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Recap of the Legislative Week By Senator Morgan McGarvey
Columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote a book titled “Elvis is dead and I don’t feel
so good myself.” That just about sums up how I’m feeling after a tough week
in Frankfort and a demoralizing loss by the University of Kentucky Wildcats.
Deep breath. This too shall pass.
I actually do love my work as a state senator.
It may not seem that way because I report the downs as well as the ups of the
legislative week. Still, I prize the opportunity to have an impact for good on
the lives of my fellow Kentuckians. Wouldn’t I be plum crazy not to?
One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Kentuckian, and Grammy winner Sturgill
Simpson, had something to say about what it is like to love something (or
someone).
I was honored to host Sturgill and his family on the floor of the Senate this
week and note his rise in the country music firmament, praise the honesty of his
music, pass a resolution honoring his accomplishments, and bestow on him the
honor of becoming a Kentucky Colonel. (If you haven’t listened to his music,
do yourself a favor and immediately plug his name into YouTube. His music is
awesome. More importantly, so is he.)
That was the big up for this week.
The downside was the Senate’s passage of a budget package that, unlike the
House version adopted earlier, made no effort to raise new revenue. As with any
budget bill, it did some things I like, but more things I don’t. It moved
money around like a carney trickster shuffling cups to hide a pea. It cut our
public colleges and universities yet again and continued years of skimpy support
for elementary and secondary schools. It robbed the reserves of the public
employee health care program, although not as much as the House bill did. It
restored some of the arbitrary cuts on the Governor’s original hit list but
left many worthy programs and services unfunded. I’d have to be crazy, or care
nothing about the public weal, to cheer that act.
Sturgill put it this way in a song called Some Days:
Well some days you kill it and some days you just choke
Some days you blast off and some days you just smoke
The Senate majority’s budget package was a choke. I voted no.
The better news is that the real budget negotiations begin today and continue
over the weekend as a conference committee tries to harmonize the very different
Senate and House versions of our most important policy document. But, as I have
said endlessly, any budget plan that fails to raise new money is out of tune
with the needs and expectations of Kentucky citizens who want efficient but
effective government. Unlike the feds, we cannot borrow. We should have the
gumption to do what is needed and what’s right.
There was no need to do what the Senate did on workers’ compensation this
week, passing a bill that reduces injured employees’ access to benefits. The
Governor’s most recent report says workers’ comp premiums have decreased for
12 straight years. Why this bill? Why ignore the testimony from police officers
who claim they will likely lose benefits for injuries suffered in the line of
duty, or for the PTSD that often accompanies those incidents? Where is the need
to kick coal miners in the gut, just when the federal government reports black
lung disease is on the rise again?
House Bill 2 is nothing more than an effort to improve the expense ledger of
business at the expense of workers. I have said many times, you can be
pro-business without being anti-worker. We can do the right thing with this
program without hurting, among others, the people who put on a uniform every day
to protect us or those who risk life and limb underground to dig cheap energy
for us.
Republicans claim to be friends of coal. Perhaps they should try being friends
of coal miners. Sturgill Simpson gets it. He is originally from Eastern Kentucky
and is the first male on his mother’s side of the family not to work as a
miner. Those who voted in favor of HB 2 should have listened to his song “Old
King Coal” in which he warns:
I'll be one of the first in a long long line
not to go down from that old black lung
This is also the time of year when we have to pay close attention to language
inserted into otherwise seemingly innocuous bills. As Sturgill sings, “you
ain’t gotta read between the lines, you just gotta turn the page.” I learned
that lesson this week when a library reorganization bill was amended to include
a major change in our open records laws.
The change at issue was described as a “mere codification” of an Attorney
General’s opinion protecting from discloser of the personal information
transmitted on personal cell phones and email accounts by citizen legislators
under our Open Records Act. I am a huge proponent of sunshine, but such language
isn’t completely unreasonable given that most of us have full-time jobs
outside of government. The actual wording of the bill, however, went way too far
and would have shielded the communications of every government employee from
disclosure so long as they were not using a government phone or email account.
For example, this new law would keep private an email sent by a Cabinet
Secretary on a government-issued computer, in a government-supplied office,
discussing government business, if sent while using a Gmail account.
It does not take an expert to quickly realize the new provision would savage our
government-in-the-sunshine law. The guy who wrote the statute in question said
this would be a disaster: "It provides a blueprint for any public official who
does not want his public actions to be traced on public records by using a
personal cell phone or a personal computer." I argued these points to my
colleagues in the Senate, and the bill was pulled from the floor for further
study. I hope we can work together and take a second look at it.
