2022 General Assembly Begins
The start of the 2022 General Assembly kicked off this past week on January 4th, followed the next day by the Governor’s State of the Commonwealth address on January 5th.
This came weeks after the deadliest tornado event in state history, where entire towns were nearly wiped off the map, followed later by flooding events in eastern and south-central Kentucky. In his address, Governor Beshear touted the administration’s economic development accomplishments including the claim of most new jobs ever created.
The first order of business for the Assembly was to deal with two time-sensitive issues: Redistricting, and adjusting the deadline for candidate filings for the elections, ending Friday with a surprise early release of the House budget bill HB1 pre-empting the Governor’s address on the release of his budget plan (which is slated for January 13th). And then finally ending this week with a rare Saturday session to continue the work on redistricting. You may find the current Legislative Calendar here.
Our allies at the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy have released a wonderful preview analysis of the state of the budget here, and we will have one of its authors, Pam Thomas, as a guest during KCC’s upcoming Legislative Summit on January 23rd. Registration for KCC’s virtual conference is now open and we hope you will join us. In addition to our Keynote—(Energy and Environment Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Goodman) and Pam Thomas, we will also be hearing from Tok Oyewole from the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives for a session on the environmental impacts of “chemical recycling” (a bill involving this process has already been filed for the 2022 session as HB45). More guests for KCC’s conference will be announced shortly, so we hope you will join us on the 23rd!
Before the session began, KCC had been tracking pre-filed bills that impact the environment. During every legislative session, KCC will be sending you weekly email updates as bills are filed, including our detailed analysis and ranking. Every week during the session, KCC’s Board of Directors and legislative team will review each piece of legislation relevant to the environment, to give you thorough information and diverse perspectives. We will provide our first full summary beginning next week. In the meantime, we are highlighting a sampling of returning bills from the previous session, including the aforementioned HB45 (chemical recycling) which we opposed last session, as well as a new filing of Rep. Kulkarni’s “healthy soils” legislation (HB235) and Rep. Marzian and Senator Harper Angel’s re-file of companion legislation to address plastic waste through HB189 and SB41. We will provide a full analysis of these and more in next week’s KCC Guardian newsletter.
As for upcoming legislation, of the bills we anticipate this session will involve an issue we have been discussing for some time—the intersection of large-scale solar and land use. We anticipate that when such legislation is filed, it will address many of the concerns that we have been receiving at the KCC office. We urge our readers to prepare for this topic by checking out our website, where we provide general information on the solar industry, solar and land use, and our new resource page on solar and birds which we will continue to update as new resources become available. If you have specific questions about these topics, please do not hesitate to contact us as we would like to provide the best information possible in advance.