Local members of the Kentucky General Assembly Senator Gary Boswell, Majority Caucus Chair Suzanne Miles, Representative DJ Johnson and Representative Scott Lewis joined members of the Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce on Saturday morning, providing a legislative update.
The event was open to members of the Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce and held in the Chamber’s third floor conference room.
Jake Boswell served as the event’s moderator, presenting the legislators questions and discuss points.
All legislators agreed that the main theme of the current legislative session, which is currently on day 42, is passing a budget.
Representative Johnson called the budget the “elephant in the room,” which “takes a lot of focus.”
Representative Miles agreed, saying, “Obviously, the budget is the number on thing, and that’s what we focus most on.”
Representative Lewis said that, as education chair, education is a focus for him, stating that, while there’s always discussions about the school systems in Jefferson and Fayette County, he wants to make sure that legislation benefits local counties, too.
“I’m fighting for public education funding. They’re fighting. Everybody’s fighting for their piece,” said Lewis, who represents the 14th House District containing parts of Daviess County, along with Ohio and Hancock Counties.
Senator Boswell, who serves on the Appropriations and Revenue Committee, explained that, this session, the budgeting process has been different.
“If it’s up to me, we would figure out a zero-based budget. We’d start with nothing and start adding. We’re not going to do that, but if it was up to me, that’s what we’d do,” said the senator. “We have a tight budget.”
The senator continued, “I don’t think the revenue is our issue. I think we just got to make sure that we control our spending.”
Johnson echoed Boswell’s comments about enforcing more “responsible spending,” stating that agencies requesting funding need to “tell us why you want the money. Prove that you need the money. Otherwise, we’re looking to have a responsible budget, where we can send as much money back to the taxpayers as possible.”
Miles stated that the biggest obstacle that legislators faced concerning the budget was “getting the numbers that we needed to work from.”
“That is what we require from the agencies, but we didn’t get it. These agencies are saying, ‘We want exactly what we had, plus more’, but they didn’t give us any backgrounds to be able to kind of look to see, is there anything in there that may not be needed anymore,” she said.
Miles said that subpoenas had to be issued to some of these agencies “to get more information.”
Johnson said that he’s noticed that “we’re putting an emphasis on trying to prioritize and fund local projects as much as we can, projects like the judge-executive and the city mayors…have come to us as priorities.”
The legislators also touched on Governor Beshear’s pet project, mandating public preschool for all kids across the state of Kentucky, a campaign called “Pre-K for All.”
Johnson called the governor’s plan a “good concept,” but said that the method that the governor wants to use to make the campaign happen “would be devastating to our childcare industry, statewide.” He added, “I know our private industries are doing just as good a job teaching our children as public schools,” countering Beshear’s proposal for “Pre-K for All” to only public schools.
Lewis pointed out that the “Pre-K for All” movement could be a way to better prepare students for kindergarten.
“We have a test called kindergarten readiness when they come to school, and our kids that go to daycare and our kids that go to pre-K score higher. The ones who we really need to capture are ones that don’t enroll anywhere. So, they’re staying in whatever environment they’re in the whole time, so they’ve got a limited amount of language skills, justing depending on what home life they come from,” said Lewis.
Lewis continued, “We don’t have the space right now to do pre-K for all. Some of our school districts don’t have the extra rooms to do that. That is something we have to consider.”
Miles said that HB6, which Dave Kirk, president of the Chamber, said has been endorsed by the organization, has passed the House and heads to the Senate. The bill provides modifications to current child care legislations with the goal of returning more adults into the workforce.
Miles said the she’s supportive of local projects, including creating a resource location for entrepreneurs, but continued to say, “We’re going to have to figure out the difference between our wants and needs. And, right now, our needs are in the budget, so we’ll see where we can fit in the wants.”
Moderator Boswell asked the legislators about the movement to get Kentucky residents relief from paying income taxes to the state.
“I think the idea was to go down what? Probably .5% this year…I don’t think we met that criteria,” Johnson said. “There are a lot of states that have just decided they’re going to go from whatever their number was to zero overnight, and it created a catastrophe for their states. We are not doing that. We have a process in place where each year we evaluate some certain criteria that we have to meet. …But the bottom line is, instead of just saying we’re going to do something and we do it regardless of what happens afterwards, we have a measure process where we meet criteria each year. We evaluate that criteria.”
Medicaid fraud was also a topic of discussion, with Miles saying, “the Medicaid Oversight Advisor Board was created specifically to work on Medicaid and try to figure out what’s going on…we have found that there has been some fraud that we’re trying to work through. I think the more sunlight that we put on the Medicaid issue and pair that with what’s coming down from the Federal (government) and trying to figure out how we navigate that.”
Senator Boswell added, “We just have to make sure that we control and make sure that the people who really need those programs are the ones who get the money. That’s because we can’t sustain what we’re doing now. That’s why the House is taking such a bold approach to trying to figure out where all this money is going.”
And undoing some of the legislation passed during the COVID pandemic, Boswell said, will help encourage more economic growth for the area.
“We have got to go back and undo a lot of the stuff that we thought was necessary during COVID times,” he said. “And when we do that, it’s just going to free up businesses, agencies to do what they’re supposed to do without too much overburden.”
The legislative panel took some time to talk about the emergence of data centers into the area, highlighting the announcement from TeraWulf Inc. that the company was seeking to establish a location in Hancock County. Data centers are described by IBM as “a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services. It also stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services.”
HB593, which has been passed by the House and sent to the Senate, details regulations concerning electricity and power usage for the data centers.
“The one thing that this bill was target towards is the consumers would not be having to pay for the electricity for the data centers. So, if the data center comes, they’ve worked out a way to have access to power that will not harm the consumers on their electric bills,” Senator Boswell said.
Miles stated that the project in Hancock County is supposed to bring in around 2,000 construction jobs and around 100 permanent jobs to the region.
Other items addressed during the forum include wind energy, entertainment, property taxes, adding Constitutional amendments, a Keep Kentucky Free of Litter campaign, election reform and how to handle issues surround real “unused” property maintenance, with Boswell noting that Constitutional amendments are only done “every other year.”
Johnson identified the former Department of Juvenile Justice property on Highway 54 as a an example, stating that hundreds of thousands of dollars were lost because the property wasn’t properly maintained.
Senator Boswell touched on a bill that he drafted concerning fish in private Kentucky ponds and lakes.
“In the state of Kentucky, there’s 69,00 ponds and lakes. But did you know that the fish, if you have a pond, like a private pond, the fish that are in that (pond) don’t belong to you,” Boswell said.
By Michele Lohman Messenger-Inquirer
