2021 Legislative Wrap Up
The 2021 session is officially adjourned. Though it was a shorter legislative session, it didn’t feel that way to us because there was still plenty of work to do! Below is a recap of the most important bills we worked on this year.
HOUSE BILL 563 - SCHOOL CHOICE
The passage of HB 563 represents a historic win for students throughout our commonwealth. This bill includes several important school choice reforms including:
giving students throughout Kentucky the ability to choose the best public school for them;
giving students with demonstrated need access to grants for educational expenses like tutoring;
and allowing students in the largest counties (90,000 and over) the opportunity to receive scholarships for private school tuition.
The Bluegrass Institute has been fighting for school choice since our founding in 2003. This bill is the result of countless conversations with legislators, hundreds of publications and media appearances, and events to educate and energize the public.
Currently, families are often forced to pay tuition to attend a public school outside their district. For years, BIPPS brought this problem to light and approached several legislators over the interim session about making this the session to fix the issue. So, this bill started as an open enrollment bill that would allow public school students to attend the public school of their choice regardless of their residency status. But, we continued to work to improve the bill as the process continued…
With a lot of grassroots support, a bill committee substitute added education opportunity accounts for students in need along with the open enrollment component. Then, in the 11th hour, Rep. Jerry Miller, R-Louisville, introduced an amendment allowing students in counties with populations of 150,000 or more the opportunity to receive scholarships for private school tuition. While on the House floor, Rep. Miller discovered that the amendment was improperly written and scrambled to have it rewritten while the bill was debated. We appreciate him reaching out to us for help with the amendment language as we all scrambled to make scholarship opportunities a reality. We were successful and the amendment passed.
As the bill moved on to the Senate we talked with several senators who were interested in expanding Rep. Miller’s amendment to include their own counties. So, the Senate version of the bill lowered the population threshold for private school tuition opportunities from 150,000 to 90,000 and passed the Senate.
But, the fight was not over. Because of the Senate changes, the House needed to concur with those changes. They narrowly did in a 48-47 vote.
Still, this bill passage almost failed. After Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of the bill, the House needed to override the veto - which requires 51 votes. The concurrence vote in the House was only 48. BIPPS and our school choice coalition and grassroots supporters were back in action reaching out to legislators and organizing grassroots supporters to contact them as well.
In a nail biter, the House voted 51-42, passing the bill by just one vote. The veto was then overridden in the Senate by a vote of 23-14 and is now law.
Though this bill nearly died several times, we’re thrilled that Kentucky has finally joined 47 other states with school choice options!
HOUSE BILL 258 - CREATES A NEW TIER TO THE TEACHERS’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM (TRS)
Sponsored by Rep. Ed Massey, R-Hebron, HB 258 is aimed to stop the growth of TRS’ unfunded liabilities, which currently stand at around $15 billion. The bill incorporates BIPPS’ approach to improving the pension fund’s economic sustainability by:
creating a new tier for new teachers offering a defined benefit component while protecting taxpayers with a defined-contribution element;
increasing the minimum retirement age for new teachers from age 55 to 57;
extending current statutory anti-pension spiking provisions in last three years of employment to the last five years for new members;
and disallowing members to collect multiple government pensions - a practice commonly referred to as “double dipping.”
The bill is projected to save taxpayers billions of dollars over the next 30 years while paying out more than Social Security would to retired teachers. This is an enormous step toward pension solvency and we applaud the General Assembly for taking on this major task.
The House and Senate in votes of 63-31 and 25-13, respectively, voted to override Gov. Beshear’s veto of the measure, and soon this bill will become law.
HOUSE BILL 192 - STATE BUDGET
The Bluegrass Institute has made historic progress in influencing the state’s budget priorities. Last year, the COVID pandemic highlighted Kentucky’s economic vulnerabilities when dealing with a crisis having such potential for a negative impact. This led the General Assembly to pass an austere one-year budget in 2020 instead of the usual two-year budget passed during longer legislative sessions. That left legislators the task of passing another one-year budget despite the 2021 session having only 30 working days.
BIPPS took advantage of the time between the 2020 and 2021 sessions to deep dive into how Kentucky’s budget compares with other states. The resulting report, written by BIPPS Visiting Policy Fellow Andrew McNeill, illustrates an eye-opening reality that Kentucky’s spending is more in line with heavily ‘blue’ states and our lack of economic freedom is putting our commonwealth at a disadvantage. McNeill’s report also contains recommendations for how the General Assembly can improve the budget, including by contributing more to the state’s rainy day fund.
