Picture this: You pull an item off a store shelf that has no price tag.
Do you assume it’s free?
If you said yes, you might have a future in the Kentucky General Assembly, where some members seem astonished — offended, even —that actual money is needed to pay for new programs they shepherded into law earlier this year.
Kentuckians fostering young relatives are among the losers; some of them would have gained much needed help from a newly enacted law. Unfortunately, it’s one of 24 new laws or resolutions that Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration says it cannot implement because the legislature failed to appropriate money to pay for them.
How lawmakers can be oblivious to the cost of bills they are moving just became less puzzling, thanks to reporting by Joe Sonka of Kentucky Public Radio: The price tags on legislation — known as fiscal notes — have largely been removed from public view.
Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, explained to Sonka that waiting to find out how much a bill would cost can be “quicksand” for measures that leadership wants to move, “especially late in the session.” Also, fiscal notes can be inaccurate and vague, says Stivers.
“I don’t want to create such a bureaucracy and to slow something down when we really need to get something moved,” Stivers said in an explanation that will never be mistaken for fiscal conservatism.
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Stiver’s rationale is also a far cry from the kitchen table economics that politicians are always praising. “Come on, baby, we need to buy that truck now. You can read the mumbo jumbo in the loan agreement after we get back from four-wheeling.”
Lawmakers can and often do request legislative staff to research the cost of a bill and its impact on the state budget. These estimates are put into a fiscal note. I spent a good bit of time during this year’s session looking for fiscal notes attached to bills on the legislature’s website. I found hardly any. Now I know why.
Sonka discovered that some — perhaps many? — fiscal notes are labeled with a red “confidential” and never attached to bills.
The absence of a fiscal note keeps the cost unknown to most lawmakers and also to the taxpaying public that foots the bill.
Only three of the 30-plus lawmakers interviewed by Sonka were aware that confidential fiscal notes are a thing.
It’s hard to know how many fiscal notes have been withheld from the public because the legislature says the documents — prepared and printed at taxpayer expense — are not public records and therefore cannot be obtained under Kentucky’s open records law.
What is observable to the naked eye is that the Republican supermajority makes a habit of moving high-cost legislation amid lots of rhetorical virtue-signaling but with little or no regard for paying for it.
The legislature has yet to fund the school resource officers or counselors promised in a 2019 school safety law. In 2022, it enacted a formula for gradually reducing the state income tax without an estimate of its impact on the state budget, at least not one known to the public.
Our self-described conservatives are disregarding the most basic conservative rule, one they accused Democrats of breaking for decades: Don’t buy something if you don’t know the cost (especially if it’s likely to be expensive).
This way lawmakers please some constituents and get positive media by moving legislation, then, when the bill comes due, they say we’ll try to fund it next time or blame Beshear for not scrounging the needed funds from state government’s couch cushions.
Beshear estimates the bills at issue would cost $153 million; that’s a big number but the legislature is sitting on a record surplus.
Public radio’s Sonka discovered that Kentucky is in a minority of states where the legislature does not require a fiscal note on bills that would impact the budget. In recent years, he reports, the Republican supermajority has changed the rules in both chambers to make it even easier to keep a bill’s cost under wraps.
Enacting laws without considering or even knowing the costs is terrible policy for obvious reasons. It’s also totally consistent with the secretive, top-down way the Kentucky legislature does business, using procedural maneuvers to rush through controversial legislation with little warning to lawmakers or the public.
Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge, told Sonka she plans to file a bill in the 2025 session to require public fiscal notes on legislation.
While the mighty GOP majority has proven it can do about anything it wants, with Beshear and Maddox attacking this bad practice from different directions, maybe the public will have a fighting chance.
This article is republished under a Creative Commons license from Kentucky Lantern, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.
Jamie Lucke is editor in chief of Kentucky Lantern. She has more than 40 years of experience as a journalist. Her editorials for the Lexington Herald-Leader won Walker Stone, Sigma Delta Chi and Green Eyeshade awards. She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky.
