Corporate Tax Break Watch: 2022 General Assembly
Last year, the Kentucky General Assembly passed new business subsidies and tax breaks at a cost of well over $1...
Bill Provides Huge Subsidy to Investment Companies with No Requirement of Rural Investments, Jobs or Return to Communities
House Bill 308, which passed the Kentucky House and may be acted on in the Senate in the session's final days, is a giveaway to out-of-state venture capital funds with...
Pretrial Bills in the Kentucky General Assembly Are a Mixed Bag
Kentucky’s pretrial system — which determines whether a person charged with a crime waits for their day in court behind bars or at home — is arbitrary, unfair and rife...
Charter School Funding Proposal Is Inefficient, Costly and Will Harm Public Education
Legislation introduced in the Kentucky House would create a duplicative, wasteful and unaccountable system for authorizing and funding charter schools that runs counter to the characteristics of an efficient system...
State Funding for Education Has Been Stagnant for Many Years, But the 2022-2024 Budget Presents a Unique Opportunity to Begin Reinvesting
In 1991, following a Kentucky Supreme Court decision finding that Kentucky’s system of funding education was unconstitutional, the Kentucky General Assembly responded by increasing taxes to begin reinvesting in Kentucky’s...
3 Ways New Legislation Would Make Kentucky’s Unconstitutional Voucher Program Even Worse
During the 2021 Kentucky General Assembly — as public school advocates were prevented from being in the Capitol by the COVID pandemic — lawmakers passed legislation to fund private schools...
A Decade Without Raises and Weakened Benefits Have Created a State Workforce Crisis. Addressing it Adequately Should Be a Top Priority in the New Budget
Updated on Feb. 2, 2022 Fundamental to providing services like P-12 education, legal defense and child welfare is the state workforce that delivers them. Despite these workers’ critical roles, Kentucky’s...
A Time To Invest: Preview of the 2022–2024 Budget of the Commonwealth
The General Assembly faces a critically important opportunity with the 2022–2024 Budget of the Commonwealth. The state has a historic budget surplus and unspent federal aid that provide the resources...
In Decade Since Major Criminal Justice Reform, the Kentucky General Assembly Has Passed Six Times as Many Laws Increasing Incarceration as Decreasing It
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the passage of 2011’s House Bill (HB) 463, “The Public Safety and Offender Accountability Act.”[efn_note]2011 Ky. Acts, ch. 2, https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/11RS/documents/0002.pdf.[/efn_note] HB 463 was...
New Federal Infrastructure Law Moves Kentucky Forward
The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the President has now signed into law, includes much-needed new investments in modernizing Kentucky's physical infrastructure. The law funds a broad array...