Unexpectedly, the commonwealth is flush with federal stimulus cash at the moment and Gov. Beshear was set to spend it recklessly. However, BIPPS held budget briefings and meetings to educate legislators regarding what needs to be done to move our economy in a healthier and more competitive direction. And they listened. Not only did they keep most of last year’s fiscally responsible measures in place, they’re making historic deposits in the rainy day fund.
HOUSE BILL 8 - PENSION REFORM FOR QUASI-GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES
House Bill 8, sponsored by Rep. Jim Duplessis, R-Elizabethtown, is an updated version of a bill passed unanimously in the House last session but which became a victim of COVID-19 and met a premature end in the Senate. This bill includes our proposal to stop the practice of forcing quasi agencies to make disproportionately higher payments than their individual liabilities. Quasi-agencies’ payments will now be based on liabilities specific to them, which generally are much lower than the Annual Required Contribution (ARC) payments into the state workers’ pension system.
HB 8 has passed through the legislature and been signed into law by the governor.
SENATE BILL 1 - LIMITING GUBERNATORIAL EXECUTIVE POWERS
This summer, the Bluegrass Institute questioned whether Gov. Beshear’s executive orders were legal and called on legislators to make significant changes to the law to ensure crippling orders – like shutting down businesses – would no longer be a unilateral gubernatorial decision. Those calls eventually resulted in Senate Bill 1 containing several key reforms:
limits certain emergency executive orders and regulations to 30 days without legislative approval;
requires the governor to call the legislature into special session before extending certain executive orders;
stops the governor from issuing the same or similar executive orders based on an identical emergency circumstances;
allows the governor to suspend statutes only with approval of the attorney general and
stops the governor from making changes to how elections are held (e.g. expanding mail-in voting).
Gov. Beshear is currently challenging the new law in court after the legislature overrode his veto.
HOUSE BILL 1 - COVID REGULATION REFORM
House Bill 1 establishes guidelines for businesses and schools to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic and for visitation to long-term care facilities and waves interest and penalties on employers’ tax bills to give businesses more time to pay them. Though the bill expires at the end of 2021, it limits Beshear’s ability to unilaterally dictate the closing of schools and businesses for the duration of the current state of emergency.
HB 1 is currently being battled in court after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto.
HOUSE BILL 5 - GUBERNATORIAL BOARD REORGANIZATIONS
House Bill 5 stops the governor from making temporary board reorganizations when the legislature isn’t in session or hasn’t voted to approve those moves. We’ve criticized Beshear’s dismantling of the Kentucky Board of Education on his first day as governor and we partnered in a lawsuit with several of the ousted board members. HB 5 should stop this or any governor from reorganizing an entire board based solely on ideological politics because it requires legislative approval.
The bill is now law.
HOUSE BILL 312 - OPEN RECORDS LAWS
BIPPS opposed HB 312, joining with the Kentucky Coalition for Open Government to send a letter to legislators explaining the issues with the bill which essentially guts Kentucky open records law. While we’re disappointed this anti-transparency became law, our joint efforts did achieve several changes to make the bill less harmful:
Original definition of “resident” was for news organizations within the state or those with an affiliate in the state and citizens who reside in Kentucky; the definition was expanded to include “news-gathering organizations” outside the state, people who work in Kentucky and people who own land in Kentucky;
Eliminated the provision that prohibited use of the open records law by persons who are in litigation;
Makes use of the standardized form permissive rather than mandatory and reduces the information that must be provided in the standardized form.
We praised Gov. Beshear for vetoing this bill, but the General Assembly overrode the veto.
SB 142 - PUBLIC EMPLOYEE LABOR REFORM
In 2017, the Kentucky General Assembly moved forward with landmark labor reforms, passing both Right-to-Work and the Paycheck Protection Act. Since that time, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling (Janus v. AFSCME) further strengthening the protection of government employees to decide to opt-out of supporting union political agendas with which they disagree.
The Janus ruling provides the additional empowerment for public sector employees by:
providing employees with an annual opportunity to decide whether to opt-in to union membership;
requiring an employee’s employer to verify an employee has decided to opt-in to union membership and payroll deduction;
and requiring clearly defining an employee’s rights when deciding whether to opt-in or opt-out of union membership.
