Published: April 16, 2008 02:22 pm            

'A disaster' — 04/17/08

On final day, a bad legislative session actually gets worse

What many thought was next to impossible occurred Tuesday in Frankfort: The 2008 General Assembly that many long-time political observers had already dubbed the worst in memory actually got worse on its 60th and final day.

The session ended without legislators giving final approval to a plan to overhaul the state’s pension system, which — other than the budget — this newspaper considered the most important piece of legislation considered by legislators. Yet, despite versions of a revamped pension plan being adopted by both the House of Representatives and the Senate by lopsided margins, the session ended with leaders of the House and Senate failing to reach a compromise on the relatively minor differences in the House and Senate versions.

Without reform, the woefully underfunded pension plans for state and county employees and for public school employees face financial collapse that will require the expenditure of millions in tax dollars to bail them out. Virtually every member of the General Assembly agrees with this scenario and has given pension reform a high priority. Yet, despite Speaker of the House Jody Richards announcing earlier Tuesday that an agreement had been reached on pension legislation, the session ended with nothing being done.

Sen. Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, didn’t see the collapse of the pension bill coming. “Apparently there were forces at work that were able to convince enough House members to kill the bill,” Thayer said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait ’til the fiscal train wreck occurs and we have to auction off the state Capitol.”

Thus, another session of the General Assembly has ended with nothing — and we do mean nothing — being done to prevent a train wreck that everyone sees coming. In fact, by doing nothing, legislators simply make the problem worse.

The 2008 General Assembly also came to an end without legislators reaching agreement on legislation setting tougher ethical standards for high-ranking state officials . The ethics legislation had been a priority for Gov. Steve Beshear. He stressed the need to build public confidence in state government during his campaign last year.

Like the pension bill, both the House and Senate had approved different versions of the ethics reform bill, but the session ended without an agreement being reached on the differences between the two bills.

“We just ran out of time,” Speaker Richards said of the failure to pass an ethics bill. That’s a lame excuse. Legislators had plenty of time but lacked the will to adopt higher standards for executive branch employees. Key legislators wanted this bill to fail.

Legislators did authorize more than $225 million worth of water and sewer projects before heading home, but as so often happens in the closing hours — or minutes — of a legislative session, there was much confusion about what exactly was taking place..

Lawmakers approved a plan negotiated behind closed doors by House and Senate members that would authorize the water and sewer projects. As part of an agreement to approve the budget, legislators had agreed to authorize about $150 million in water and sewer projects. That tally increased by $75 million, under a proposal that cleared both chambers with less than an hour remaining on the legislative clock.

The bill authorized an additional $50 million in water and sewer projects for non-coal producing counties, and an extra $25 million for coal-producing counties. The $25 million for the coal-producing counties will come from the coal severance tax, but legislators didn’t seem to know from where the money for the other projects will come.

The House rejected a plan to authorize about $200 million worth of road projects throughout the state. The money was freed up when lawmakers agreed to use federal bonds to finance $231 million for the proposed Ohio River bridges project in Louisville.

Nevertheless, after the vote, Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said the money for the bridge project in Louisville was still continuing.

As midnight approached, clocks in the House and Senate were mysteriously frozen, and lawmakers continued meeting for another hour. Thus, it only seemed appropriate that in their final act of this session, legislators proved that they not only could not reach a reasonable compromise on major pieces of legislation, but they also didn’t know how to tell time.

“It was a disaster,” House Minority Floor Leader Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown, said after the session.

In our book, those four words pretty much sum up the entire 2008 General Assembly.

        

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