.
Bill opponents say the system is impossible to implement without additional funding, and as a result, will effectively revoke access to the medical procedure in the state.
▪ School control. Senate Bill 1 ended up doing two things, one of them somewhat controversial and the other very controversial.
The original portion of SB 1 gave more authority to school superintendents to set curriculum and hire principals, taking power away from the parents and teachers on schools’ site-based decision making councils.
Later, lawmakers attached the text of Senate Bill 138. That part requires two dozen specific documents to be taught in middle and high school American history classes and sets “guardrails” — as one supporter described it — on how teachers are permitted to talk about racism, equality and economic opportunity in classrooms.
▪ Charter schools. Kentucky approved charter schools in 2017, but only this year did it authorize public funding for them.
House Bill 9 will allow charter schools to get per-pupil funding from local school districts while operating under independent management contracts with those districts. They would operate under fewer regulations than most district-run schools.
Among the most hotly contested items in HB 9: Charter schools could be for-profit or nonprofit, and language in the bill specifically requires charter schools to be approved in Louisville and Northern Kentucky as pilot programs.
▪ Political redistricting. The session opened in January with new district maps for the state House and Senate and Kentucky’s six congressional seats, the product of 2020 Census data and closed-door discussions by the legislature’s Republican super-majorities.
Not surprisingly, Democrats sued to challenge the maps, saying the GOP drew lines to give itself unfair advantages, such as slicing up the liberal-leaning city of Lexington like a pizza to dilute its electoral clout. While litigation is pending in Franklin Circuit Court, this year’s elections are expected to continue with the new maps.
▪ Public benefits. Urged by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and other business groups to get more people back into the labor force, lawmakers passed two bills to make public benefits for the poor less generous.
House Bill 4 will shrink the length of time that unemployment insurance is available, down from the current 26 weeks, by indexing it to the statewide unemployment average during a recent three-month span. Critics say it could force Kentuckians to take an ill-suited job within six weeks that pays barely half of what their last job paid.
House Bill 7 adds restrictions to the state’s food stamps and Medicaid programs. There are tougher penalties for public benefits fraud and a “community engagement” program that state officials must create for able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients without dependents. There also is a ban on the Medicaid program’s use of a shortcut called “presumptive eligibility” to more easily enroll Kentuckians in sudden need of health insurance.
There are roughly 544,000 Kentuckians who receive food stamp benefits and 1.6 million enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program.
▪ Library control. Senate Bill 167 will let elected county politicians take control of public libraries by naming whomever they wish to library boards and vetoing major library spending. There also is language to let libraries provide their buildings to “educational institutions,” a nod to the private University of Pikeville wishing to occupy the downtown Pikeville library.
Most of Kentucky’s library systems are tax districts established by citizen petition, and until now, they’ve largely been self-governed and self-financed. County judge-executives have appointed library board members, but only based on state-vetted finalists presented to them by the library.
Backers of SB 167 say that library boards can levy property taxes, and so they should be accountable to someone who is elected by voters.
▪ Transgender students. Senate Bill 83 bans transgender girls and women in Kentucky from competing in girls’ and women’s sports from sixth grade through college. The bill declares that school sports designated for females won’t be open to students who were born biologically as male.
Supporters of the bill said it will protect girls’ sports by guaranteeing that students who are born as girls won’t have to compete with students born as boys, and who are stronger and faster as a result of their biological advantage.
Critics rejected that premise and said the bill cruelly targets for harassment a relatively small number of young transgender girls in Kentucky who want to play sports with their peers. Also, they said, the regulating bodies for high school and college sports already have rules addressing the issue.
▪ Name, Image, Likeness. One of the few major bills that generated bipartisan support and no protest was Senate Bill 6, a bill that wrote into state law student-athletes’ right to profit from Name, Image and Likeness agreements.
Student-athletes in Kentucky previously could earn money from NIL agreements because of an executive order that Beshear signed last summer.
Aside from authorizing the deals, the law gives universities the ability to put reasonable restrictions on NIL agreements and grants them immunity from potential lawsuits. The law also requires universities to educate student-athletes on contracts, negotiations and potential tax implications of their deals.