Not everything we did this week would make for a sad country song. We did pass a
good two-year road plan, and my Republican colleague from Oldham County, Ernie
Harris, demonstrated how to get a unanimous vote on a potentially vexatious
bill. He met with members of both parties. When it came to Jefferson County
projects, he even met with the Democratic mayor of Louisville. He included
stakeholders. He conducted a real process. He eased House Bill 202 out of the
Senate 37-0.
We also had a particularly poignant moment on the Senate floor this week when we
passed House Bill 128, requiring public middle and high schools to teach
children about the Holocaust. This proposal has been championed by middle school
teacher Fred Whittaker and his students for 13 years and will now become law.
Named the “Ann Klein and Fred Gross Holocaust Education Act,” the bill
honors both Mr. Gross, who survived the Holocaust as a child and later taught
about it, and Ms. Klein, a survivor of Auschwitz and a Holocaust educator who
died in 2012.
Mr. Whittaker teaches in my Senate District, Mr. Gross still lives in the
District, and so does Ms. Klein’s daughter. I was also honored to host them in
the Senate this week as they watched their bill come for a vote on the Senate
floor. All received a standing ovation from the Senate after final passage.
Mazel Tov to everyone involved!
Here is some more legislation of interest that cleared the Senate this week:
• House Bill 132 establishes financial literacy as a high school graduation
requirement, which would go into effect with students who are freshmen in
2020-21. Deciding what would satisfy this requirement would be up to the
school-based decision-making council or principal. Guidelines would be developed
by the state level. There’s a strong case for this bill, since Kentucky
students currently rank 48th in financial literacy.
• Senate Bill 231 creates a Work Ready Kentucky Scholarship to help make sure
that any Kentuckian who has not yet earned a postsecondary degree will have
affordable access to earning an industry-recognized certificate or diploma.
• House Bill 46 permits security freezes to be requested by methods that are
established by a consumer reporting agency and allows consumers to request a
replacement personal ID number or password the same way they made the original
security freeze request.
• Senate Bill 70 changes statutes so that Kentucky is in compliance with a
Supreme Court opinion that current law relating to sex offenders is
unconstitutional. It prohibits registered sex offenders from knowingly using
electronic communications to solicit, or contact, anyone under the age of 18.
• Senate Bill 155 requires that employees of the Education and Workforce
Development Cabinet who have access to, or use of, federal tax information must
submit to a state and federal criminal background check.
• House Bill 68 offers help to first responders who are confronted with tragic
and horrific events in the course of their work. It would enable them to access
mental health and wellness programs. Central to this is a post-critical-incident
seminar program established by the FBI in the 1980s. Funding would come from
donations, grants, and lines in the state Department of Criminal Justice
training budget.
• House Bill 454 is this session’s abortion bill. This is an intractable
issue on which people of good will have diametrically opposed points of view. It
should be debated with respect for both sides, not with hyper-emotional
arguments, and should consider the constitutionality of the proposal. This
particular bill has been successfully challenged in other states and will lead
to a lawsuit in Kentucky. It passed 31-5. I voted no.
• House Bill 290 sets conditions for home-schooled individuals or teams to
compete in state-sponsored interscholastic sports. They would be able to
participate in any state-sponsored interscholastic athletic sport in Kentucky as
long as the home-schooled students and their coaches comply with set
requirements. However, they would not be allowed to participate in sanctioned
conferences or tournaments or be eligible for championship titles or other
recognition sponsored by the state. I disagree with this part of the bill but
voted yes. With legislation, something is usually better than nothing.
On the difficult issues I try to avoid hot rhetoric and fall back on reason and
restraint. I sometimes fail… all have sinned and come short of the glory. But
I try to keep it between the lines. Which is the name of a wonderful Sturgill
Simpson song. Here, to close this missive, are some of the lyrics:
Don't turn mailboxes into baseballs
Don't get busted selling at seventeen
Those thoughts are absurd, to a dirty home
Motor oil is motor oil
Just keep the engine clean
Keep your eyes on the prize
Everything will be fine
Long as you stay in school
Stay off the hard stuff
And keep between the lines
Link to the post:
uawlap.org/uaw/cap-uaw/recap-of-the-legislative-week-by-senator-morgan-mcgarvey-6.php
Link to UAWLAP.org: uawlap.org
Details of the post follow.
