Another year of legislative inefficiency has left citizens to wonder: Is there a better structure for state government, or is it simply the nature of the political game?
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After the first 80 percent of this year's general session had passed, the Kentucky General Assembly had managed to accomplish two things: allowing someone else to rename a Louisville highway and making sure they got paid.
The only two measures approved by both the House and the Senate during the first 25 days of the 30-day session were a resolution allowing I-65 in Jefferson County to be named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and an organizational bill that included authorization to compensate legislators — hardly the most pressing business of the elected representatives of an impoverished state.
Before the session adjourned, Gov. Ernie Fletcher had already laid the groundwork for a special session to tie up loose ends from not only the 2007 session but the 2006 session as well. That session, called in early July, effectively ended roughly 90 minutes after it began when the House voted to adjourn and head home without action.
Ironically, it was supposed to be a promising year for legislative productivity, the first annual session to avoid being bogged down in the fiscal wranglings of the biennial budget process.
Instead it left many state officials and business leaders privately expressing deep anxiety over the lack of action in Frankfort, and wondering if there isn't a better way to legislate.
The filing deadline
While the budget debate consumes much of any even-year, 60-day session, legislators say the body is handcuffed during its first month. No one wants to take what could be viewed as a controversial vote prior to the January 31 deadline to file as a candidate for the House or Senate.
"It really paralyzes people until that passes," said Rep. Jim Wayne (D-Louisville). "A lot of people just will not take any risk, and what ends up happening is we use that time for prep work for bills we know we will start the first part of February."
Senate President David Williams (R-Burkesville) said he is still in favor of legislation he previously introduced that would move Kentucky's primaries back to August, where they stood until the years of Happy Chandler's administration. The benefits of the move, according to Williams, would be twofold: "People that desire and are taking a look at running for the General Assembly ought to know what the record of the person they are going to run against is. If we move the primaries to August and the filing deadline is after the session is over, there would be complete disclosure, and that would make the January of that particular session more productive, because right now bills do not move until the filing deadline is over."
House Minority Leader Jeff Hoover (R-Jamestown) said he too would like to see the deadline after adjournment, but said the current placement has some underappreciated advantages. "I don't know that we're handicapped by itit allows you to get through and get out of the way things that are not as controversial, that pass 98 to nothing."
A full-time legislature
The 30-day sessions in odd-numbered years began in 2001, bringing Kentucky's citizen legislators to Frankfort on a far more constant, regular basis. Even still, legislators scramble to accomplish major goals in the last few hours of each session, which has raised the question, why limit the amount of time for the legislature to meet?
The move to annual sessions — according to two top associations, the Lexington-based Council for State Governments (CSG) and the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL) — classifies the commonwealth's lawmakers as a mix of the citizen legislature Kentucky's had since statehood in 1792 and a professional legislature. The tradition of ordinary Kentucky farmers, insurance salesmen and lawyers making the trek to Frankfort has essentially ended as the NCSL says lawmakers in states with legislatures like Kentucky's "typically say that they spend more than two-thirds of a full-time job being legislators."
Dr. Keon Chi, a center director and editor-in-chief of the Book of States at the Council of State Governments, said calling Kentucky's 138 legislators "part-time" could be a misnomer. "Legislators in the states with part-time legislators say that they are actually working much more than what they are supposed to be working. Even though they are paid part time, and they are meeting only a few months out of the year, they are spending lots of time (doing unpaid work as a legislator)," he said.
That can be a strain as most legislators have other careers.
"When we're not in session, we're really working (just as hard)," said Wayne, a social worker who runs a mental health consulting firm.
According to a CSG report written by Chi, in 2005 Kentucky legislators' pay was 40th among the states. When paid for an annual average of 45 days in session (90 regular legislative days every two years) and for official interim work, they averaged a little under $7,700.
"The problem that I see is for people who are not independently wealthy, that are not retired or have some other source of income or that are not career politicians," said Hoover, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran with Anne Northup for the Republican nomination for governor in the spring.
"There is nothing wrong with any of those three classifications, but if you're not any of those three, then you're out working on a jobTo come up here during a session, we have to make (time) available to do that."The demand of the meetings, the committee meetings, the special interest groups, all of these things — you could easily spend four days, five days a week doing nothing but legislative responsibilities (outside of session)," Hoover added.
Georgetown Republican Sen. Damon Thayer, who just left a job with the Breeder's Cup to become a consultant, said when the General Assembly is not in session, he officially works four to six days a month as a state senator, but he does even more off the clock.
"Even when we are not in session, it's an easy 20 hours a week, sometimes more," he said. "There are many legislators who do that. I see them here on those days, because you want to keep up with everything that is going on in your district as well as in the Capitol."
