Kentucky’s GOP supermajority is shutting public out, shutting public schools down

Grayson and I want you to imagine being one of the thousands of unsung heroes working in state government in Kentucky. Imagine if you were to see or experience something illegal within the Kentucky legislature and believe it needs to be addressed. When you bring the issue to legislators or their executive staff, they ignore or dismiss the concerns. Under a new law (HB 312), if your request for openness and transparency is denied by the director of Legislative Research Commission, who is employed by legislative leaders controlled by a supermajority of one party, you’ll end up having to appeal to a panel of 16 legislative leaders. And if that panel denies the request to release the information, the new law says that decision is final and unappealable. Period, end of story. The new law removed the ability to appeal that decision to the Franklin Circuit Court. One of the most dangerous changes to the LRC open records application is the removal of three words “or other documents” on page 17, making only certain items available that are mostly things already found on the LRC Web site.

What could they be hiding or protecting—and why? Many legislative proponents of this horribly bad idea reasoned we needed this to protect personal information of folks writing or talking with legislators. These protections already exist in great detail under current law and have been used successfully for years with no problems. When State Representative Dan Fister was questioned about his vote for this travesty, he said we had to “agree to disagree” after he said he didn’t even read the mere 18-page bill. A bill that, by the way, was substituted in committee into another “shell bill placeholder” used for just this type of unscrupulous maneuver at the last minute to avoid public scrutiny. Even after this was brought to Rep. Fister’s attention, he voted for it again by voting to override the Governor’s veto of this flagrant abuse of raw power and self-dealing in Frankfort. Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority (for now) and can pass ANYTHING they want — why play games unless you don’t want the voting public to know?

But the harm to the public didn’t stop there. One more bill among the many there isn’t enough room to write about is HB 563 that will allow $25 million in tax breaks for “education opportunity accounts” for each of the next five years to wealthy individuals and corporations. Heck, they can’t even find money for updated textbooks for our kids, and they want to give tax breaks to the wealthy and funnel public money to private schools. Most folks don’t have problems with private schools so long as public schools aren’t starved of public dollars to feed private schools. And the goal of these “education (missed) opportunity accounts” can already be done through existing endowments and charitable opportunities.

Sure, there were some fine bills that passed with near unanimity as there is in most sessions. So why strip even more money from public schools? We would propose that many in power and in the majority currently have a goal of weakening public schools so much that they can convince folks that charter schools and more public money for private schools is necessary — all while wealthy donors make money with these schemes and processes. Not to mention that a lot of that money would then flow back to these legislators who are passing laws to hide their actions from public scrutiny and weakening public schools while they’re at it to keep the mother’s milk of politics flowing to them. Oh, the denials will be fierce, but we’re simply connecting the dots. Our Republican legislators in Frankfort are shutting the public out and your kids’ public school down.

Joe Graviss is a civic entrepreneur, retired businessman and former state representative. Grayson Vandegrift is the mayor of Midway, and a candidate for state representative of the 56th district in 2022.