Published: April 04, 2008 01:56 pm            

A quick review — 04/07/08

Legislators approved a budget, but little else accomplished

Since the start of the 2008 Kentucky General Assembly in January, we have used this space to comment on a number of bills under consideration. With only two days remaining in the 60-day session, the fate of most of those bills has been determined.

Thus, a review of those bills seems in order, and in the process of making that review, we will discover why many long-time observers are calling this the worst legislative session in memory. When all is said and done, little was accomplished during the session.

A review:

‰ For the fourth consecutive year, State Rep. Robin Webb’s bill aimed at protecting Kentuckians from becoming victims of identity theft was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives only to die of inattention in the Senate. This bill — endorsed by both the Kentucky Bankers Association and the Kentucky Retailers Association — should not have even been controversial. It would have required companies that keep personal identification information about customers to notify them if their personal information — such as bank account or Social Security numbers — has been breached.

About the only thing that has changed in the four years since Webb first filed this bill is that the number of people who have had their identities stolen has increased.

‰ House Bill 500 — State Rep. Johnny Bell’s attempt to place reasonable restriction on “payday lenders” — was approved by the House but died without a vote in the Senate. Under the bill, borrowers would be given 30 days, instead of two weeks, to repay the original loan without incurring additional penalties. The permissible payday lender fees would be reduced from $15 per $100 to $12 per $100.

According to Kentucky Youth Advocates, some payday lenders charge annual interest rates of nearly 400 percent for short-term loans that are not promptly repaid. Many consider such rates outrageous; members of the Kentucky Senate apparently do not.

‰ House Bill 111 — which would have given Kentucky’s state universities and community and technical colleges the authority to issue revenue bonds for construction projects for which they have the financial means to repay those bonds — was approved by the House by a 91-0 vote but died in the Senate. Like Webb’s bill on identity theft, this marked the fourth consecutive year similar bills have been approved by the House and ignored by the Senate.

With state revenue extremely tight and the universities facing funding cuts, the timing for HB 111 seemed ideal. It would have provided universities with a new source of funding for some construction projects and would have increased the state’s bonding capacity to fund other state projects. Although 44 states now allow universities to issue revenue bonds, this clearly is a power the Senate does not want to give Kentucky schools. That’s too bad.

‰ Senate Bill 71 — which would have lowered from .18 to .15 the blood-alcohol level an intoxicated offender must have to be automatically charged with aggravated drunk driving — sailed through the Senate in nearly record time only to die in the House committee.

This newspaper opposed the bill not because we thought it was a bad idea but because the extremely overcrowded jails in many counties made the timing wrong for this bill. Our contention was that the legislature should not enact any new mandatory sentencing laws until a solution is found for Kentucky’s overcrowded jails.

‰ House Bill 138 — which would have allowed registered voters to cast their ballots early without giving a reason for voting early — was approved by the House but died in the Senate. It seems some senators had the same reservations about the bill that we expressed in this space back on Feb. 10:

“Absentee ballots have a history of being used to promote election fraud in Kentucky. If HB 138 becomes law, election officials — led by Secretary of Sate Trey Grayson, who supports the bill — must take precautions to assure that absentee ballots are not being used to promote vote buying and other election abuses.”

While we support most efforts to make voting easier in Kentucky, we’re not too disappointed by the demise of this bill.

‰ House Bill 402 — which would have prohibited employers from retaliating against employees who are victims of crime and must leave work to testify in court — was approved by the House with only three dissenting votes but died in the Senate. One hopes that employers who do punish workers for testifying in court are extremely rare.

‰ Senate Bill 1 — which would have weakened the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 by replacing the CATS test with the ACT and other standardized multiple choice tests — never even got out of the Senate despite be given the highest priority by the Republican-controlled body. After it became clear that the House of Representatives was unlikely to approve this bill and Gov. Steve Beshear has promised to veto it if it reached his desk, pushing the bill seemed futile. Good. In our view, SB1 would have gutted KERA.

A few bills on which we commented did make it to the governor’s desk. One would require DNA samples to be collected and filed on all convicted felons in the state. Another would allow 16 year olds to donate blood.

Some bills — particularly the ones dealing with reforming state pensions and executive branch ethics — are far enough long that they could be approved during the final two says of the session on April 14 and April 15. Or, at least, one can hope the senators and representatives can put petty politics aside long enough to do something for the good of Kentucky.

The usual procedure during the 2008 session was for a bill to be approved by one body by a large majority only to be completely ignored by the other body. We don’t think that’s the way the framers of the Kentucky Constitution intended for the General Assembly to work. It is wrong for committee chairpersons to single-handedly kill a bill by refusing to bring it up for a committee vote. Yet, that happens repeatedly in Frankfort, where true representative democracy is more a concept than a reality.

        

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