Recap of the Legislative Week By Senator Morgan McGarvey
Columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote a book titled “Elvis is dead and I don’t feel
so good myself.” That just about sums up how I’m feeling after a tough week
in Frankfort and a demoralizing loss by the University of Kentucky Wildcats.
Deep breath. This too shall pass.
I actually do love my work as a state senator.
It may not seem that way because I report the downs as well as the ups of the
legislative week. Still, I prize the opportunity to have an impact for good on
the lives of my fellow Kentuckians. Wouldn’t I be plum crazy not to?
One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Kentuckian, and Grammy winner Sturgill
Simpson, had something to say about what it is like to love something (or
someone).
I was honored to host Sturgill and his family on the floor of the Senate this
week and note his rise in the country music firmament, praise the honesty of his
music, pass a resolution honoring his accomplishments, and bestow on him the
honor of becoming a Kentucky Colonel. (If you haven’t listened to his music,
do yourself a favor and immediately plug his name into YouTube. His music is
awesome. More importantly, so is he.)
That was the big up for this week.
The downside was the Senate’s passage of a budget package that, unlike the
House version adopted earlier, made no effort to raise new revenue. As with any
budget bill, it did some things I like, but more things I don’t. It moved
money around like a carney trickster shuffling cups to hide a pea. It cut our
public colleges and universities yet again and continued years of skimpy support
for elementary and secondary schools. It robbed the reserves of the public
employee health care program, although not as much as the House bill did. It
restored some of the arbitrary cuts on the Governor’s original hit list but
left many worthy programs and services unfunded. I’d have to be crazy, or care
nothing about the public weal, to cheer that act.
Sturgill put it this way in a song called Some Days:
Well some days you kill it and some days you just choke
Some days you blast off and some days you just smoke
The Senate majority’s budget package was a choke. I voted no.
The better news is that the real budget negotiations begin today and continue
over the weekend as a conference committee tries to harmonize the very different
Senate and House versions of our most important policy document. But, as I have
said endlessly, any budget plan that fails to raise new money is out of tune
with the needs and expectations of Kentucky citizens who want efficient but
effective government. Unlike the feds, we cannot borrow. We should have the
gumption to do what is needed and what’s right.
There was no need to do what the Senate did on workers’ compensation this
week, passing a bill that reduces injured employees’ access to benefits. The
Governor’s most recent report says workers’ comp premiums have decreased for
12 straight years. Why this bill? Why ignore the testimony from police officers
who claim they will likely lose benefits for injuries suffered in the line of
duty, or for the PTSD that often accompanies those incidents? Where is the need
to kick coal miners in the gut, just when the federal government reports black
lung disease is on the rise again?
House Bill 2 is nothing more than an effort to improve the expense ledger of
business at the expense of workers. I have said many times, you can be
pro-business without being anti-worker. We can do the right thing with this
program without hurting, among others, the people who put on a uniform every day
to protect us or those who risk life and limb underground to dig cheap energy
for us.
Republicans claim to be friends of coal. Perhaps they should try being friends
of coal miners. Sturgill Simpson gets it. He is originally from Eastern Kentucky
and is the first male on his mother’s side of the family not to work as a
miner. Those who voted in favor of HB 2 should have listened to his song “Old
King Coal” in which he warns:
I'll be one of the first in a long long line
not to go down from that old black lung
This is also the time of year when we have to pay close attention to language
inserted into otherwise seemingly innocuous bills. As Sturgill sings, “you
ain’t gotta read between the lines, you just gotta turn the page.” I learned
that lesson this week when a library reorganization bill was amended to include
a major change in our open records laws.
The change at issue was described as a “mere codification” of an Attorney
General’s opinion protecting from discloser of the personal information
transmitted on personal cell phones and email accounts by citizen legislators
under our Open Records Act. I am a huge proponent of sunshine, but such language
isn’t completely unreasonable given that most of us have full-time jobs
outside of government. The actual wording of the bill, however, went way too far
and would have shielded the communications of every government employee from
disclosure so long as they were not using a government phone or email account.
For example, this new law would keep private an email sent by a Cabinet
Secretary on a government-issued computer, in a government-supplied office,
discussing government business, if sent while using a Gmail account.
It does not take an expert to quickly realize the new provision would savage our
government-in-the-sunshine law. The guy who wrote the statute in question said
this would be a disaster: "It provides a blueprint for any public official who
does not want his public actions to be traced on public records by using a
personal cell phone or a personal computer." I argued these points to my
colleagues in the Senate, and the bill was pulled from the floor for further
study. I hope we can work together and take a second look at it.
