#KYGA Week 7: Education, anti-transparency and bad tax bills move foward

We are just beyond the halfway point of this year’s 2022 legislative session.

This week, we saw the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

A bill giving educators more direction on teaching history passed the Senate Education Committee. This is an issue that BIPPS education analyst Richard Innes has been bringing to light since Kentucky’s social studies standards were updated in the summer of 2020.

During the committee hearing Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, who also chairs the committee said:

Educators and parents have complained existing standards seem to lack specific reference to key people, events, struggles, challenges and ongoing successes that have forged American democratic principles of equality, freedom and individual rights.

Wise’s comments are consistent with Innes’ findings published in a BIPPS September 2020 report titled Preserving History.

If you haven’t been to the state’s capitol recently, you wouldn’t know that Governor Beshear decided to block off part of the roadway that goes between the Capitol and Annex buildings, claiming it was for “security measures.” This area is sometimes used by the public for rallies, protests or caravans. Sen. John Schickel, R-Union, sponsored a bill that would remove the installed blockades to reopen that road, giving voice and access back to the people. It passed the Senate and heads to the House.

The Bad

A bill threatening to weaken Kentucky’s best-in-the-nation open records law passed out of committee and moves to the Senate floor. According to the Bowling Green Daily News:

In its current form, the bill is an absurdly wide-ranging and open-ended attempt to not only drastically limit the amount of ‘personally identifiable information’ that Kentuckians are allowed to know about public officials, but also to establish grounds to sue anyone who shares the kind of information that has been freely available for decades. As the bill is written, ‘personally identifiable information’ encompasses pretty much anything you can think of, even redundantly including some data – such as Social Security numbers and health care information – that are, appropriately so, already withheld from public view.

This same bill passed through the General Assembly last year but was ultimately vetoed and the legislature, having limited time, didn’t get around to overriding the veto.

House Bill 453, which passed the House and has been received in the Senate, attacks Kentucky’s current open meetings laws by allowing the government to hold meetings via teleconference. We echo the concerns of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition:

It is our position that House Bill 453 threatens the preference for in person meetings that has existed in the Open Meetings Act since its enactment. It abridges the public’s right to make its collective ‘voice’ heard in face to face interaction with its elected and appointed officials by authorizing those officials, without limitation, to erect electronic barriers to the public's ability to hold them accountable at in person meetings.

The Ugly 

This week, a bill we saw defeated last year reared its ugly head again. House Bill 475 is a proposed change to the Kentucky Constitution and if passed by two-thirds of the House and the Senate you will see the following on your ballot this November:

Are you in favor of permitting the General Assembly to authorize a county, city, town, or other municipal corporation to assess and collect local taxes, license fees, and franchise fees that are not in conflict with other provisions of the Constitution by amending the Constitution of Kentucky to read as follows?

BIPPS CEO Jim Waters wrote about the dangers of this constitutional change last year in his weekly syndicated column, the Bluegrass Beacon:

Supporters claim this bill only makes it possible for the legislature to move forward with re-framing local tax policy and promise a vigorous debate in the legislature before any final decisions are made to change tax policy for local governments.

They claim it’s ultimately about helping communities move toward a model which relies on taxing sales rather than incomes.

While we’ve often endorsed the idea of changing Kentucky’s tax code toward a consumption-based approach, that argument is the red herring in this particular debate. In fact, it’s disingenuous for advocates to claim this bill will lighten the tax burden on productivity when it does nothing of the sort.

Instead, this bill represents an end run around the founders’ protections against local governments piling on by allowing a legislative discussion on more ways to raise your tax burden. Period.”

Hopefully, this legislation will once again fail.

The legislative update is comprised by Sarah May Durand, director of government affairs for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions. She can be reached at sarahmaydurand@freedomkentucky.com.