Though the legislators essentially work a full-time job for the state, Chi said it is not in the makeup of Kentucky to desire that elected lawmakers draw full-time salaries and spend extensive time in session. The same is true for the rest of the South, which is devoid of professional legislatures, with the exception of Florida.
"In Kentucky, for instance, you'll find the majority of voters are suspicious or skeptical of their elected representatives meeting so often," Chi said. "We have had a long history of very conservative philosophy and ideology that said the best government is one that governs least, and when the legislature is in session, taxpayers are very much worried about government raising more money, more taxes. They don't want to see legislators discussing taxes; they don't want to see more laws governing their lives. That's the very conservative attitude people tend to have, particularly in the South."
Hoover agrees with Chi, but said Kentuckians could grow used to seeing the legislature in annual session, and in a decade or so, the subject of a full-time legislative body could be broached.
"Until we've had annual sessions for 10 or 12 or 15 years, I don't think it would be ripe for debate or discussion, but at some point in time, that discussion will have to take place in Kentucky," Hoover said.
But a full-time legislature doesn't necessarily produce a more effective body that will help a state achieve top rankings nationally in areas of education, business climate and technology, according to experts.
"The goal in most states is for the legislature to be an independent and coequal branch of government," said Karl Kurtz, director of state services for the NCSL. Most states that have high-paid, full-time state legislatures do so because they have large and diverse populations. States with smaller, more homogenous populations don't need as long for the state's lawmaking body to establish itself as an "independent and coequal branch of government."
Senate Minority Leader Ed Worley (D-Richmond) said the political climate is more to blame for the near gridlock in Frankfort than any restriction on time.
"If you were here as full-time legislators or part-time legislators, and if you met everyday during the year or you met on our schedule, the outcome is still incumbent upon that process of reasonable men and women getting together and doing the people's business," Worley said.
Worley's comments were echoed by Al Cross, a longtime Frankfort political reporter for the Courier Journal who is now director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at UK.
"The Republicans have really played hardball from the start (since taking over control of the Senate for the first time in 1999), and that made it all the more difficult for Democrats to adapt to Republicans having Senate majority," Cross said. "They are better adapted to it now than they used to be, but there is still a great deal of competition. Not until you've changed the leaders of the chambers would you be able to move on to the next chapter in the book, because David (Williams) has been the stick in the Democrats' eye for seven years and (Democratic Speaker of the House) Jody (Richards of Bowling Green) has been the leader of the House for all that time. And it's just a kind of thing that is difficult for those chambers to get past as long as they are led by those two people."
One House Instead of two?
At a recent legislative convention, Richards said he listened to his Republican colleague in the Georgia House complain about difficulty dealing with the Republican-controlled Senate and Republican governor. "There is tension between the House and Senate any place in the country except Nebraska," Richards said, alluding to the fact that Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature. "Whether it is Democrat/Democrat or Democrat/Republican, whatever it is, there is a tension between both houses."
Mitch McCartney, director of the Nebraska Unicameral Information Office, agrees, and that is why in the 1930s Nebraska's voters without the support of the legislature placed on the ballot and approved the move from a two-chamber partisan assembly to a structure more akin to Lexington's urban/county council. "That's really the key — the nonpartisan aspect," he said.
"There are no party caucuses and what that really does is it allows everybody to be a free agent. You basically are beholden to your conscience and your constituency and the people who sent you here," McCartney said.
"Coalitions form from issue to issue," he said, but added that rather than forming along party lines, there are business versus labor and urban versus rural contingents. "Because it is more (like a) city council, the debate is more freewheeling; it's a little more town hall style," he said. "It is very decentralized because there is no majority and minority. It's not like each side controls time or anything like that."
While McCartney was happy to praise the virtues of Nebraska's unique form of government, he did make some concessions. "No system's perfect; our system works very well here. It works very well here because we have kind of grown up with it and we've done what we can to perfect it as much as we can," he said.
McCartney also pointed out that there are other characteristics of government that are more important than the overall structure of the system.
"In some jurisdictions, the two-house systems work very well. If you have transparency in government and if you have accountability (the legislative structure itself doesn't matter)you need those as part of your legislative process in order to be able to run effectively," McCartney added.
Back in Kentucky, Sen. Worley said that the solutions to the legislative concerns of business leaders, state officials, advocacy groups and others around Kentucky rest on the shoulders of the people elected to represent them.
"The art of compromise is what government is," Worley said. "It's what it was intended to be and no matter who is herethis body and this institution can only function as it was intended to be, and that is through a process of compromise. When unreasonable people are here and they believe might is right or they believe that their way is the only way, you'll have difficult times."