Political jockeying has begun as the House holds hearings on the budget.
FRANKFORT — Monday will make the 32nd day of this year’s 60-day budget session, and Senate Republicans are anxious to get their hands on the $21.8 billion biennial spending plan. Senate President Robert Stivers, who on Thursday took to the Senate floor alongside Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee Chairman Chris McDaniel to urge the House of Representatives to expedite its work in marking up the budget, said Friday that the upper chamber is ready to put its stamp on the budget bill, House Bill 303.
House leaders, however, say they have no plans to hurry their plans in amending Gov. Matt Bevin’s two-year spending plan, which relies on 4.5 percent cuts in the current fiscal year and 9 percent over the next two fiscal years totaling $650 million in part to fund higher contributions to the state’s beleaguered pension funds for teachers and most state workers. Bevin spared a number of areas from spending reductions, offering pay raises for state police, correctional officers and social workers, a $100 million bond pool for workforce development projects, and $4.5 million to alleviate the backlog of untested sexual assault kits in law enforcement’s possession, among other items in his budget.
The House, under state law, gets the first opportunity to mark up the governor’s budget proposal, and a biennial spending plan must be passed by April 15. House Speaker Greg Stumbo reiterated Friday that the Senate can expect a budget by March 15. House Appropriations and Revenue Committee Chairman Rick Rand said Bevin gave the General Assembly “a radical budget” to consider. “We’re going to take our time and have public hearings,” said Rand, D-Bedford. “A lot’s coming out about this budget. The university presidents think it’s bad, and we are having interest group after interest group letting us know how it’s going to negatively affect their budgets. Those people need to be heard, and we’re going to take our time and do it, and the Senate will get the budget in plenty of time to do their work on it.”
Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said the House’s budget review subcommittees have held open hearings on the budget, so the Senate should not be caught off guard by the version of HB 303 it receives from the lower chamber. He suggested that the Senate could begin its series of budget hearings, which it has but not at the House’s pace. Specifics have been lacking from the administration, Stumbo said, “and we continue to discover. For example, just yesterday I learned that county clerks in counties that have a population of less than 20,000 would be stripped of about $60,000 from their budgets by the governor’s sweeping of those accounts, which he had told that he had not intended to do that,” he said Friday. “I’m not sure if they intentionally intended to do that or whether it was an oversight, so there’s a lot of questions we have to ask, and we owe it to the people of Kentucky, as Chairman Rand said, to hold full and fair hearings on this entire process.”
