Bevin’s opponents miss the bigger picture as he trolls them on social media

(Note -- this was written more than two weeks ago and submitted for publication to the newspapers in my area that have been carrying this column, but I'm just now getting around to posting it on the blog site.)

One of the best things about Gov. Matt Bevin being a political outsider is that he can afford to be unorthodox in his approach. He doesn’t feel bound by convention the way previous governors have. He’s used to a businesslike environment where things get done without being bogged down by process and red tape.

So, with the clock ticking on this year’s General Assembly session, Bevin took note of the House of Representatives’ slow pace in adopting a biennial budget. Last Monday morning, he fired a shot across the bow of the Democratic majority and posted a video on social media, urging the legislature to get to work and pass the budget.

His move obviously got under the Democrats’ skin, because a few hours later, they posted photos of what they said was a committee meeting in the Capitol Annex. The Stumbocrats also claimed that Bevin didn’t know how the process works because the House typically does not convene in full session until 4 p.m. on Mondays, and much of the work on the budget is done in committee meetings in the Annex instead of the House chambers in the Capitol.

That sounds plausible enough on its face, but the Democrats’ defense doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny.

For starters, the Monday committee meetings don’t typically start until after lunch, so even if Bevin had gone to the Annex at 11 a.m. to try to find legislators hard at work, his search would have come up empty.

But there was something more sinister at work here. Even as House Speaker Greg Stumbo and his House Stumbocrats claimed that Bevin was trying to mislead the public, they were engaged in an even greater and darker deception.

The committee purported to have been meeting in the photos the House Democratic leadership posted was the Transportation Budget Review Subcommittee. A clock shown in the background of one of the photos indicated the picture was taken around 1 p.m. There are two major problems here. First is that the committee wasn’t scheduled to meet until 2 p.m. Second is that the official House calendar for Monday, March 7, shows that the Transportation Budget Review Subcommittee meeting was cancelled.

An explanation was offered by someone with deep knowledge of Frankfort – a former legislator and a former high-level gubernatorial staff member. He stated that many of the legislators pictured aren’t even members of the Transportation Budget Review Subcommittee.

The Stumbocrats lying to the people of Kentucky in an attempt to discredit only the second Republican governor in 45 years? Surely not. But it appears as if that’s exactly what happened. It looks as if the Stumbocrats, stung by Bevin’s unexpected attack, fought back by finding a bunch of their legislators and sticking them in a room with a bunch of papers stacked on a table and staging a photo opportunity.

But the Stumbocrats missed the bigger message. The House – and, to be fair, the Republican-controlled Senate – typically don’t convene in full session until 4 p.m. on Monday, but committee meetings usually don’t start until after lunch on Mondays. The General Assembly usually adjourns around noon or so on Fridays. This basically means that the legislators use only about four out of every five working days each week to conduct business.

Those who go into public service should know that sacrifice is expected. Legislators are paid well for 90 days of work in a two-year period, with an occasional interim committee meeting or special session thrown in. Yet they use Monday mornings to travel from their homes to Frankfort, and Friday afternoons to travel back home. No one else who works away from home during the week gets that luxury. They have to travel on Sunday and Friday evenings to be at the job on time on Monday and to put in a full day on Friday. Legislative business should begin on Monday mornings, not Monday afternoons. Yes, it’s a long way from Paducah or Mayfield or Cadiz to Frankfort, but those who ran for office knew that when they got into politics. They should be willing to sacrifice Sunday evenings at home to do their duty.

The same Frankfort observer who caught the chicanery with the legislators in the photograph made another observation. He said that the General Assembly can afford to have some flexibility in scheduling early in the session, when little business of consequence is being conducted. But when time is running out and the budget is still under consideration, the senators and representatives need to be on the job as much as possible to get the work done.