Not everything we did this week would make for a sad country song. We did pass a
good two-year road plan, and my Republican colleague from Oldham County, Ernie
Harris, demonstrated how to get a unanimous vote on a potentially vexatious
bill. He met with members of both parties. When it came to Jefferson County
projects, he even met with the Democratic mayor of Louisville. He included
stakeholders. He conducted a real process. He eased House Bill 202 out of the
Senate 37-0.
We also had a particularly poignant moment on the Senate floor this week when we
passed House Bill 128, requiring public middle and high schools to teach
children about the Holocaust. This proposal has been championed by middle school
teacher Fred Whittaker and his students for 13 years and will now become law.
Named the “Ann Klein and Fred Gross Holocaust Education Act,” the bill
honors both Mr. Gross, who survived the Holocaust as a child and later taught
about it, and Ms. Klein, a survivor of Auschwitz and a Holocaust educator who
died in 2012.
Mr. Whittaker teaches in my Senate District, Mr. Gross still lives in the
District, and so does Ms. Klein’s daughter. I was also honored to host them in
the Senate this week as they watched their bill come for a vote on the Senate
floor. All received a standing ovation from the Senate after final passage.
Mazel Tov to everyone involved!
Here is some more legislation of interest that cleared the Senate this week:
• House Bill 132 establishes financial literacy as a high school graduation
requirement, which would go into effect with students who are freshmen in
2020-21. Deciding what would satisfy this requirement would be up to the
school-based decision-making council or principal. Guidelines would be developed
by the state level. There’s a strong case for this bill, since Kentucky
students currently rank 48th in financial literacy.
• Senate Bill 231 creates a Work Ready Kentucky Scholarship to help make sure
that any Kentuckian who has not yet earned a postsecondary degree will have
affordable access to earning an industry-recognized certificate or diploma.
• House Bill 46 permits security freezes to be requested by methods that are
established by a consumer reporting agency and allows consumers to request a
replacement personal ID number or password the same way they made the original
security freeze request.
• Senate Bill 70 changes statutes so that Kentucky is in compliance with a
Supreme Court opinion that current law relating to sex offenders is
unconstitutional. It prohibits registered sex offenders from knowingly using
electronic communications to solicit, or contact, anyone under the age of 18.
• Senate Bill 155 requires that employees of the Education and Workforce
Development Cabinet who have access to, or use of, federal tax information must
submit to a state and federal criminal background check.
• House Bill 68 offers help to first responders who are confronted with tragic
and horrific events in the course of their work. It would enable them to access
mental health and wellness programs. Central to this is a post-critical-incident
seminar program established by the FBI in the 1980s. Funding would come from
donations, grants, and lines in the state Department of Criminal Justice
training budget.
• House Bill 454 is this session’s abortion bill. This is an intractable
issue on which people of good will have diametrically opposed points of view. It
should be debated with respect for both sides, not with hyper-emotional
arguments, and should consider the constitutionality of the proposal. This
particular bill has been successfully challenged in other states and will lead
to a lawsuit in Kentucky. It passed 31-5. I voted no.
• House Bill 290 sets conditions for home-schooled individuals or teams to
compete in state-sponsored interscholastic sports. They would be able to
participate in any state-sponsored interscholastic athletic sport in Kentucky as
long as the home-schooled students and their coaches comply with set
requirements. However, they would not be allowed to participate in sanctioned
conferences or tournaments or be eligible for championship titles or other
recognition sponsored by the state. I disagree with this part of the bill but
voted yes. With legislation, something is usually better than nothing.
On the difficult issues I try to avoid hot rhetoric and fall back on reason and
restraint. I sometimes fail… all have sinned and come short of the glory. But
I try to keep it between the lines. Which is the name of a wonderful Sturgill
Simpson song. Here, to close this missive, are some of the lyrics:
Don't turn mailboxes into baseballs
Don't get busted selling at seventeen
Those thoughts are absurd, to a dirty home
Motor oil is motor oil
Just keep the engine clean
Keep your eyes on the prize
Everything will be fine
Long as you stay in school
Stay off the hard stuff
And keep between the lines
Link to the post:
uawlap.org/uaw/cap-uaw/recap-of-the-legislative-week-by-senator-morgan-mcgarvey-6.php
Link to UAWLAP.org: uawlap.org