Back-to-back pension transparency bills – Senate Bills 2 and 3 – provided strong bookends for a busy 2017 session of the Kentucky General Assembly.

Along with passage during the session’s historic first week of Sen. Chris McDaniel’s SB 3, which makes legislators’ pension benefits subject to open-records requests – an issue pushed by the Bluegrass Institute’s Legislative Pension Transparency Pledge during last year’s election – Sen. Joe Bowen’s SB 2 reorganizes the Kentucky Retirement Systems Board and imposes stricter guidelines for financial disclosures and requires greater investment experience to serve on the retirement systems’ boards.

The bill also requires Senate confirmation for board appointments to the commonwealth’s three retirement systems – the Kentucky Retirement System (KRS), Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System (KTRS) and the Judicial Retirement System (which includes legislators’ pensions) – as well mandating uniform methods of reporting and disclosing investment fees and requiring the chair or vice chair of the House budget committee to join the Public Pension Oversight Board.

Bowen indicated in comments to reporters that an outgrowth of SB 2 will be rejecting “this notion that a fiscal impact of any board action is undefinable” while emphasizing “there are fiscal impacts on every decision made.”

The fact that both Senate Bills 2 and 3 received overwhelming support in the Kentucky House of Representative by votes of 95-1 and 99-0, respectively, indicates that lawmakers and their constituents have an appetite to know – and do – more about what’s happening with taxpayer dollars that previously disappeared into the deep dark hole of the state’s secretive and costly public-pension system.