BIPPS created policy to help the state conform with the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling by updating the current statutes to provide these enhanced protections to public sector employees. We also provide polling to show that Kentucky voters want to further protect public employees' first amendment rights as reaffirmed through the Janus case.
Our proposed technical revisions to Kentucky’s Right-to-Work and Paycheck Protection Act were sponsored by Sen. Robby Mills, R-Henderson, in Senate Bill 142. While this bill didn’t make it through this year due to the time constraints of a short legislative session, BIPPS will continue educating our elected officials on the importance of this update to current law.
HOUSE BILL 208 - IN-PERSON LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM
BIPPS’s Heather Huddleston and Sarah Durand at a press conference to urge the JCPS school board to return to in-person learning
HB 208, sponsored by Rep. Regina Huff, R-Williamsburg, was another policy that we opposed but we were able to get significant improvements to the bill. In its original form it would have allowed school districts to remain virtual through this school year and 2021-22. After many discussions and with the grassroots support of parents, the updated bill that passed required that students return to in-person instruction a minimum of two days a week beginning this month.
While we would have preferred students return to the normal five-day a week classroom model, we appreciate that Kentucky’s students - some of whom have not had in-person instruction in over a year - will see resume some face to face time with educators.
HOUSE BILL 473 - LEARNING PODS
Due to the COVID pandemic, “learning pods,” microschools designed to keep children moving forward in their education in person while many public schools remain closed, have popped up throughout the state. BIPPS proposed legislation that would shield learning pods from bureaucratic red tape and allow them to continue to operate independently.
BIPPS policy would ensure that learning pods would be exempted from:
education code regulations such as staff ratios, certifications, background checks, physical accommodations;
regulatory provisions related to the operation of a day-care, child-care center, or at home daycare;
any state or local building or fire codes applicable to educational or child-care facilities
and any other state or local statute, rule or code which would not be applicable to any group, building or facility where a Learning Pod is not in operation.
We appreciate Rep. Felicia Rabourn, R-Turners Station, for taking up this proactive, anti-regulation policy in HB 473. Unfortunately, during a short session that included the need to pass a budget, the bill did not rise to a priority level. However, South Carolina lawmakers adopted the policy we created as a model for their state’s own learning pod legislation.
HOUSE BILL 133 - RECALL PETITION REFORM
Rep. Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville, filed HB 133 in response to the recent tax hike imposed by the Jefferson County Public Schools board that raised the county’s property tax by a whopping 9.5%. Current law allows citizens to petition for such tax increases to be null and void until and unless voters have a chance to weigh in via a ballot measure. The law before this bill required a petition be signed by a number of registered and qualified voters residing in the affected jurisdiction equal to at least 10% of the total number of votes cast in the most recent presidential election. This number is quite high in larger counties making it difficult to collect enough signatures to secure a ballot measure.
BIPPS helped NoJCPSTaxHike, the petitioners asking for the tax hike to be added to the next election ballot, in raising awareness about the issue and acquiring signatures. Although the attempt in this particular case was unsuccessful, it led to the creation of HB 133. The bill reduces the number of required signatures to 5,000 if that number is less than what the previous law required, making it easier for citizens to have their voices heard on tax increases at the polls.
The bill is now law.
SENATE BILL 87 - CORPORATE WELFARE ACCOUNTABILITY
Last session, the General Assembly awarded a $35 million taxpayer-backed loan to the University of Louisville for the purchase of Jewish Hospital. BIPPS testified against the plan before the Senate Education Committee. The contract would allow for partial loan forgiveness at taxpayers’ expense if UofL met certain requirements. However, in November, the BIPPS Center for Open Government exposed UofL’s efforts that resulted in the negation of the job retention requirements that were part of the original loan documents. In response, BIPPS worked with Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, on SB 87 which would have put those requirements back in place.
Unfortunately, some in leadership in both the House and Senate support this form of corporate welfare and succeeded in killing the bill before it even had a hearing.
BIPPS Gas Tax AD
HOUSE BILL 561 - GAS TAX
This bill has been filed several years in a row by Rep. Sal Santoro, R-Florence. HB 561 would raise the gas tax by roughly $0.10 per gallon, disproportionately affecting low-income citizens. We preemptively began running targeted ads against a gas tax hike before the bill was even filed.
We happily report that we killed it for this session and are gearing up to fight it again in 2022.
And that’s a wrap!