Passing the biennial budget this session won’t be easy. Ignoring fiscal realities, House Stumbocrats don’t seem willing to go along with the necessary cuts Bevin has proposed. The Senate is expected to concur with most of Bevin’s recommendations. That means there will be an impasse between the two chambers which will have to be hammered out in a conference committee, then approved by both chambers. It’s entirely conceivable that as time runs out on the session, the old tradition of stopping the clock will be followed so legislators can pretend they got their business finished on time.

Or, it’s possible that no budget will be passed at all, and the Stumbocrats would be only more than happy to operate the state on a continuation budget from former Gov. Steve Beshear’s last two years.

At any rate, the Stumbocrats in the House got so upset over being trolled on social media by Gov. Bevin that they missed the bigger picture. They aren’t working as hard as they should, or as much as they should, to get a budget passed. And they resorted to dishonest measures in an attempt to retaliate. That’s something the state’s voters should remember when all 100 House seats are up for election in November.

“Tax reform:” Liberal code for raising taxes

Each year when the Kentucky General Assembly goes into session, someone will float the idea that Kentucky’s taxation system needs to be reformed. They will point to amount of tax revenue that the state is not capturing and pulling into its coffers, which would be spent on who knows what kind of new government programs.

Another term frequently used in place of “reform” is “modernization.” The expressed logic behind that term is that the state’s economy has evolved from one based on manufacturing and purchasing to one of providing services, and thus the tax system needs to evolve as well.

While “modernization” of something that’s been around awhile sounds like a good thing, and “reform” when it comes to government is the goal of most conservatives, the reality is that those terms, when applied to taxation, are really code for “tax increases.”

With the new administration of Gov. Matt Bevin facing budget issues, the calls for tax reform are possibly louder now than they’ve been at any time during the last few legislative sessions. Bevin is looking to cut state government spending, which isn’t going over well with those who prefer a more expanded role for the bureaucracy.

Some tax reform proposals issued in the past have been “revenue neutral” – that is to say, the changes would shift tax burdens from one group to another without an overall increase in money to the General Fund. That would basically end up being a tax break for some groups and a tax increase for others. Such an effort would accomplish nothing, other than to mollify some of those who want to soak the rich.

The most frequently mentioned reform proposal being floated this year, however, would result in both an increase in taxes on certain individuals and an increase in revenue for the government. While some tax rates might be lowered in the process, the overall effect would be people paying more taxes and on things that are currently not taxed.

Presently, Kentucky doesn’t tax services. You don’t pay sales taxes on haircuts, auto repairs, pet grooming, dry cleaning or a number of other acts. You pay taxes on the parts used to fix your car, but you don’t pay a tax on the labor to install those parts. Most every proposal for reform or modernization recommends extending Kentucky’s 6 percent sales tax to certain services.

There’s a danger in such a proposal. Proprietors and employees of barber shops, beauty shops, auto repair garages and other such service-oriented businesses already pay taxes, whether it’s as an employee or as a business owner/proprietor. Could taxing those services send many of those businesses underground into a cash-only status? What if the owner of a licensed beauty parlor closes up shop, starts doing hair in her home, and taking untaxed cash as payment? There’s always an unintended consequence anytime the government makes a money grab.

Another frequently-mentioned reform is rescinding a number of tax breaks given to certain industries or individual businesses. Liberals seem to believe that a tax break involves a payment from the treasury to the recipient of the break, rather than them getting to keep more of their own money instead of having to fork it over to the government. It seems to be part of a pattern among those who believe that your earnings belong to the government first, and you get to keep whatever the government lets you keep after it takes what it want.

No one ever seems to promote what would be true tax reform. What’s needed are policy changes that would promote economic activity and generate additional commerce that would produce an increased flow of tax revenue; maybe even to the point where overall tax rates can be reduced because the economy is booming and revenues will still go up. We need policies that will increase the number of available jobs and remove restrictions that hamper the ability of businesses to offer products and services.

