From Medicaid changes to sexual predators, KY’s public servants are addicted to secrecy | Opinion
Last Friday at 9:15 p.m., just a few hours before the Kentucky General Assembly was scheduled to end for the veto recess, Senate Republicans produced a committee substitute on a bill that would make sweeping changes to the state’s Medicaid program, which covers one in three Kentuckians.
In a hastily scheduled committee meeting, lawmakers passed it so it could be rushed to the Senate floor, where it passed on a party line vote. Then it was sped over to the House for a similar vote.
The substance of House Bill 695 is bad, with new work requirements for Kentucky’s Medicaid recipients despite the fact that more than half of working-age adults in the program already have full- or part-time jobs.
They work in low-income jobs that don’t offer employee healthcare. In fact, many of our large corporations, like Walmart, Amazon or Kroger, use the federal health care program to pad their bottom line.
But the process to pass the bill was also terrible.
Why would a party that controls supermajorities in both houses need to hide legislation until it was too late for the public to see or comment on it? They control everything, including a veto-proof majority. Since their legislation will inevitably pass, it seems silly they’d bother to hide any of it.
Unless it could be related to the fact this legislation will affect many of the people who voted for them, and they wanted to keep the public uproar to a minimum.
Or the fact that the party itself if becoming addicted to secrecy, and is determined to keep the workings of the government out of sight of the public for which they ostensibly work.
As the League of Women Voters of Kentucky found the past two years, there’s been a documented uptick in the most slippery legislative practices that shut out the public: Quickly scheduled committee meetings, shell bills filled with last-minute committee substitutes, no pre-filed bills, floor votes scheduled directly after committee votes so that public comment is shut out.
“The League has documented how the legislative process, since 1998, has been increasingly manipulated in ways that minimize citizen participation and stifle full and open debate on significant legislation,” Jenn Jackson, president of the Kentucky League, said in a recent release.
“This legislative session is no exception.”
The public’s right to know
March 16-22 is Sunshine Week around the country. As quaint as it sounds these days, this nonprofit collaboration highlights all the ways the transparency obtained through our open records and open meetings laws allows we the people to understand and hold accountable our local, state and federal governments.
We have some examples here in Kentucky, such as Herald-Leader reporter John Cheves’ long-running series on the truly inhumane treatment of many young people in the juvenile justice system. Most of the information he obtained has been through the state’s open records act, which was shamefully weakened in the last days of the legislature with House Bill 520.
There are also examples of how the system should not work.
This week my colleagues Monica Kast and Kendall Staton documented how often our public universities try to get out of complying with open records requests.
In looking at 12 years of records, they reviewed 156 appeals filed with the attorney general’s office from 2012 to 2024. In total, they found “Kentucky’s public higher education institutions were found to have violated the law on appeal around 65% of the time.”
The University of Kentucky’s example is particularly galling because much of it centers around a terrible case involving UK’s student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel. General Counsel William Thro, who has directed open records operations for the entire span of this reporting, denied the Kernel’s requests about a professor’s alleged sexual misconduct after the professor had moved on to another university.
Over five years, the case went all the way to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which in an unanimous ruling, said UK could not hide behind student confidentiality rules to shield its own actions.
UK is now embroiled in another case with the Kernel over records involving a sexual assault on campus.
But none of the state’s universities do a good job in this; it’s worth asking why the state’s centers of free thought and inquiry are so interested in hiding so much of what they do.
Easy answers
This isn’t difficult.
While it would be nice if public agencies were truly engaged with a government “of the people for the people,’ it’s quite clear that much of government is no longer working for us.
Therefore we must become more engaged with all of our local governments.
We must make sure the people we hired — everyone from members of local schools boards and city councils to governors and legislators — are telling us exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it.
We must use the tools already in law, like open records and open meetings statutes, to keep our elected officials accountable.
While that concept may seem further and further away, this is the work we must do to make sure democracy at every level stays intact.
This story was originally published March 18, 2025 at 11:21 AM.
