It has been said time and time again: transparency is the first step toward accountability. Kentucky’s public pension system is broken and to truly reform it we need it to be transparent. Contact your legislator and tell them: I want to see a transparent public pension system in Kentucky.
A recent editorial by the Lexington Herald-Leader hits on something that the Bluegrass Institute has been championing for years now: public pension transparency. Most of the piece focuses on funding the pension system’s substantial shortfall but at the end this point is made: Both systems lack transparency. Even though every taxpayer in Kentucky will contribute…
Here’s some media coverage of a news conference held today to call a foul on the KFC Yum! Center operations. Click here for more information from the Bluegrass Institute on a new report recently that shows the arena is $800 million in debt and losing $1 million a month.
For Immediate Release: Thursday, January 31, 2013 KFC Yum! Center’s finances, lack of transparency distasteful to Kentucky taxpayers (LOUISVILLE, Ky.) – Despite the fact that $649 million of the $1 billion price tag for downtown Louisville’s new KFC Yum! Center comes from taxpayers statewide, the arena’s Authority operates behind closed doors, according to a recent…
Did you know that the full Kentucky Senate planned to meet on short notice – behind closed doors – Wednesday to discuss the Bluegrass State’s public pension crisis? Right. No one else knew, either. Not even the Legislative Research Commission knew — and the LRC is the entity that keeps the calendar for public legislative…
Yet another attempt to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18 is going to be debated during the current legislative session in Frankfort. This idea stalled at least twice before, but that doesn’t seem to stop some non-data oriented, feel-good folks from wanting to try again. Several years ago when this…
According to recent reports from the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission, 2012 was a record year for politics in the commonwealth. That’s because by the time Bluegrass businesses had retired their checkbooks for the year, a grand total of $17.8 million was spent by 630 different groups on lobbying the legislature. That’s up from $15.1 million…
Education Week just published an article about states where the college system is producing too many elementary school teachers for the available jobs (subscription?). Kentucky is an over-producer. Per EdWeek, Kentucky has a demand for 730 new elementary school teachers but the supply from colleges is 1,275. That means 545 Kentucky college graduates won’t have…
If the Kentucky state government wants to operate a secret, non-transparent public pension system, then by all means, it should. The catch is that the state absolutely should not use taxpayer dollars to do it. Currently, the state’s pension system is as transparent as a brick wall. In fact, state law goes as far as…
Is the federal agency ignoring ground water contamination from fracking in Texas? New articles are widely circulating about the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) strange handling of natural gas contamination of drinking water supplies in a suburb West of Fort Worth, Texas. According to Texan Steve Lipsky, his well water started bubbling like champagne after a…