How we get there may be a topic for debate, but the reality is that such changes would do far more good than the tax increases disguised as reforms proposed by liberal Frankfort interests and promoted by the Lexington Herald-Leader – which, to borrow a quote from the late Citizen Voice & Times and Clay City Times publisher Guy Hatfield about a certain former school superintendent, never met a tax increase it didn’t like.

Time to rein in power of appointed boards, give control to elected officials

One of the most memorable stories I covered during my time as editor of the Citizen Voice & Times in Irvine was a controversy over sewer service rates.

In the early 1990s, a sewer system was built to serve portions of Estill County on the south side of the Kentucky River, primarily the West Irvine area. State law required customers to abandon their septic tanks and hook on to the municipal sewage system when it came online, so dozens of Estill County residents and businesses began using the new system.

Customers were shocked when they started receiving bills for the service. Their utility bills went up an average of 150 percent. What had been $40 water bills suddenly became $100 bills for combined water and sewage service. The increases posed real financial problems to many, including those on fixed incomes.

Residents complained to the Estill County Fiscal Court and the county judge-executive, but those elected officials were powerless to do anything about the bills. The water and sewer systems were operated by an entity called the Estill County Water District No. 1; a name I always found amusing, because in all my years of working in Irvine I never heard of there being another water district. Although the water commissioners were appointed by elected officials, the fiscal court had no authority over their actions.

Because there was so much community outrage, the water commissioners were invited – strongly encouraged might be a better term – by the county judge-executive to attend a fiscal court meeting and explain the rates to angered customers. None of the water board members came to the meeting to face the music.

One reason the incident sticks out in my mind is because it’s one of the few times during my newspaper career I quoted someone using profanity in a news story. One of the chief complainants addressed the fiscal court after the board members turned out to be no-shows, saying something along the lines of “I can’t believe we have three water commissioners who don’t give enough of a damn to be here tonight to face the public.”

But another reason is that there’s renewed public anguish over appointed boards and commissions being able to act without any oversight from elected officials.

This has been controversial in a number of counties, where agencies such as extension service boards or library boards have approved tax increases or expenditures for large, and often unneeded, construction projects. Taxpayers are upset because their elected officials have no say about the tax increases. At a time when people’s budgets are already stretched thin and government resources need to be spent wisely, many of these agencies act as if they are flush with cash. These times call for fiscal frugality by public agencies in economically troubled communities, not wasteful spending on unnecessary projects such as new buildings when the existing facilities are just fine.

Fiscal courts have to approve the tax rates set by these special districts, but that’s only so those property taxes can be included on the tax bills. The elected officials cannot veto the tax rates.

There have been a few efforts to change that, and to put the final say over tax rates into the hands of elected officials who are accountable to the voters, but those efforts have been met with resistance. The last time such a law was proposed in the Kentucky General Assembly, the claim was made that giving fiscal courts approval or veto power would, in effect, turn those special district taxes into county taxes, and would hurt counties’ bonding ability. There’s a simple workaround for that. Merely specify in the law that the special district taxes are not to be considered county taxes, and bonding companies or lenders cannot take those rates into consideration when evaluating funding for county projects. Problem solved.

Critics of the proposal to give fiscal courts more oversight of special districts’ actions also say that there is already accountability because the board members are chosen by elected officials. While that’s true, most of those appointments are made in obscurity. Very few people can probably name the members of their local library board. And the average citizen probably doesn’t know when their extension service board meets so they can lobby against tax increases.

A quarter-century ago, that Estill County water board purposefully ignored the concerns of its customers and constituents. The members were eventually replaced, and the way they brushed off citizens’ very real monetary concerns was a key reason. Still, the fiscal court at the time had no ability to step in and address the problems. Similarly, they have no way to act in the voters’ interests when appointed bodies try to increase taxes.

That needs to change. There are ways to bring the actions of rogue or tone-deaf appointed boards under the control of the people’s elected representatives. It’s time that local elected officials were given that power.