Lawmakers still trying to reach agreement on housing bill
Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
FRANKFORT — The Kentucky General Assembly overrode most of Gov. Andy Beshear’s vetoes on Tuesday, including the judicial branch budget and most of the two-year state budget.
Votes and floor speeches were largely along party lines. Democrats defended Beshear’s vetoes as House Floor Leader Steven Rudy, R-Paducah, called one veto “petulant and unconstitutional” and Speaker Pro Tem David Meade, R-Stanford, said Beshear “just chooses not to follow the law because he doesn’t want to.”
Meanwhile, with just one day left in this year’s regular session, the House and Senate are still trying to find agreement on a housing bill. Lawmakers sent Senate Bill 9 to a conference committee to hash out differences; it contains a number of proposals supported by housing advocates but also a controversial provision preventing local governments from regulating short-term rentals. A veto of the bill from Beshear would make SB 9 “dead” for the year because lawmakers would not have an opportunity to override the veto.
The legislature also moved forward with the judicial branch budget that the Administrative Office of the Courts has said would put the judicial branch in a deficit and drug, mental health and veteran courts at risk of closure. Beshear cited those concerns in his line-item vetoes of House Bill 504.
Majority Whip Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, called it “a responsible budget” and questioned the concerns raised by the courts and Chief Justice Debra Hembree Lambert.
“The courts were treated more favorably than most areas of state government in this budget,” Nemes said. “While all areas of state government face funding pressures at times, it remains the responsibility of agency leadership to prioritize core functions and manage resources accordingly.”
He added: “Based on the information provided by both court and legislative budget staff, we do not believe the courts are facing the underfunding that has been suggested, and we will continue to work collaboratively with the Chief Justice and her staff to address any ongoing needs.”
House Bill 500, the two-year state budget, had the most debate in the Senate Tuesday. Democratic Floor Leader Gerald Neal, of Louisville, highlighted the repeated “unfunded mandates” that Beshear had vetoed. Neal said that while “a lot of good things happen in this budget,” Beshear continued to find unfunded mandates.
“I trust that the governor, and his scrutiny of this, raises concerns that this bill creates fiscal and policy uncertainties that could impact long term stability,” Neal said. “We should be cautious. We should be cautious stewards of public resources.”
In response, Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said that the line-item vetoes often encompass “things have been in the base budget for years.” He renewed Republican criticism of the Beshear administration for not providing information to the legislature to make the budget.
“Who sets the priority of policy? Not the governor, not the Supreme Court, the General Assembly,” Stivers said. “So, if you wanted to help yourself execute on our policy, why did you not give us the details of what you believe to be in the base? Because you don’t want to be transparent. You want to spend the way you want to spend.”
Sen. Karen Berg, another Louisville Democrat, slammed papers down on her desk toward the end of Stivers’ comments. She then said that the budget does not fund the state’s Medicaid costs in 2028 and argued that saying there are no unfunded mandates is “extraordinarily disingenuous.”
Sen. Chris McDaniel, a Ryland Heights Republican who is the Senate’s budget chair, said the governor’s vetoes are “input into the process” and argued that it is the General Assembly’s responsibility to enact appropriations while the executive branch executes the law.
“It is his job to find ways to appropriately effectuate it and to be efficient with it. And we can stand up here and debate whether things are and aren’t funded all day, and we’re probably all pretty firmly in our trenches,” McDaniel said, adding that Kentucky’s Medicaid costs have doubled by $10 billion in the last decade.
Beshear had issued about two dozen vetoes Monday evening.
On fictive kin
In the two-year state budget, lawmakers provided the Beshear administration with $12 million over the next two years to implement a 2024 law to help kinship care families. It included a $6 million appropriation for Senate Bill 151 for each fiscal year.
The legislature also directed the Beshear administration to pursue federal funds to help fund foster care payments to kinship care families.
Initially, the bill said the funds would be “to provide sufficient funding for the maintenance of effort necessary to maximize available federal funds to implement the provisions of” the 2024 law, which would provide financial relief to Kentuckians who are raising minor relatives to keep them out of the foster care system.
HB 500 also directed the administration to seek federal funding streams, including Title IV-E of the Social Security Act and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant.
Beshear vetoed the mention of the 2024 law and the section instructing the administration to maximize federal funding, saying the funding “is not to provide sufficient funding for the maintenance of effort of a federal program” but rather to directly help kinship care families.
The legislature accepted this line-item veto. House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said the move “wasn’t necessarily a concession.”
“For everybody that thinks that we just ignore what the governor says when we do these vetoes, we actually do kind of pour over pretty intensely what he has and they come back with,” Osborne told reporters. “He made a pretty compelling argument as to why we needed to let those two vetoes stand, and so we did.”
Other HB 500 budget vetoes the legislature accepted are:
- A provision requiring county property valuation administrators to “utilize the Commonwealth’s statewide aerial imagery and mapping program, KyFromAbove, as the source for aerial mapping and imagery services used in the administration of property tax assessment functions.” The bill directed the local officials to switch over by June 30, 2028. In his veto message, Beshear said “the data needed by Property Valuation Administrators for property valuation purposes is different than that provided from the KyFromAbove program, including different standards, imagery size, timing and workflow.”
- A provision involving how the Department of Community Based Services utilizes federal funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant.
Liam Niemeyer contributed to this report.
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
