Floyd: House majority stalls legislative pension transparency bill

By DAVID FLOYD
50th District State Representative

Tuesday, March 1, 2016, 3 p.m. — The idea of requiring public disclosure of legislator retirement pay is popular with the public. Senate Bill 45 would require disclosure for all current and former legislators, and that bill passed the Senate earlier this session by a vote of 38-0. You’d think the House majority would take it up quickly and move it through the process. But that wasn’t happening, and the House committee chairman said he’d likely not hear it.

So our House minority tried procedural votes under “suspension of rules” to bring the matter to the floor for a vote. This is the same procedure that we used successfully to bring the informed consent bill before the House for a vote – which passed overwhelmingly. I suspect we’d get the same overwhelming support if SB 45 was voted on by the entire body. However, the majority caucus voted down our procedural motions.

It’s important for Kentuckians to monitor what their elected officials are doing in Frankfort, and many people think that includes the pensions they will be collecting. Public pension transparency is a priority for our caucus, so we’ll do what we can to make this happen; were we in the majority, the bill would already be on the governor’s desk for signature.

Frankly, I don’t care to know the exact dollar figure a state retiree is getting every month, whether they worked for the city, county, state, legislature, courts, or schools. If I was curious, I could get a pretty good rough figure. Generally, you take what a person makes when they were paid by the state (current salaries are available now,) multiply it by the number years of service, multiply again by the annual percentage on which their pension is calculated, and there you go.

But some people want to know down to the penny. They want to be able to look it up online so that they’ll know, for example, that Mrs. XYZ gets a teacher pension of $41,327.56 per year. I can already calculate that she’s getting around 40, which is close enough for me. Not close enough for others. And so we’ll pass that legislation some day because some, perhaps most, Kentuckians believe they have a right to know. By the way, if you want to know a legislator’s pension, that’s pretty easy too; just take the number years’ service and multiply by 100 and you’ll be right near their monthly check. (I don’t know why legislators get a pension in the first place, and I’ve written about this before.)

Budget work is ongoing, and education is always at the top of our list for funding. This year is particularly challenging with the more than $30 billion pension liability Kentucky faces. K-12 education takes up around 44 percent of all state General Fund spending, and postsecondary education claims another 14 percent. The next largest share of General Fund spending goes to health care – or, specifically, state Medicaid – which claims about 13 percent of General Fund appropriations (this does not include federal matching) as we strive to meet the health needs of people who are poor.

Given our attention to health care, it is not surprising when legislation designed to improve health care delivery in the Commonwealth receives support in the House. And such was the case last Monday when the House voted 94-0 to approve House Bill 163. This bill would create a new Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) law for Kentucky to improve the process by which registered and practical nurses can practice in any NLC state under a multistate license. HB 163 now goes to the Senate for consideration.

In other news, my friend Rep. James Allen Tipton (Taylorsville) filed HB 432 this week to remove the term “GED” from statutes regarding the Kentucky High School Equivalency Test. It’s not just playing words with the statute; since that general term is in our statutes, Kentucky is limited in the tests we can use. There’s been an 85% drop in the GED testing pass rate as a result of different test standards implemented in 2014. That’s because the testing company Pearson got the contract for the GED test and changed it to conform to the controversial Common Core Education Standards.

In removing “GED” from the statutes and replacing it with the term “High School Equivalency Diploma,” the testing options would include national standards for adult education. If you understand the significance of non-traditional students achieving their high school diploma, I think you’d agree that Tipton’s HB 432 is worthy of support.

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