Stacking The Deck?

On Friday, Senate and House leaders announced the formation of a new working group on public pensions. (By the way, is there a difference in a working group, task force, and blue ribbon panel?)

Frankly, this was not that particularly interesting, as the new political mantra across the state is that pensions need to be saved. It’s much like the past decade of people saying the tax system needs to be restructured. Sounds good in a stump speech, but no one ever has any concrete details.

But then we saw the membership list of this working group. The Senate appointed, among others, Robert Stivers, Damon Thayer, Chris McDaniel, Morgan McGarvey and Jimmy Higdon. These are all current or former members of leadership and the current A&R chairman. The House, on the other hand, appointed, among others, Travis Brenda, Scott Lewis and Buddy Wheatley, three freshman members who are the most closely affiliated with the KEA and other public employee unions. The only member of leadership from the House side is Derrick Graham, who has unofficially served as the KEA spokesperson for years.

Do these appointments signal anything to observers? Was this the House’s way of thumbing their nose to Governor Bevin? Is it a way to kill any ideas of pension reform for this session? Or is it an attempt to have these members learn more about the issue and try to woo their support for reforms?

We at ITC have our own opinions, but we’ll keep those to ourselves right now. What we will do instead is cite Speaker David Osborne’s comments from the Kentucky Chamber dinner last week: “I don’t believe that a quick solution will be found. Quite frankly, I think there is a possibility we will exit this session without a solution.”